[Bups-dis] Fresh topic: Let's have some more cults.

[Duncan Crowe]

Matthew: "Maybe I've just babbled nonsense."

I wouldn't say so, and I follow you up to a point but... suppose we look 
not at the case of someone who merely happens to be generally 
relativistic but let's suppose we consider someone who, for all we can 
tell, isn't actually /doing /philosophy but is soaking up money anyway.

I seem to recall that art was discussed on the list not that long ago. 
I'd best not weigh in to a discussion on aesthetics but suppose we say 
for the sake of analogy that a sculptor or a fine art painter has a 
legitimate grievance if money earmarked for the government to fund art 
ends up going to a 'modern artist' whose work is supposed to "critique 
the meaninglessness of art" (I may have the wording wrong but such 
things do exist, particularly in conceptual art). This claim as to the 
worthlessness is fine, you might say, and has perhaps as good a claim to 
be art as anything else, but ultimately it was not the intention of the 
people giving the funding and resembles more like a kind of posturing 
than the skilled activities that the sculptor or the painter were 
looking for the grant money to pursue.

Tim Crane came to Cambridge to speak the other week and gave his own 
view on the analytic / continental distinction. His views as I recall 
them were the following

1: We (in Cambridge Continentalists are confined to the English faculty 
usually, Raymond Geuss being an exception so it's safe to say the crowd 
is comprised of what is normally called analytic philosophers) are not 
actually analytic philosophers in so far as we don't engage in analysis 
in the manner conceived by the people who advocated the primacy of such 
a practice.

2: Not all so-called continental philosophy is bunk. Probably, out of 
his work related to phenomenology, Professor Crane appears to have a 
particular affection for the Germans.

3: Not all philosophy done on the continent is 'continental' philosophy.

4: What people really mean when they use the term 'continental 
philosophy' is 'bad French philosophy'.

5: Heidegger is French (for the sake or argument).

The idea is that really we're not objecting to everything done on the 
continent, but rather to a particular small tradition mostly found in 
France which Tim Crane reckons is dying out.

I was reading something this morning (rather frustrating that I cannot 
remember what) where someone said there was a problem for a while in 
that it seemed what was being taught in Paris for a while wasn't so much 
philosophy as a type of performance art: philosophical posturing. This 
we might dispute (I'm not sure whether I'm able to weigh in, again) but 
can we accept;

If someone were inclined to believe that someone applying for philosophy 
funding was engaged in a form of posturing, rather than in philosophy, 
that they are under no obligation to aid them 'because they are 
philosophers'. Rather, they would be within the limits of their 
justification to actively hinder them.

?



Pete:

"To say it in a different way, the continental people are
much happier working in large brush strokes, whereas the analytic
people always seem caught up in the small details."

Granted, but I'm tempted to say 'the devil is in the details', and not 
in a small way either. If analytic philosophy has taught us anything it 
has taught us that very minor distinctions can result in a conceptual 
framework standing or falling.

"One of the major positions I hold, and a cornerstone of my project
(which I'm trying to develop long and interesting arguments for) is
that logic is not a constraint on ontology, or that logic does not
provide the inherent structure of the world. Another way of saying
this would be that the ways in which we pick things out, although it
must be explained by the way things are individuated, does not
necessarily tell us anything about the way things are individuated."

I'm not sure what individuated means here. Are things being individuated 
through the picking out of them (through perception, let's say), or as a 
brute metaphysical fact about the world? I'm generally inclined towards 
a pragmatist position when it comes to objects: We all perceive objects 
the same way because of our psychological make-up and that's fine and 
dandy, but when it comes right down to it the 'medium sized dry objects' 
are not actually there; there are no distinct rules of supervenience 
between normal objects and the lower physical levels (particles etc). 
For that matter, I'm not inclined to think the lower levels are any more 
ontologically respectable but that's for rather different reasons and I 
don't feel up to attempting to articulate my reasons why... yet. Do you 
mean anything of the kind?

"I start talking about the possibility that the world is not structured
logically and all I get is blank stares."

But there's a good deal of Wittgenstein still hanging around in 
philosophy, and Frege before him. Psychologism is bad, wrong and wicked 
(for reasons never clearly explained) and 'the world consists of facts, 
not of objects'. There is something to it though when you consider that 
our ability to talk about aspects of the world which aren't logical (if 
there are such things) is extremely limited to the point of being 
impossible, as sensible discourse presupposes logical structure (no?)

"why is it that analytic philosophers aren't interested in issues like
these, and why do they feel justified in ignoring them?"

It's a question well worth asking. I would suppose it is a general 
feeling that if their interlocutors aren't (apparently) interested in 
making themselves clear then they haven't got anything worth listening 
to. This may be wrong, but one can understand the motivation. One of the 
interesting points Tim Crane made was that incomprehensibility is no 
less present in Analytic philosophy - we've all read bad articles (for 
those that haven't I recommend 'A deontic argument for god's existence' 
which can be found on JSTOR or in volume 15 of Nous and despite being a 
mere 2 pages truly pushes the envelope for bad arguments) which are 
clearly of the form we would consider to be analytic philosophy, so it 
may be a problem to simply define analytic philosophy as 'good 
philosophy'. Crane remarked that he'd come to the conclusion after 
wrestling long and hard with Davidson's argument for anomalous monism, 
that he was convinced Davidson didn't know what was meant by 'there are 
no psychophysical laws' either. It was just there as an undefined 'space 
holder'. But so-called analytic philosophy admits these moments of 
incomprehensibility as an exception to the rule; with continental 
philosophy they seem pretty much the standard. Someone I was speaking to 
the other day put it rather well (though I don't wish to present this as 
an /example)/: it may be that to really get to grips with Kant you have 
to devote your life to studying him... but then you'd just be a Kant 
scholar rather than a philosopher. If Deleuze (say; I've no idea whether 
this is true in his case) requires several years to even grasp what he's 
saying then people will just avoid dealing with him and will likely 
react as harshly to someone that introduces him into a discussion as 
someone that starts speaking a foreign language half way through a 
conversation.

I should probably tail off as it's 1 in the morning, I'm rowing tomorrow 
and this is starting to seem more like a substantive piece in it's own 
right. I'll end on what may seem like a positive note: what you're 
saying about analytic philosophy being resistant to examining it's own 
presuppositions and bases may be broadly true at present, but it would 
appear that the further we get from the 20th century the more the 
uniform body of so-called analytic philosophy is breaking down. This is 
certainly not a bad thing; variety being the spice of life and so on. 
The one thing which must be maintained though is the commitment to 
clarity first and foremost (if it means you must give up your dream of 
being a pipe-smoking intellectual who communicates only in cryptic 
aphorisms so be it. McDowell, Putnam, Dennett, (Isn't Rorty a 
Continentalist? ;) )... these are all people who have largely broken 
from both the foundations of the analytic tradition and to an extent 
from the 'reborn' metaphysics which immediately followed it (maybe, I'm 
not so sure about that one). Maybe the future's bright for the marriage 
of Wittgenstein and Deleuze.


Duncan


Pete Wolfendale wrote:
> To reply to this message or start a new topic please email: 
> BUPS-DIS at bups.org
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>
> I haven't posted anything on here in a while, but I think this might
> be something where I can lend a useful thought or two. Duncan has
> brought up a number of really interesting issues, and although it
> might be better for me to tackle them individually, I think they're
> all quite interconnected and so I'm going to try and answer them
> collectively.
>
> Particularly, I find interesting how you've brought up the questions
> of 'systematic' philosophy, mentorship, group research (schools, or,
> to be a bit Lakatosian, research progams) and the continental analytic
> divide at the same time.
>
> Firstly, let me state my 'allegiances': I'm studying at Warwick, where
> we have a department divided between continental and analytic
> philosophy. My own interests tend toward the intersection of the two,
> in fact my proposed PhD is supposed to be on Deleuze and Wittgenstein.
> It's important to state here that I'm not just intending to write a
> nice little join up the dots account of their similarities and
> differences either, but I think I've got new and interesting material
> that is relevant to both traditions.
>
> However, I find myself working almost exclusively in the continental
> side of the department. Why? Because I find that people working their
> are far more open to variant ideas that are completely different to
> their own, they're far more used to appraising them and talking about
> them too. To say it in a different way, the continental people are
> much happier working in large brush strokes, whereas the analytic
> people always seem caught up in the small details. I'm generalising a
> lot here, but bear with me a little while and see where its going.
>
> One of the major positions I hold, and a cornerstone of my project
> (which I'm trying to develop long and interesting arguments for) is
> that logic is not a constraint on ontology, or that logic does not
> provide the inherent structure of the world. Another way of saying
> this would be that the ways in which we pick things out, although it
> must be explained by the way things are individuated, does not
> necessarily tell us anything about the way things are individuated.
>
> I have arguments for this position, ones I think can be put in
> relatively analytic terms. True they take time to engage with, but I
> find very few analytic philosophers are willing to give me the time. I
> start talking about the possibility that the world is not structured
> logically and all I get is blank stares. If I even mention Deleuze
> this becomes a lot worse. I may just sound bitter here, and of course
> there is a bit of it, but I think there's an interesting socialogical
> point to be drawn from it. To draw it out we have to ask the question:
> why is it that analytic philosophers aren't interested in issues like
> these, and why do they feel justified in ignoring them?
>
> The answer to this question has to do with what you picked out as the
> intuition that 'we are all doing the same thing', we're all just
> involved in this enterprise called philosophy, and the fact that most
> graduate students tend to be working on things directly relevant to
> the work of their supervisor.
>
> I read a paper last year which put a lot of this into perspective. I
> can only remember the authors last name - Levi - unfortunately. The
> central claim of the paper however, was that the distinction between
> analytic and continental philosophy could be understood in terms of
> their proximity to science. But, unlike the way in which the analogy
> between analytic philosophy and scientific approaches that is usually
> made, it made it with regard to socialogical structure. The essential
> point is that analytic philosophy is much closer to being structured
> like a Kuhnian paradigm, or a Lakatosian research program, than
> continental philosphy, which doesn't really have any unified structure
> other than its distinction from analytic philosophy.
>
> For those who don't know the essential features of a research program,
> the basic idea is that they are collective endevours engaged in by
> groups of individuals, these individuals being bound together by a
> core set of problems which enable them to engage in independent
> research which can inform one anothers activity. However, what enables
> this core set of problems is a shared metaphysics and ontology,
> manifest as shared terminology, which organizes their collective
> research and enables communication between individuals. As such, there
> can be a neat division of the field into different problems which can
> be pursued independently, in the knowledge that they are all
> contributing to one anothers research. One of the features of this
> kind of organization is that it tends to supress the questioning of
> the shared metaphysics, and focus effort into the research which that
> metaphysics structures. It also tends to turn an enterprise which
> previously might have been structured around big systematic treatments
> of issues, mostly written in the form of books, into small treatments
> of individual issues within a larger system written in paper form.
>
> I am not claiming that the organization of analytic philosophy is as
> strict as something like physics, but rather that it does loosely
> share this kind of organization. This means that different individuals
> focus on particular areas, which they dedicate their research to in
> the knowledge that other things are being taken care of, and that
> these individuals are inclined to take on research students within
> their own area of speciality, particularly who try to work out the
> implications of their own positions. Of course, this does not mean
> everyone shares the same positions, but rather that where there is
> disagreement it is defined in very specific terms, and importantly is
> internal to the tradition itself, rather than challenging the central
> concepts which organize the tradition as a whole.
>
> What I am claiming is that analytic philosophy discourages the
> questioning of the collective assumptions upon which it, as a loose
> research program, is based. The most important of these being that
> logic is a constraint upon all philosophical activity, and that as
> such the structure of our language mirrors the structure of the world.
> This latter consequence is sometimes taken to absurd consequences, but
> not always (I'm thinking of doing metaphysics through doing semantics
> for instances, semantic externalism being the best example).
>
> I'm going to have to cut this short, as my girlfriend is beckoning me
> to have food. But I will post more on this topic, that will hopefully
> make more sense. I will finish by clarifying a couple points:-
>
> 1) I don't dislike all analytic philosophy, I have immense respect for
> Quine, Dennett, Brandom and as you may have gathered most of the
> philosophy of science, among others.
>
> 2) I understand this is a crude generalisation, as there are those on
> the fringe of the analytic tradition who dabble in other things and
> hold weird positions: Rorty, Brandom, and McDowell to a lesser extent,
> but these people are for the most part really marginal.
>
> 3) Continental philosophy is not fundamentally better because it
> necessarily has a positive position which is superior, but rather, not
> being a single tradition, but rather an interconnected web of
> traditions, it tends to encourage rather than discourage the
> questioning of fundamental positions.
>
> Later,
>
> Pete
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