[Bups-dis] A handful to things

[Pete Wolfendale]

Interesting ideas. I'll chime in on two points: pure vs. applied
philosophy, and Aristotle Vs. Hume.

Pure Vs. Applied Philosophy
-----------------------------------------

I think you're right that there is a distinction of this kind in
philosophy, and I also think that you've hit on something when you've
described pure philosophers as 'enablers', but I think your
characterisation of the distinction is wrong. I don't think that
applied philosophy is that philosophy which has more to do with
people, in fact, there is plenty of work in ethics and the philosophy
of mind, just like that in philosophy of religion and theology, that
is incredibly abstract and inapplicable to people's lives.

Additionally, there is a whole wing of philosophy you've missed out of
your division - Philosophy of Science. As far as I'm concerned, the
Philosophy of Science is the applied philosophy par excellence. Why is
this? Because it has an actual effect on the organisation of the
conceptual apparatus which 'enables' scientific work to be carried
out. Most of the philosophy of science is far from abstract philosophy
but also has nothing particularly to do with people.

It is also notable that the title 'philosophy of science' is somewhat
obscuring, in that there are particular applied philosophical
branches: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy
of biology, philosophy of chemisty (I'm not sure what happens here,
but there is a society for it and everything), philosophy of
psychology (bordering with, but not necessarily philosophy of mind),
philosophy of social science, philosophy of economics, etc. Not to
mention that there are a whole bunch more of 'philosophy of's',
importantly including philosophy of art (including literature), and
philosophy of history (which tends to be taught as historiography).

My thesis is that applied philosophy is 'philosophy of', and that what
this consists in is the conceptual regulation of that field of
discourse. So, our job in these areas is to prevent the misapplication
of particular concepts (e.g. particle, observer, market, event), which
includes diffusing the muddles which these concepts can sometimes
generate. This is a very Wittgensteinian description of the
enterprise, and I like that; importantly however, Wittgenstein himself
never really got into any particular discourses beyond psychology,
linguistics (only barely) and mathematics. I know a lot of people
think that scientists are beyond getting conceptually confused, and
that experiential precision is all they need, but one only needs to
look with all of the problems in the interpretation of quantum theory,
and the 'schrodinger's cat' debacle, to understand that they are as
prone to muddle as the rest of us.

An additional claim I'll make here is that I don't think this kind of
'conceptual shepherding', as we might want to think of it, is
necessarily anything to do with finding necessary and sufficient
conditions for the application of concepts. I have an odd view about
what concepts consist in, and I won't repeat my earlier ramblings
here, but suffice it to say that even though I'm claiming that one can
justifiably correct the usage of concepts, and thus guide the ways
those concepts are applied and thus extended within their given
discourse, I don't think that one can FIX them, and that attempts to
do so are  themselves muddling.

So, what about pure philosophy? Well, we have seen what one has to do
with concepts once one has them, fully formed and situated in a
particular discourse, so what is it the job of pure philosophy to do?
The answer: create them.

By this I do not mean that all concepts are created by philosophers.
Particularly this would be absurd if we were to apply this to
denotative concepts, so whenever we have a new thing we need a
philosopher to come along and name it. New concepts emerge within the
fields of particular discourses in a way which we rarely consider to
be anything to do with philosophy, and I think this is somewhat
justified, though I would like to think that those who originate new
ways of looking at things, new ways of organising their respective
discourses are being at least in part philosophical. So, one might say
that there is plenty of philosophy going on in science, without
thinking of itself as philosophy.

However, there is a much more obvious example of pure philosophy, and
that is the generation of those concepts (and also the shepherding of
them) that are independent of any given discourse, and move across the
field of discourse in general. It is these concepts that beg us to ask
of their origin: Essence, Necessity, Possibility, Knowledge,
Justification, World, Power, and even the concept of Concept itself.

A lot of these concepts seem so obvious that we forget that they must
have arisen at some point, it seems as if they were just there waiting
to be picked out of the air, but although some of them are so
fundamental that we have no hint of their origin (like world), others
can be traced within particular historical discourses, and we can see
where they have not only originated, but how they were determined over
time. Good examples of this would be the concepts of Essense and Idea
(or concept), which can both be traced within the western tradition
back to early Greek philosophy. Feyerabend did some interesting work
on the emergence of the idea of Essence in pre-Socratic philosophy for
those who are interested.

We might want to say that we have all of the general concepts we need
these days, and that all new conceptual genesis must take place within
already delimited discourses, but I think this very intuition is part
of the way discourses are structured. As I've written elsewhere, one
of the fundamental structures of discourse is that we suppress any
difference between the ways we talk and think about the world and the
structure of the world, in order to get on talking about it. This can
turn into a denial that there could be any different general ways of
thinking about the world, or to put it differently, that there could
be other conceptual schemes, including new variations on our existing
one. Davidson is a chief proponent of this view, and I personally
think his arguments (often based on poor analogy) beg the question.

All of this seems to be just pure assertion right now, so I'll try to
take a particular example of a concept that is discourse independent,
but which is not yet completely determinate and is still being fleshed
out philosophically. This is the concept of Emergence, dealing with
emergent properties and emergent phenomena. Although a lot of us can
use it in a very general way, we often use it in ways which contradict
or are incompatible with our other ways of thinking about things,
particularly essentialist modes of thought. People working in
philososphy proper, philosophy of science and in the sciences
themselves (notably those associated with the emerging discourse of
complexity theory) have all been involved in trying to further
determine this concept and to reorganise its relations with other
concepts such that it can be deployed in numerous discourses:
mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, economics, sociology, art,
neuroscience, computing, etc. but also in general observations that
are not yet attached to any given discourse.

If we take this view, people like Ian Stuart and Jack Cohen, in
writing pop science books like the Collapse of Chaos, are not just
doing science, they're doing applied philosophy, but also a certain
amount of pure philosophy, in that they're creating new concepts
through which the concept of emergence is further determined
(simplexity and complicity in their case).

This view of pure philosophy connects up with a certain vulgar
intuition which many people have about philosophy, which is that
philosophy is the Ur-discourse from which all others are then
differentiated. On this view we look at Aristotle and how he created
the divisions of knowledge into the different sciences, and how
various 'natural philosophers' after him further differentiated the
field, and say that at some point every discourse must have come out
of the root of philosophy.

I think this view is misguided, but as I've been saying, part of the
intuition is right. Philosophy is not an Ur-discourse out of which
everything else appears, but rather it is the concern with discourse
itself, whose activity does involve shaping and delimiting the
different fields of discourse and regulating the different conceptual
apparatuses that make them possible. So, every day discourse which is
the most general discourse, is where discourses are born, but the
activity of being concerned with the structural features of discourse,
and the particular discourses which emerge around this activity, is
what constitute philosophy, in both its applied and pure sides.

To take a final example, the philosophy of language is a good place to
differentiate my view from yours. This is because it displays both the
tendencies of pure philosophy and the tendencies of philosophy of, or
applied philosophy. At times it deals with what is properly the
philosophy of linguistics, trying to solve purely conceptual problems
involving the concepts of linguistics, and other times it is not
involved within linguistics itself but tries to develop new purely
philosophical approaches to language. I personally think that most of
the trends in logical analysis that dominate the philosophy of
language are themselves muddled, and thus that the applied philosophy
therein tends to be of more value than the pure philosophy, but to
argue with the pure philosophy elements first requires this
distinction between the two sides.

Aristotle Vs. Hume
---------------------------

I could probably say a lot more on this, but as I've just written a
load above I'll be brief and just recommend some reading you might not
have come across:-

On the Aristotle, if you haven't read McDowell's essays contained in
Mind, Language, and Reality then you should. He has a Wittgensteinian
take on virtue ethics, but its very sensitive to the actual texts of
Aristotle and brings out the social, cultural or conventional aspects
you're interested in.

On Hume, I strongly recommend Deleuze's book Empiricism and
Subjectivity. It's slightly different in style from what you might be
used to, but not overly so. I'd read the translators preface and the
2nd chapter (I think), which focuses on ethics and convention, spells
out Humes positive approach in contrast to contractualist theories (a
la Hobbes) and his relation to what will become utilitarianism. It's a
fantastic reading which is very sensitive to Hume's associationism,
and brings out how, for Hume, ethics is politics, and institutions
(and thus traditions) are the object of ethical discourse.

I'm off to eat a sandwhich.

Pete