[Bups-dis] A handful to things

Sat Mar 3 08:07:06 PST 2007

I just had a quick response to the 'point of philosophy' point, especially
as regards education. Personally I think it all depends on what you want to
use it for; at a level and university it should be explored both as a means
and an end. However I reckon teaching it from a young age in schools can
only be a good thing, especially critical thinking and moral philosophy, as
it has to potential to diffuse a majority of social problems i.e. bullying,
prejudice, the influence of red top newspapers, and advertising at young
people.

On 3/3/07, Pete Wolfendale <pete.wolfendale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To reply to this message or start a new topic please email:
> BUPS-DIS at bups.org
> -
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
>
> -
> Browse or search the BUPS-DIS archives, or unsubscribe from the mailing
> list at: http://www.bups.org/mailinglist.shtml
>