Month: December 2019

How philosophy does not make progress. A note on Scott Soames’ new book

Every now and then, philosophers like to discuss whether philosophy makes progress. Although the notion of progress is problematic, I often find these discussions rewarding, for they bring out how varied our understandings actually are. For me, “progress” is a term qualifying interaction, e.g. between interlocutors. In this sense, a conversation can be progressive in that it becomes more refined. And insofar as philosophy can be seen as a form of conversation, it certainly allows for progress. I don’t particularly care whether the progressive elements lie more in the problems or answers or in the methods of tackling them. After all, it depends on what the interlocutors make of them. On Twitter, Michael Schmitz recently suggested that the impact of philosophical ideas on other fields (sciences, arts, politics) might make for an interesting measure of progress, and I wondered whether there are histories of philosophy that put such impact centre stage. When studying linguistics, for instance, I was struck how often Wittgenstein would be named as an inspiration, but my question of how exactly the interaction between linguists and philosophers went remained unanswered. While I have no doubts that there are crucial interactions between philosophy and other fields, I think the precise relation between them would be an intriguing topic for historical research: What was the impact of philosophy, perhaps decisive in the foundation of disciplines, policies or other developments? More than once, Scott Soames’ new book The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age was mentioned as an example for this kind of history. So I began to read. In what follows, I don’t want to present a thorough review. Rather I want to point out in what ways this book is an exemplar of the kind of book that might block progress.

The book does indeed set out from what I’d call an interactionist account of progress. In the introduction, Soames notes that “this book is about the contributions philosophers have made, and continue to make, to our civilization.” (xi) On Daily Nous and elsewhere, Soames’ book has already been noted for its intriguing view on progress:

“Philosophers help by giving us new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing questions to expand their solution spaces. Sometimes philosophers do this when sciences are born, but they also do it as disciplines mature. As science advances, there is more, not less, for philosophy to do.” (ibid.)

Given the subtitle of the book, it’s clear that we should not expect a very detailed account of such interactions. Fair enough, it might be a start. However, we know that the notion of philosophy might have changed since Plato. Trying to depict any interaction between philosophers and other fields requires an idea of how to identify agents of different fields, doesn’t it? Soames loses no ink over demarcating philosophy from other endeavours. There are no remarks on the shaping of disciplines or even on research on such developments. For instance, the chapter on the “science of language” begins with Chomsky, whose work is deemed as crucial for the empirical study of natural language (133). Is he to be seen as a linguist or a philosopher? We are not told. What did he draw on? Who cares? Not a single word about the Neogrammarians in the nineteenth century; nothing about the early and later works of Bloomfield or the relations of linguistics and warfare in the early twentieth century. Soames is known for history of analytic philosophy and work in the philosophy of language, but one gets the impression that Soames merely works from the top of his head when drawing distinctions or picking his heroes, even in his area of specialisation. To his credit, I should note that he was “initially not inclined to” write this book (ix). Rather he portrays himself as having been persuaded by his editor at Princeton University Press.

Of course, I was particularly curious what Soames would make of medieval philosophy, for in this case we have numerous assumptions and prejudices about the relation between, for instance philosophy and theology. The schematic “timeline” at the end of the introduction notes three stages in medieval philosophy: Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, the “revival of the Aristotelian study of nature” and “Ockham’s razor”. The chapter itself is called “A Truce between Faith and Reason” and also mentions Augustine, Avicenna, Averroes, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus – a serious expansion of the canon relied on! Despite these honourable mentions, it’s clear that Aquinas is the hero of the chapter. Without any questions Soames repeats the story of the “grand synthesis” (39) between faith and reason, Augustine and Aristotle, that the Neothomists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have handed down to us. If you follow the sparse footnotes (409-410) you will find that, besides Aquinas himself, Copleston’s history (1946-1975) is the true source of erudition. And why bother with any later scholarship?

But what is Soames’ verdict? In his own words, the “genius of the High Christian Middle Ages – its foremost contribution to the world philosophy made – was in finding a way to give Greek philosophy a second chance …” (21-22) This might indeed pass as a witty remark. After all, medieval philosophy is known as a set of commentary traditions, and the talk of a “second chance” – isn’t it just? But substantially, what acclaim do you receive, if I note that what you do best is give voice to someone else’s thoughts? Similarly great are the achievements of individual men (yes, what else?). Albert the Great’s “most lasting contribution was his influence on his brilliant student Thomas Aquinas.” Of course, the Editio Coloniensis, the critical edition of Albert’s works comprises roughly 50 percent, but Soames can already assess the lasting influence of this work.

These assertions of the traditional canon are so lame that even challenging them can by now count as canonical. As the résumé of his chapter makes clear (39), he merely repeats a teleological narrative of philosophy as striving towards a rational autonomy designed to foster the development of the sciences. Soames writes: “… as time wore on, philosophy asserted its natural critical autonomy, the synthesis [of faith and reason, M.L.] eroded, and philosophers created the intellectual space they needed to begin laying the foundations for the spectacular growth of mathematics and natural sciences that was to come.” (39, italics mine) I italicised parts of the text that indicate the familiar teleological reasoning driving this well worn idea. It’s a story of decline and growth, and its hero or rather heroine is philosophia, endowed with natural properties that come to flourish in the course of history. It’s a story with agents and detractors, of destination towards the fate that we have come to now.

It’s 2019, and we see a major academic publisher disseminating a piece of work, admittedly reluctantly composed by someone who is not a specialist, who grounds at least part of his work on no research, who does not pause to question the categories and descriptions he applies. You might object that this is not “scholarship” but intended for a larger audience. If so, what kind of audience is this? An audience that needs to be told that Plato was a philosopher or that Bach had interest in organ music? Does that audience not deserve to be served state of the art research? Or at least something based on research of the last thirty years? Or, if that would be asking too much, something that highlights caveats or open questions in the introduction?

I’ve read too many books to ignore the fact that Soames’ book is not the only exemplar of this kind of work. Nor is it a special problem that Soames publicly endorses the politics of Trump.  Indeed, there are many books by famous philosophers who get to share their sometimes ideosyncratic views in an unquestioning manner with a major publishing house. The problem is not just that some of the chapters might be outdated. Given that the actual question of the project behind this book is rather interesting, this publication will represent the state of the art on this issue for years to come. Aspiring scholars wanting to engage with this kind of project will have to reference this work and discuss it, thereby perpetuating the impact of unquestioned teleological bullshit.

Philosophical experience. A response to Andrea Sangiacomo

Sometimes I begin a seminar or lecture by just standing or sitting in front of the course and saying nothing. I wait, sometimes for two to five minutes. That’s a long, long time. I sense that the students expect me to say something. Sometimes a student breaks the silence by asking me what’s going on or by inviting me to speak; sometimes I break the silence when I feel that the discomfort is growing. – In any case, I can be sure that in these two minutes there is at least the onset of a shared experience. The students expect me to speak and are either amused or irritated when this expectation is not met. Referring to this experience, I can then talk about the deeply ingrained expectations, roles, norms and what have you. Moreover, I can be fairly sure that the students will connect the experience to what is said. Often they will participate more actively in the seminar. Depending on how such experience is conceptualised, it gains the status of evidence, illustration or even of the content of discussion. I think that such experiences can crucially enrich philosophical activity. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that we should integrate such experiences more systematically into philosophical work.*

Let’s begin by looking at some kinds of experiences that figure in philosophical exchange. When you say or write something, you (hopefully) get a response: nine times out of ten that response will take the form of an objection to what you say. If this is correct, the typical experience in current philosophical discourse is the exchange of claims and objections. While this practice gets us some of the way, it strikes me as a very limited use of the resources we actually have. To be sure, we use a few more things to stimulate our imagination: we draw on thought experiments, examples, analogies, formal methods and such like. But except for formal methods, we pay fairly little attention to the way these ‘tools’ work. What do I mean by this? – Well, if you reconstruct an argument by rendering it in a formal code, you engage in a sort of translation: in writing “if p, then q” you turn a sequence of sentences into sequence of symbols. This is a practice that has to be learned. Once you are familiar with it, it widens your resources of thinking. It enables a shift of focus (for instance on truth-values), a number of decisions (what sort of conditional is this?), and it stimulates your imagination, since you literally have to play around with the sequence. Depending on your goals, some translations will be more adequate or helpful than others. This practice is enormously helpful in various ways and has developed into a clear component of philosophical education. The same is true of the growing education in statistical reasoning. Arguably, such conventions afford us certain ways of making (highly cultivated) philosophical experiences. Once established, they turn into resources of handling ideas and arguments that enable us to move around and redirect our focus. (As I pointed out earlier, this thrives on forms of alienation.)

However, far less, if any, attention is given to other forms of thinking and cultivating attention. We spend far less time analysing or applying examples, analogies, translations into other languages, the use of pictures and drawings, forms of literature, film, theatre, music and other arts. I think this is an enormous loss. If we look at the history of sciences such as biology, it is clear that forms of representation, not least artistic representation, provided enormous boosts. Painting things larger than life, as it were, turned our attention to unregarded details. Why should that not be true of philosophy? The idea, for instance, that our moral reasonings could have developed independently of inventions by novelists strikes me as absurd. But if this is even remotely correct, then why don’t we pay more attention to the interaction between literary experience and philosophical intuitions? Why should we assume that Iris Murdoch’s Black Prince does not afford us with philosophically relevant experiences? We don’t necessarily have to become novelists ourselves, but the transformation of such experience into other forms of thought and vice versa strikes me as both vital and wholly underestimated. How, then, can such resources figure in our philosophical experience?

Perhaps you have already asked yourself now and then why at least the first chapters of Descartes’ Meditations are such a widely and persistently appreciated text. Why does it speak even to first-year students in such a direct way that other works never will? Let me give you a hint: it’s not the structure of the arguments; neither is its philosophical content. It is because it is a meditation. In a series of posts, Andrea Sangiacomo recently reminded us of this fact and also of the fact that we never really pay attention to the form. The point is that Descartes directly appeals to our experience and guides us, by example, through an experiential journey in which we focus on certain modes of perception and on blocking them. You can read the text as a series of arguments, but you can also do what Descartes insinuates: experience what he suggests. Arguably, it is this latter feature that speaks to people directly in that they don’t need anything but their means of perceiving and thinking to play along.

You might object that the appeal to experience is somehow “not philosophy”. At least, it is this estimation that often blocks the inclusion of other approaches and indeed of whole traditions. According to Kristie Dotson, our philosophising is driven by a “culture of justification” that excludes appeals to other forms of philosophy, relying on other practices or lived experiences. But in fact we don’t even need to leave the so-called western tradition to encounter such appeals. Wishing to introduce a concept, we often help ourselves to examples. If you want to talk about illusions, for instance, there is a number of stock examples ready. Most of us are familiar with optical illusions, such as the stick appearing bent in the water or the Müller-Lyer illusion. Such examples are often invoked in discussions of perception and can help demonstrate various aspects. Sometimes they are invoked as a mere illustration, sometimes as evidence for a claim, sometimes they are a topic in their own right, for instance, when we ask how and under what conditions they arise. What is rarely noted, however, is that exposure to such and other examples might constitute a philosophical experience. Presented with an example, we step out of the verbal exchange and consider an image or a scene. Even if this experience is guided by concepts and explanations, it is not wholly determined by them. It gives rise to sensations that are deeply linked with other experiences. It connects with all sorts of things, sensations, intuitions, feelings etc. and might trigger way more or other sensations and associations than expected. Arguably, it is the exposure to the experience of the illusion that triggers new lines of arguments.

Likewise, if we pay attention to certain strands especially in the analytic tradition, the use and handling of examples and thought experiments is a guiding feature. Just re-read some classics: Frege, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Davidson, Millikan, to name a few. For once, don’t pay attention to their arguments but to the wonderfully crafted examples and imaginations that inform their writings. You will soon find that much of the convictions they leave us with depend on the strength of these examples. Far more than mere illustrations, they often carry the burden of argument. But they function so well because our imagination does a large part of the work. This is why they often form the outset of whole traditions of exchanges.

In the light of such traditions, it strikes me as an enormous impoverishment if the experiential reflexes we train others to respond with reduce to disagreement. Arguably, it is not disagreement but wonder that keeps philosophy going.

____

* In her latest post, Helen De Cruz kindly picked up on the idea: “I’m inclined to an expansive conception of philosophy where images, aphorisms, music, poetry, can all be part of philosophical conversation. … I do wonder whether there would be room for a journal that explicitly makes room for more wondrous philosophy–philosophy that is high in innovative content but low(er) in rigor, a journal of cool, exciting half-baked ideas of sorts. I don’t think there is such a journal yet.”

Dismissing (religious) belief. On a problematic kind of anachronism

I’m currently teaching an intro course on medieval philosophy. Although I really enjoy teaching medieval philosophy, I am always somewhat shocked at the generally dismissive attitude towards the religious or theological aspects of the material. A widespread assumption is that we can and should bypass such issues. Why bother with God or angels, if we can focus on philosophy of language or ethics? That said, there is no reason to blame students. Looking at various histories of philosophy, it’s clear that the selection of material often follows what is currently deemed most relevant. In fact, bits of my own work might serve as a case in point. However, in what follows I’d like to present three reasons for the claim that, in bypassing such aspects, we miss out on core ideas, not only in history of philosophy.

(1) The illusion of modernity. – If you ask people why they think we can happily ignore theological aspects, a common answer is that they are indeed no longer relevant, because the world is supposedly progressing towards an increasingly enlightened state of a scientific rather than a religious view of the world. This is of course not the last word. Criticisms of progress narratives aside, it is also clear that we live in a world that is currently deeply conflicted between adherents of religion and a scientific worldview. Moreover, this assumption makes us overlook that this conflict is a deeply medieval one, testified already in the writings of Augustine, culminating perhaps in the famous condemnation of 1277, and continuing well into what is known as modern philosophy. Thus, the idea that dissociating reason from faith is a trait of Enlightenment or modernity is a cherished illusion. After deciding to address this issue head-on in my current course, I made the condemnation of 1277 the first focal point. Amongst other things, it clearly shows that the battlefield of faith versus reason, along with the discussion of different kinds of truth, not to speak of alternative facts, has venerable precedents in the 13th century. In other words, the distinction between adherents of faith versus adherents of science is not a diachronic one (between medieval and modern) but a synchronic one.

(2) Theology is philosophy. – But even if you agree that conflicts of faith versus reason might be relevant even today, you might still deny that they are philosophically significant. If you turn to philosophers of the medieval or other periods, you might go straight to the philosophically interesting stuff. The assumption seems to be that certain problems or topics can be stripped of their theological content without much loss. Going from this assumption, material that cannot be stripped from such overtones is “not philosophy.” One problem with this view is that a number of philosophical systems have notions such as “god” at the core. For a number of medieval and early modern philosophers, their metaphysics are unintelligible without reference to a god. Trying to bypass this, means bypassing these metaphysics. The idea of stripping such systems from theological notions strikes me a consequence of the illusion of modernity. But in fact we find a number of 20th-century or present-day philosophers who rely on such notions. And as is well known by now, readers of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the foundational texts of the early analytic tradition, should not ignore his approach to the “mystical” and related ideas. This doesn’t mean that there is no philosophy without theology. But we are prone to serious misunderstanding if we wilfully ignore such foundations.

(3) The significance of belief. – My third and perhaps most important point is that the foundational role of belief is often ignored. Reading, for instance, that Anselm opens his Proslogion with the idea that we have to believe in order to understand, this and other remarks on (religious) belief are often taken as confessions that do not affect the arguments in question. As I see it, such estimations miss a crucial philosophical point: unquestioned belief is foundational for many further (mental or physical) acts. Arguably, there is a long tradition of philosophers (e.g. Augustine, Anselm, Gregory of Rimini, Spinoza, Hume, William James, Davidson) who exposed the foundational role of belief, showing that there are reasons to accept certain assumptions on faith. The need to rely on axioms is not only a trait of special sciences. Indeed, many aspects of our life depend on the fact that we hold certain unquestioned beliefs. Unless we have startling evidence to the contrary, we’re inclined to believe whatever we perceive. We believe that we weren’t lied to when our parents or other people informed us about our date of birth, and we don’t normally question that there is an external world. Challenging certain beliefs would probably deeply unsettle us, and we certainly wouldn’t begin searching, if we didn’t believe we had a chance of finding what we’re looking for. In this sense, certain beliefs are not optional.

The upshot is that the dismissal of (religious) belief is not only problematic in that it distorts some niches of medieval philosophy. Rather, it’s based on a misconception of our very own standards of rationality, which rely much on more on unquestioned beliefs than might meet the eye. So if the dismissal of religious belief is anachronistic, it’s not only distorting our view of the past but distorting the understanding of our current discourses. In this regard, much medieval philosophy should not be seen as strangely invested in religion but rather as strangely familiar, even if unbeknownst to ourselves. As Peter Adamson succinctly put it, for some “a proper use of reason is unattainable without religious commitment.” I agree, and would only add that we might recognise this attitude more readily as our own if we deleted the word “religious”. But that is perhaps more of a purely very verbal matter than we like to believe.