Author: Martin Lenz

In addition to running the Handling Ideas Blog, Martin Lenz is professor of philosophy at the FernUniversität in Hagen. He specialises in medieval and early modern philosophy.

How to read (part eleven): With texts against interpretations

A telling fact about human intelligence is that we can hold a lot of false beliefs and still survive or even live a jolly good life. For all I know, there are flat-earthers around whose beliefs don’t seem to interfere much with other beliefs. It’s telling because it raises the question of how much really depends on our knowing the truth (imagine the word capitalised). Much less spectacular but vital for philosophers and historians of philosophy, the same might be true for our understanding of texts.* Many of us might live with grand misinterpretations without ever noticing. (I, for one, lived with a mistaken understanding of what the term “proposition” means roughly until I wrote a paper about it. ) This fact triggers at least two responses: (1) A fair amount of people think that this sad state of affairs can be amended by proper reading which will eventually lead to a proper understanding. “I just read carefully and see what it says”, or something like that. (2) To this a more sceptically inclined colleague might respond: “Well yeah, but it’s all down to your interpretation.” These fairly common yet opposed responses give rise to two opposed myths about reading: The first is that the text simply contains what we can say about it. This kind of hermeneutical givenism is often met with what one might call interpretationism, that is, the idea that there is no text an sich but only interpretations. This opposition is frustrating because it polarises approaches that actually depend on one another. As I see it, the relation between them is not one of contrariety but of a dialectical swinging back and forth. Even if there is not one single correct understanding of a text, there are many false ones. If this is correct, we should exploit this fact for (becoming aware of) our practice of reading by looking for frictions between what we think we know and what the text presents us with. In what follows, I would like to share some ideas how to exploit such frictions. The crucial point is that a claim on what a given text is about should be refined in the course of confronting the actual text. You may start with the assumption that a text is about X. If you’ve done some proper work, you should find that the text is about Y. Here is how:

What are philosophical texts about? – Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself. Philosophical texts typically consist of arguments for a certain claim. That’s at least what should be true of our currently most common genre, the philosophical paper or essay. Thus, a good way to read those is to begin by identifying the conclusion that is argued for and then to look for the premisses supporting to the conclusion. How do you find the conclusion, though? What’s often overlooked is that this question is twofold. It has a textual or grammatical sense and a topical or disciplinary sense. In the textual sense, papers or passages often contain a line saying “the aim is to show”, an explicit statement with the defended view or a “therefore” (or “thus” or a similar word or phrase) introducing a conclusion. You should by all means look for such items when reading, but I suppose that the assumption of what a given text or passage is about is settled well in advance by what I call topical sense. Usually, you don’t just bump into a text wondering what it’s about. That question is normally settled by a a course instructor, secondary literature or a bibliography listing this text under a course title or keyword. In this sense, the conclusion is generally embedded in a topical network of a topic (the nature of the mind) as related to a discipline (like philosophy of mind), a common problem (how do mind and body interact), and a set of positions (say, dualism vs monism) on that problem. So even if you look for the conclusion in the text, it will be the topic suggested by the instructor or some other context that guides your search for the conclusion. I bet that if you were to list Cinderella in a syllabus for a consciousness course, people would start looking for the pertinent points in the text. What this comes down to is, again, twofold: On the one hand, a philosophical text is about (arguing for) a conclusion; and identifying the conclusion settles what you take the premisses to be. However, on the other hand, the conclusion is commonly assumed in advance, since the text is given to you in a topical context that suggests and constrains potential conclusions. If this is correct, it seems that prior interpretations (taken on authority) often settle what a text is about. Try reading Descartes’ Meditations as a text that is not in some sense about dualism and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not impossible, but many people will think you’re avoiding the elephant in the room.

Points of contact. – Guiding topical assumptions might seem problematic, but they are not. They belong to the way we receive the text. Rival interpretations often argue about the right topical context. They can be quite controversial and seem mutually exclusive. Just think of the Bible as a religious text as opposed to a historical document. Sometimes they seem more complementary. You can see the Bible as both a historical document and a religious foundation. The point is, then, not to avoid such contexts (and go for givenism), but to see what actually connects text and interpretations. In other words, you should look for points of contact. What are the interpretations arguing about and how do they relate to the text. Interpretations worth your time do not only argue about the proper topical context but do so by also pointing out a concrete term or passage in the text. This is the proper point of contact. Interpretations and related disagreement must have a clear textual basis.

Where are you now and what is next? – If you have found one or several points of contact, you can begin to see what the text is about – in keeping with various interpretations. Don’t downplay this! Figuring out a point of contact is an achievement going well beyond engaging with doxography or an individual interpretation. You could now write something about the state of the art. But note that, so far, you have not begun to work with the text as such. But how do you begin that and why should you bother? Many people won’t even delve into different interpretations but stick to a doxography telling them authoritatively what certain texts are about. Although doxographies initially derive from engagements with the text, they don’t make these engagments explicit. No one today will actually argue that Locke was an empiricist. Such interpretations are taken for granted, not in the sense that they are taken to be true, but in that they are taken to belong to an interpretive tradition. (In the same way, we wouldn’t call a map of Paris from 1250 or from 1950 false; although it still tells us something, we know that it’s outdated.) If you want to move on, you should know what you want. Do you actually want to read the text or do you want to pass an exam? Are you interested in a certain kind of philosophy or do you want to see how it was or is done, that is, written? As I like to put it, if you’re merely doing philosophy, it’s enough to get the hang of some interpretations. If you want to do history of philosophy, you have to engage with the text. But how?

Build up friction between the text and the interpretations. – Topical contextualisations or doxographies are often taken as a starting point, but they do obscure (earlier) failures of understanding. Students often don’t notice that they have mainly learned to project an interpretation into a text, rather than reading a text. So how do you move ahead? Start from your point of contact, but rather than taking an interpretation for granted, ask yourself what the term or passage in question is about. Begin by trying to explain the passage in virtue of the other parts of the same text. How? Explanations like “Locke is an empiricist” or “This passage contains Locke’s account of linguistic meaning”, for example, will commonly block actual reading. You’ll notice this when you ask for details in the text. Once people parse Locke’s famous claim that “Words in their primary and immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them …” with the assumption that Locke discusses meaning, they are likely to think that “signification” means “meaning”. Arguably, Locke’s text doesn’t offer any such account. So what do you do instead?

  • Provide an analysis of the content and style of the passage as such: explain (technical) terms, see how they hang together and get taken up. Look at logical operators and connections between sentences. See whether it contains arguments or explications of terms. See whether it contains examples. References to other authors or texts. See whether it contains metaphorical expressions. Ask yourself what work the metaphors do.
  • Make a strict distinction between the content and the function of a passage in the overall text. Does it function as an introduction or is it a refinement of something earlier? Is it a key passage in the text itself or part of a larger argument?
  • See whether the technical terms used are part of a common terminology. Study the terminology through dictionaries, handbooks or related texts.
  • Check the translation (if it is one) for consistency with regard to technical terms. Is it a use of terms that’s still common or now part of a different discipline?

Going through some of these considerations will quickly challenge the interpretive ideas. You will likely notice that a text, once you look at the whole, can be part of quite different topics or disciplines and also that the priorities provided in the text rarely match what is deemed relevant in current interpretations. As Jenny Ahworth has shown with regard to Locke’s notion of signification, sometimes a different understanding of one technical term can turn over whole traditions of reading a text. But even if you don’t intend to contribute original research, you’ll have made a first step to developing a solid and independent understanding.

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* Here is part one of my series on how to read.

Reviving the commentary as a philosophical genre

When I was in my final school years and reading lots of Goethe, my German teacher recommended I read some commentaries by Erich Trunz. This was an amazing discovery: Trunz explained the texts on various levels and, above all, he left out none of the difficult passages that seemed impossible to grasp. When I began reading philosophy at Bochum university I found like-mined approaches, especially in medieval studies. But especially the so-called secondary literature on modern philosophy was often disappointing: True, the interpretations were often quite elegant, but they mostly bypassed the dark passages that clearly required a professional interpretation to make any sense whatsoever. The often fleeting remarks on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its numbering system, for instance, left me in despair. Was I not seeing the obvious or were the interpretations I consulted just not geared towards explaining the text? Only much later it dawned on me that the commentary was a philosophical genre in its own right and, outside more philologically inclined circles, a rather rare treat. These days, this is especially perplexing, given that the “diversification of the canon” requires reading unfamiliar material and thus a lot of detailed commentary. But apart from a couple of good examples (especially in classics and medieval studies), one can’t say that the commentary is exactly fashionable again. (See Barry Smith on the neglect of this genre.) Students are often entirely unfamiliar with the genre and sometimes seem to conflate it with what is known as an “opinion piece” in newspapers. After some sketchy remarks here and there, it is high time, then, to say more clearly why a revival of this genre is overdue.

So what is a commentary? – My rule of thump is that commentaries focus on explaining given texts, the linguistic forms of utterances themselves, rather than merely on ideas and arguments. Commentators do not solely attempt to say what a text is saying and what it means or has meant, but also why it is expressed in the way it is expessed. This means that the structure of the commentary follows the text and not the interpretive ideas or goals of the commentator. The beginning of a commentary is thus marked by a quotation of a word or passage from the text itself. Commentaries are often provided along with critical editions or translations of primary texts. They range from occasional annotations to “dark” passages or unfamiliar terminology to full-blown interpretations, giving background information on related texts or tracing unacknowledged sources. That said, a commentary can of course also be a part of a larger interpretation and typically occurs when a specific text passage or term forms the point of contact between different interpretations of a text. In fact, many introductions or guidebooks are commentaries in disguise. But besides critical editions of ancient and medieval texts, it’s mainly Wittgenstein’s work that seems to have invited the genre of commentary.

Why bother? – Do you know Beethoven’s 5th Symphony? Of course you do! Most people only know the opening theme, though. Secondary literature focussing on “central themes” is a bit like that. Arguably, you need a line-by-line commentary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to get beyond the famous Proposition 7 (see e.g. Duncan Richter’s commentary). The point is, then, that understanding a thought, argument or concept is different from understanding a text. But if philosophers care mainly about the former, why bother with the latter? Aren’t the essential ideas enough? Getting the “essentials” of the Tractatus, for instance, is like getting a Readers Digest or worse perhaps a cartoon version of it. Nothing wong with cartoons, you say. Of course not, but why bother with philosophical texts in the first place? But here is a more important point: It is often said that the text as such only really matters, if we consider it or the author an authority we want to defer to. Arguably, then, if we value independent thinking we can bypass the textual details. However, this gets things the wrong way round. For who tells you what “the main point” of a text is, if not an authority that you implicitly defer to? As I see it, then, the supposed “main points” are taken on mere authority and are in fact the outcome of earlier textual work of past generations. It is the detailed commentary that equips you with the material necessary for independent study and thought.

How to write a commentary? – Getting a glimpse of the scholarly work going into a commentary often makes the idea of writing such a thing overwhelming. But fear not, it’s doable. Especially these days with so many searchable resources at hand, you often don’t even need to travel. Here are a couple of preparatory moves, though, that might help you getting into the right frame of mind for beginning to write a commentary:

  • Pick and prepare a bit of text: Pick a text you like and find a bit tricky. Not too much: just a couple of lines. The text is your guide. So actually write it down. No, don’t copy it. Only if you actually write it, you will begin to see tricky bits. Write it down, number the sentences, underline words that you want to focus on, and highlight sections that you find tricky.
  • Think about the origin of the text: Make clear to yourself how the text made it onto your screen: Is it from an early print, a student or critical edition, a translation? Who edited it and when and why? Is the spelling in keeping with the original, is there something standardized? All these things tell you something about the material basis and politics involved in the text and might matter to what you actually find on the page.
  • Translation: If the text is in a foreign language, then try to translate it or write out a given translation beneath or beside it. If you don’t know the language, try to get at least keyterms. Check every keyterm and ask yourself whether you can think of a better alternative. Making a translation is the best way to see what you really don’t get. In my experience, many sentences begin to become unclear if you try translating or paraphrasing them.
  • Paraphrase: If the text is in your native or working language, try to make a paraphrase or transfer bits into formal language.
  • Variants: If you waver between different paraphrases, write down both or more. These are possible interpretations. If applicable: Have someone else make a paraphrase, too.

Now that you have a version of the text, you can begin with the actual commentary:

  • Start with a term you find central: Explain briefly why the term is central. Try saying how its centrality affects the rest of the passage you’ve picked. Say how the term relates to (modern or contemporary) cognates (similarities, differences). Say in what sense the term is part of a terminology.
  • Move on to a phrase you find difficult: Say what makes the phrase difficult for an imagined reader (even if it’s no longer dark for you): a certain grammatical feature, an unknown lexical meaning, unfamiliar terminology, strange wording etc. Now spell out some resources that help(ed you) figuring out what the phrase means: a grammar, dictionary, related texts that come with similar phrases.
  • Where does the idea expressed by the phrase come from? Hardly anything you find in a text is (entirely) original. This means that there is often something to be gained from asking genealogical questions: Where does this idea come from? Is it almost a quotation? Does the terminology perhaps just signal a slight shift of interest?

When writing your commentary, there are some obvious techniques to be used:

  • What if you can’t figure something out? Take the phrase and google it! Likely someone else has commented on it. Or something similar is in a different text that helps you figure it out.
  • Make connections within the text: Try to see whether the terms you commented on shed light on the dark phrases. Check logical connectives and see whether they are well used. Check for omissions, enthymemes, implicit assumptions etc. and write them down. Relate these notes to other parts of the same or a different text.
  • Think of audiences: Who will understand thee text better with your comments. Will it help students, people new to the material or fellow specialists? Try too gear your comments to one of those audiences. Ideally begin with students who had no exposure to the material.
  • Contextualise your priorities: Even if you try focussing on “the text as such”, your interests and what you find worth commenting on will be in keeping with certain interpretive traditions. Make them clear to yourself and use them for deciding how to move forward.

It goes without saying that there are many other factors that you could take into account, but if you follow at least some of these stepts, you’ll end up with a bit of commentary on a bit of text that might present you with a way forward or a spark for doing something else with it. Perhaps you’ll extend it, move on to another text or integrate it in an interpretation. I for one will begin to make the commentary a decisive part of writing exercises for students. My hope is that we might write more commentaries in the future. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or about your favourite commentaries.*

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* Thanks to Susanne Bobzien, Nicholas Denyer, Michael Kremer, and Michael Walschots for some first suggestions.

Reason and evidence as disguised authorities in philosophy

Currently, philosophy often enjoys the status of being a critical discipline – a discipline not grounded on authoritative beliefs but as a discipline critically examining such beliefs. Given that philosophy can also be seen as a form of life, for instance, this view of philosophy as a critical discipline is of course not without alternatives. So how did this image of philosophy become so popular? There is of course more than one answer, but writing up a paper on the Condemnation of 1277 made me realise that this view of philosophy might have been pushed greatly by being targeted through this and other condemnations in the 13th century. (If you want to get a clearer idea about the condemned view, the paper is here.) Here are two of the condemned propositions:

“Man may not be content with authority to have certainty about any issue.” (Proposition 150)

“One should not believe anything unless it is self-evident or can be manifested from self-evident principles.” (Proposition 37)

One thing that’s interesting about the view represented by the condemned propositions is that it is taken as a rejection of authority tout court. In being critical, the view seems to reject anything requiring authority or the testimony of others. However, what goes often unnoticed is that this view relies on something that is not conceptualised as an authority but taken to be very authoritative: human reason.

Apart from endorsing all sorts of ableisms, this view obscures that human reason is not just a tool but also turns out to be taken as a source of claims. If we restrict claims to what is knowable through our natural faculties and exclude claims going beyond the pertinent evidence, crucial tenets, such as the omnipotence of God or the creation of the universe, fall away immediately. In this sense, second-order claims about standards of evidence directly affect first-order beliefs. Arguably, a lack of evidence for something does not entail the inexistence of that something. Thus, the lack of evidence might grant being agnostic about something’s existence, but not the denial of existence. However, quite a number of condemned propositions (50-65) seem infer restrictions to God’s omnipotence. As is well-known, the whole understanding of the world order depends on whether we assume the possibilityof divine interventions or not.

In disguising authoritative first-order claims as merely resting on “self-evidence” or “natural reason”, philosophers mangage to sell their view as the mere outcome of critical reflection, rather than reliance on authority. As I see it, the image conjured up by the condemned propositions and the subsequent interpretations helped to create the myth of the ruthlessly rationalist philosopher, as associated with the so-called Enlightenment or indeed with early analytic philosophy. In his Don’t Think for Yourself, Peter Adamson provides a pertinent picture of this view. Taking philosophy as starting from “blank slate” rather than from some authoritative belief means

“… that it would indeed be possible, in sufficiently ideal conditions and with sufficient talent, for a single human being to become an accomplished intellectual with no help apart from resources of the natural environment. Those of us who did not grow up alone on a remote island depend on teachers and routinely take authorities at their word. But there is no absolute need to turn to other humans to achieve enlightenment. You can, quite literally, do it yourself.” (Don’t Think for Yourself, 2022, xii)

According to this image, a proper philosopher rejects reliance on authority and rather thinks for themselves, ideally relying on nothing but natural faculties. This and related images capture and transmit metaphilosophical assumptions. The disagreement figuring in the Condemnation of 1277 affords an image of Enlightenment philosophy avant la lettre. Thinking of this image as opposed to another kind of philosophy allows for portraying those disagreeing with the supposed Enlightenment philosophers as irrationalists. In this sense, the image of the “blank slate” Enlightenment philosopher comes with a cluster of predicates that are mutually reinforcing in historiography, philosophy, and even propaganda.

This blank slate image is quite prominent to this day. One element of this image is the idea that philosophy needs to return to and start from a blank slate, i.e. a state without superstition, prejudice, pseudo-problems, linguistic vexations etc., as it is propagated by some of the condemned propositions, and more famously in Descartes’s Meditations, Locke’s “underlabourer” in the Essay, Wittgenstein’s ideal of purification in the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, Carnap’s attack on metaphysics or the Letter against Derrida’s Honorary Degree.

What is it, then, that recommends this image of philosophy over other images of philosophy? As noted, it’s the supposedly undogmatic, instrumental, and critical character that makes philosophy of this kind seem particularly attractive and applicable. This image of purity lends itself to the assumption of political and ideological innocence. In this spirit, Hans-Johann Glock writes: “If the big philosophical beasts are anything to go by, then culpable political lapses may be rarer within the analytic movement than in continental philosophy.” (What is Analytic Philosophy, CUP 2008, 195) Accordingly, Glock thinks that “a failure of reason was a necessary condition to support the [Nazi’s] cause.” (164) This verdict is not only interesting as an expression of the enormous trust into the power of reason in analytic philosophy. It also contradicts Horkheimer and Adorno who would see a single-minded emphasis on reason as degenerating into reason instrumental to totalitarianism.

It’s important to note, though, that both the supposed instrumental character and the freedom from ideology seem to differ from the Aristotelian recommendation of philosophy as the best actualization of human nature, which is spelled out in tandem with the distinction of human reason from perception that we share with nonhuman animals and vegetative functions of the soul that we share with nonhuman animals and plants. But while the teleological hierarchy of the soul’s functions is no longer endorsed today, the distinctions from other psychological features (such as emotion) is still operative. This hierarchical view of psychological functions still privileges reason in distinguishing it from perception, desire, and emotions for instance. So the prioritizing of reason does not only construe it as nobler than belief (in authority), but also nobler than other cognitive, emotive, conative, and physiological functions. The upshot is that we inherit a certain reason-focused image of philosophy. Arguably, it rests on an understanding of philosophy that promotes a dismissive attitude towards faith or belief that is not fulfilling certain evidential standards. However, what remains mostly unsaid is that “natural reason” can be seen as an authority itself.

Invisible disability ­and ableism on the rise through (Long) COVID

Revealing something commonly invisible seems quite a challenge. But ever since hitting on the tweet below I have looked at ordinary scenes in the streets with different eyes:

Along with the caption I found the picture quite telling, but just in case you’re wondering: It’s quite a strain to move past with a stroller and impossible to move ahead with a wheelchair in such situations. While I’m not sure that this phenomenon is a Dutch thing, it’s certainly sufficiently thoughtless to deserve being called ableism. I’d also call it invisible ableism, because it is not commonly noticed as presenting barriers until being pointed out. Had I not seen the tweet, I wouldn’t have noticed the phenomenon. Our world is full of such barriers. When they go unnoticed or remain untouched, they will continue to make disabilities invisible. People with pertinent disabilities will often (have to) resign to stay put.

While such thoughtlessness is bad for people with disabilities, it’s likely to get worse in the coming years. On the one hand, COVID keeps spreading and Long COVID has been and is gravely underestimated. According to a fairly recent paper, “Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems. At least 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, with cases increasing daily.” If this is correct, the amount of disabilities will rise significantly. On the other hand, not only laypersons but even medical experts are often still uninformed and in denial of the severity of the pertinent diseases, so much so that we’re now seeing what’s called sustained medical gaslighting.

I wouldn’t have become aware of these facts myself, had it not been for the many instructive conversations and writings by friends, such as Eric Schliesser’s pieces on Long COVID (see here for a comprehensive interview). By now I know (of) quite a number of people who are severely affected. I don’t know what’s to be done. But we certainly need to listen and face the severity of the situation. This means not least removing invisble barriers for others and perhaps our (future) selves. That would involve at least to return to better measures of protection and also of accommodating our likely growing disabilities with more flexible responses. At workplaces, for instance, the issue is no longer just a matter of “work-life balance”. Our inaction or action will be decisive for the livelihood of the coming generations, no less.

Take care!   

Can the penny drop too late? Unrecognised slowness in (teaching) philosophy

Non scholae sed vitae discimus.

Once upon a time I received a flattering mail from a student, thanking me for teaching him to ask structured questions. “Although I really hated it at the time,” the student wrote, “I realised I could make great use of the technique some years later, especially since the pandemic started.” It goes without saying that this mail made me very happy, but what I’d like to point out is not that the penny dropped, but that it dropped too late. Too late, that is, to make it into the student evaluations. What we should conclude is that perhaps many of the crucial effects of teaching and learning manifest themselves much later in life than is standardly assumed. At least assumed when we design and assess tests of what has been learned. – Now that the murmur about hopes and worries about the coming academic year is all around, I often think of this mail and related experiences. What the student emphasised was that he could now make use of something he had learned so much earlier that it seemed almost disconnected to the course work. The lesson that I learned from this mail is that I have come to plan my teaching with way too much focus on goals that are supposed to be achievable within the time span of a course, visible at the latest in the assignments, visible ideally to the students, too, so that they can assess their “learning experience” accordingly. In what follows, I want to argue for a different timing in teaching philosophy. I’m a slow reader, thinker, and writer – and I have come, after a long time, to think that’s a good thing after all, so please bear with me. 

Student evaluations. ­– Although it is well known that student evaluations reflect biases rather than educational progress, they are still often taken as a legitimate form of feedback. “Well, of course, they’re bad, but they tell us at least something about the level of satisfaction,” is a line I often hear. The common response is to improve the questions on evaluation forms and think twice about using them too much in hiring and promotion. But as I see it, the problem is that both criticisms and refinements obscure the fact many effects of learning manifest themselves much later. When we advise students and teachers to focus on skills that afford employability, we pretend that the things we teach can be recognised as skills of that kind. Learning to ask questions or, as some prefer to say, “the right questions” certainly means acquiring a skill, but it’s clear that the student didn’t recognise this as something valuable at the time. The upshot is: Many learning goals might not be recognised as such during the time of instruction.

Learning outcomes. ­– What do you do if learning goals might not be recognised as such during the course. Well, you might just tell your students: “trust me, I’m a philosopher”! But that is not good enough when it comes to values such as accountability. So the alternative is to formulate different learning goals or outcomes, ones that are recognisable. Reading up on some of the pertinent literature, I was impressed to begin with. The fact that students cannot relate their performance to verbs such as “understand” or “analyse” in learning outcomes was met with the advice to formulate goals that can be recognised. So we are encouraged to use verbs such as “being able to present”, “respond to” etc. No doubt it’s easier to recognise that you’ve presented something rather than recognising whether you actually understood something. “Presenting” is a success verb, you can tell when it has been done. “Understanding” might seem to be a success verb, too, but arguably it’s an ongoing process. So it’s less clear what constitutes an understanding. While the advice to reformulate learning outcomes accordingly made sense to me when I read it, I have come to doubt it again. I’m expected to teach philosophy, not how to present. Of course, I also care deeply about how philosophy is presented, but does that mean that I can teach philosophical skills best by confining the goals of the course to something recognisable? I doubt that the answer is a clear ‘either-or’. But I think it’s problematic to give up on goals that we deem essential to philosophy. It’s not problematic because it’s simplistic; it’s problematic because it makes a false promise. “Doing philosophy”, “understanding” or “philosophising” are not success verbs. If anything it’s a coming-of-age kind of thing. Arguably, then, we don’t do our students a favour if we mainly aspire to “teach to the test”.

Some politics behind it. – Of course, it would be too simplistic to decry the status quo and glorify the olden days. But it’s important to see where much of this mind-set (aiming at recognisable goals in teaching) might come from. At least in many parts of Europe, an important turn was taken with the introduction of the so-called Bologna reform. While many aims struck me as noble back then, the way this reform has been carried out entails a number of consequences in line with the thinking criticised above. But whatever might drive this development, it’s not a law of nature that philosophy is taught as an easily reconisable skill set. At the same time, I am aware that the current zeitgeist will not allow for a straightforward acknowledgement of the slowness and indeed uselessness that doing philosophy might require. This is why I’d like to close with a quote by Richard Rorty that we might want to bear in mind when flying under the radar:

“So the real social function of the humanistic intellectuals is to instil doubts in the students about the students’ own self-images, and about the society to which they belong. … Somewhere deep down, everybody – even the average taxpayer – knows that this is one of the things colleges and universities are for. But nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public. … This tension between public rhetoric and private sense of mission leaves the academy in general, and the intellectual humanists in particular, vulnerable to heresy hunters.” (Richard Rorty)

Did Descartes read Wittgenstein? Video of my inaugural lecture (from 2017)

Introduction and laudatio start at minute 9:30. Lecture starts at 20:50.

Above you can see a video of my inaugural lecture (Did Descartes Read Wittgenstein? Towards a Conceptual Geography), held on 31st of October in 2017 at the University of Groningen. Taken together with my regular course on methodology in the history of philosophy for research master students at our faculty, the preparation of this lecture may be said to have served as the main source of ideas for this blog, which I started about nine months after presenting the lecture.

The lecture (beginning at minute 20:50) is preceded by a brief introduction through the Rector and a laudatio by Dean Lodi Nauta (beginning at minute 9:30). In the meantime, the original text of the lecture has been turned into a small paper, kindly published in a special issue of Magyar Filozófiai Szemle (2022/1) edited by Judit Szalai and Olivér István Tóth, and now even translated into Russian by Marija Weste.

The main reason for keeping the video for posterity is of course a soundbite, early on in the lecture, by my daughter Hannah who was then just under a year old. At some point in her life, it might please her to have one of her early public oppositions to my views on record. Along with some other videos, my lecture used to be stored on my Youtube channel under “Going Loopy”, the name of my alter ego on soundcloud. But since my university decided to close brand accounts with Google, these videos are no longer accessible on Youtube. Thus, I thought I might as well make it available here.

Writing is decision-making. Introducing reflective tasks in examination (in the light of ChatGPT)

It’s true, even though I said that I wouldn’t worry too much about students using ChatGPT, a few doubtful cases have made me wonder what to do about it. I’ve seen a lot of good advice and discussion already (see e.g. this piece by Matthew Noah Smith among further discussions and resources), but nothing has quite convinced me for my own endeavours and settings. What I am particularly worried about is that some students might stop entirely with working through crucial hardships of writing: trying out formulations, thinking carefully about structure and terminology, setting goals, failing, revising, refining and trying again. Obsessing (especially in how we grade) about the quality of the product (the exam or essay), we might forget about the point of teaching writing. After all, it’s not the odd successful exam or essay but reflecting on shortcomings and setting priorities that will foster learning. As Irina Dumitrescu aptly puts it: “But the goal of school writing isn’t to produce goods for a market. We do not ask students to write a ten-page essay on the Peace of Westphalia because there’s a worldwide shortage of such essays. Writing is an invaluable part of how students learn. And much of what they learn begins with the hard, messy work of getting the first words down.” The main reason for emphasising such tasks, then, is not to torture students, but to teach them thinking successfully and affording control over the process of thinking. So before I set out my ideas for examination, let me briefly motivate my approach.

Two phases of writing. – As I see it, writing is a kind of decision-making. While (1) tacitly articulating things in one’s head and attempting to write them down might count as thinking, (2) coming down on a certain way of phrasing means to decide or commit oneself to a particular mode of expression. It’s crucial to see that these are two very different phases and the way from phase one to phase two might be very long and disparate. As a student, I simply could not get to phase two without very torturous and long processes of trying things out. And sometimes I would never even reach phase two. Other times, I would need to write down two to three pages in order to end up writing and committing to a phrase that I had initially formulated in my head. It felt like slowly working towards finally writing down a phrase legitimately that I had idly considered in the beginning of writing my text. (Even if you’re different from me and do everything in your head before writing down a single line, you need to practise weeding out bad formulations before.) When you do this in handwriting, the constant crossing out and revising remains visible. Today, computers and formatting allow even the most hapless scribbles to look like parts of a finished book manuscript. The perfection of layout suggests a perfection of presentation that leaves the traces of desperate revisions invisible. Coming to phase two, then, means to have ruled out plenty of unsatisfactory formulations and alternative modes of structuring. Arguably, shortening this process of phase one by jumping on the next best phrase or sidestepping it completely by leaving it to ChatGPT means sidestepping thinking altogether and ending up with at text that no-one ever decided on.

Accordingly, I want to discourage students generally from unreflectively holding on to the first form of words that passes through their minds. Rather, I’m looking for tasks that make students ponder on their work and encourage second thoughts. So I hope to design something that works even for students who are not resorting to ChatGPT or other forms of cheating.

What I want students to go through. – Is this a fitting expression, and what is left out in using it? Does this structure work, given the content? What would change if I presented things in a different order? What is the main point I need to get across? How did I come to think of this as the main point? Should I rather focus on a seeming side-issue? Etc. Between the blank page and a successful piece, there are so many things and versions and other potential pieces that might be equally successful. Despairing over such choices is a crucial part of the process of writing. Leaving it to ChatGPT means learning nothing, nothing at all about writing and about yourself, let alone about ways to find your voice. Drawing out the gloomy consequences of leaving thought-processes to machines, Maarten Steenhagen sees us heading “towards a de-skilled society. More and more, thinking itself is being turned into a service, a product that is offered by some company or other. When people look for answers or want to understand something, they turn to Google, Bing, or to social media. There, they are likely to find easily digestible, byte-sized snippets that will do for most practical purposes.”

So what are the tasks I’m going to try out in my courses? – How can I see and evaluate whether students thought about the presentation of their ideas? I guess by asking to do so explicitly. So in future exams and essays I will add two kinds of tasks to the standardly requested answers (or papers).

  1. On the level of content: Instead of having students just write down answers to exam questions, I will ask them to motivate their answer in relation to an insight they had. Ideally, this insight should relate to a previous discussion in class. It could take the form of “I think this or that in the light of the following idea, premise, assumption, argument (where the specific item relates to a discussion in class)”. If one wants to extend this procedure, one could add further steps to the motivation, such as an objection to the answer given and a tentative response to the objection. (This idea builds on my teaching of structured questions.) So whereas the actual answer is the item to be graded, the additional items (motivation, objection, response) ensure a relation to the previous action in class (or whatever you ask it to be related to). Obviously, the addition items allow for a fine-tuning of the grade, too, but the main point is to encourage reflection, ideally by means of relating to actual discussions in class so as to introduce elements that cannot be achieved by ChatGPT.
  2. On the level of articulation: Here, I would ask students to add a reflection on their formulations or terminology. Either positively, by explaining why they have chosen a certain form of words, or negatively, by explaining why they have decided against a certain form of words. The precise term or phrase is for the students to pick. What they need to do is say something like “I used the term necessary because this excludes the possibility of exceptions.” Or, “I first thought about using the term thing but then I realised that what I meant could also include processes.” Again, the point is not to turn this into a demand for whater-tight arguments for certain modes of expression, but rather to encourage and monitor some level of reflection on one’s own language. It goes without saying that this also could be done or requested in relation to discussions in class. (Ideally, this exercise will also train the grasp of “operational concepts”, i.e. the means through which we express certain contents. See on this my conversation with Daniel-Pascal Zorn.)

While these tasks are thought of in relation to exam questions, they could also be introduced in essays and other assignments. Here, they could easily be requested in the form of footnotes offering some self-reflection.

I don’t know if these and related tasks will prevent ChatGPT from being used and abused, but at least the request to invoke discussions that happened in class will be difficult to mimic for such a device. In any case, they would take some reflection for making the relation, ensuring at least some reflection on part of the student.

At this point, I’m just beginning to experiment with tasks that encourage reflecting on one’s texts. I’m pretty sure, there are many people who have already thought of this and related issues more thoroughly. (* I am particularly grateful to Sara Uckelman for sharing her reflections. You can follow up on these on FB.) Please feel free to add ideas or, as always, comment on the ones presented.

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As it happens, this blog is now up and running for five years. So I’d like to thank you all for your continuous reading, encouragement, and discussion.

Enthusiasm and the Myth of the Given. A response to Tom Poljanšek

“But the deception of sober persons lies precisely in the fact that, simply put, they imagine that there were something like a completely unenthusiastic experience of the things themselves. … Listening to music without apperception, haha.”

Tom Poljanšek 

Not just philosophers eye enthusiasm with suspicion. Often contrasted with sobriety, it is seen as a distortion of our view on reality, of things as they really are. However, one might counter this take on enthusiasm by pointing out that it rests on a dubious assumption that is, in the wake of Sellars, often called the Myth of the Given or Givenism, i.e. the idea that things could be viewed for what they are, as raw data, without (distorting) attitudes or judgments. This is one of the points suggested by Tom Poljanšek in his great ode to enthusiasm. (Here is a longer conversation about Tom’s work.) In this brief response, I would like to point to some reasons for my agreement with the claims running through his ode.

In the passage quoted above, the sober person is portrayed as assuming to have a privileged epistemic access, i.e. access to the “things themselves”, in virtue of being undisturbed by enthusiasm (or perhaps other strong attitudes or emotions). According to the sober person, then, enthusiasm works like an interpretation or judgement of a fact or thing. While the thing as such is given, the attitude of the enthusiast (who is taken to interpret or judge it, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) is taken to distort it. In taking the attitude of sobriety as an undistorting approach to things, sober persons take themselves to be realists in opposition to enthusiasts, who are seen as judging, projecting, interpreting and hence distorting what is given. Taking things this way, the sober one is a Givenist who not only takes themself to differ in attitude but in epistemic privilege. Some psychologists took this idea of opposing enthusiasm and ran even further, claiming that depression yields a more realistic attitude to the world. But, as Tom points out, Givenism is a “deception”.

Givenism and the rejection of it as a myth have a long dialectical history. But the appeal to bare, undistorted data, things or facts has not ceased, especially when philosophers pride themselves on their immunity against ideology and unbalanced emotion. In this spirit we find, for instance, Gilbert Ryle, claiming that only (analytic) philosophy is immune to ideology, or Timothy Williamson, claiming that realism is a “sober philosophy”. What is new, at least by my lights, in Tom’s approach to the issue (and his implicit rejection of Givenism) is the introduction of enthusiasm into this history. Higlighing at once the social, epistemic, and psychological dimensions of enthusiasm, he exposes unfounded rejections of enthusiasm as a form of falling prey to Givenism. We might conclude, then, that sobriety is an attitude that might, mutatis mutandis, come with the same virtues or vices as enthusiasm and thus doesn’t afford epistemic privilege. There is no content we could entertain without attitude.

One might now wish to object that, even if sobriety is merely a sort of attitude, it might be a more appropriate attitude in epistemic endeavours than, say, enthusiasm. But what would make sobriety more appropriate? Arguably, the supposed realism of sobriety is owing to Givenism. So the assumption of one attitude being more or less appropriate might boil down to a matter of changeable conventions. As I see it, then, it’s not that one attitude wins out against another. Rather, it takes all kinds of attitude to approach the world. In this spirit, we might say that there is also a givenism about attitudes. Neither sobriety nor enthusiasm are attitudes as such or work in themselves. It takes a bunch of enthusiasts to make me feel sober or a sober person to make me feel enthusiastic.

Love as imitation. A note on the role of love in academic teaching and learning

“I am touching on a point that I’ll soon leave behind again, since it relates to the profoundness that I intend to bypass, I mean the disparity between university and truth. To study medieval philosophy in a philosophical way one has to learn a lot, but one should not prioritise learning. As with any kind of philosophy, one has to ask questions. One has to have problems; one has to have confidence in being able to solve them; one still has to be on the move, wishing to make discoveries, wishing to learn something of vital importance from old books. This is countered by many intimidating experiences, especially during one’s studies. One loses this confidence if one is not encouraged. This encouragement comes only from others, from role models, from friends, from teachers whom one – let’s be frank – loves. Only among friends can one do philosophy. But if university career paths merely produce sober thinking clerks (Denkbeamte), then philosophy does no longer exist at universities. And without this spark you might still become a specialist in medieval logic – which is no small endeavour – but then medieval philosophy is not just dead but forgotten, too.”

Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003*

In times of increasing worries about ChatGPT and education systems more generally it’s soothing and inspiring to re-read some of the works of my teacher Kurt Flasch. Neither he nor my PhD supervisors Burkhard Mojsisch and Gert König were very good at preparing me for a career on the international job market, but they surely inspired some resilience against its crushing mechanisms. Re-reading the passage I translated above made me think about love of teachers again. Not in the recently well-rehearsed sense of academic ‘metoo stories’, but in the sense of what I’d like to call love as imitation. I know there are a lot more topics in the offing, but the idea of love in academia is, as far as I can see, perhaps the least understood.

So what does it mean to love a teacher? – Quite simply, to love one’s teacher means wanting to be like them. While it might involve interacting with them on some level, the crucial aspect is wanting to become like them, and that means, for instance, approach problems like them; speak, sound and listen like them; read like them or perhaps even enter into the form of life displayed by them – in one word: imitate them. (As I have argued earlier, love is, amongst other things, the ability and desire to understand another person. A strong way of understanding the other, then, is imitating them.) When I was a student, I had a couple of professors I really loved in that sense. I ended up following their courses, not primarily because I was into the topic all too much, but because I thought that, whatever they would teach, I would be learning something worthwhile. But how do you learn, how does that kind of love play out? While I was (back then) completely unaware what that meant, I just attempted to imitate them. This was quite palpable to me. When I wanted to pursue a certain (stylistic) approach, I would simply hear and try to imitate their voice in or their style when writing. – You might find this strange, but that’s probably what’s going on when we learn to find our voice in any kind of art, be it playing music, trying to paint or draw, or trying to speak and write.

Shouldn’t we aim at independence? – I guess the reason why imitation is so underrated in teaching is that we’re told to value independence. This is a fair point, but there are two issues that should be considered in response: Firstly, there is no independence without belonging. We’re not monads but always relating to a form of life and style that allows us (and others) to recognise that we’re engaging in the kind of practice we wish to engage in. How do I know I’m playing music if there is no one I’m relating to in my musicianship? Secondly, when we imitate we are never perfect imitators or impersonators – we end up appropriating and making things our own. So when I imitate my favourite teacher, you won’t hear Kurt Flasch but – willy nilly – an appropriation of his approach. In fact, the initial enthusiasm for pursuing something is fostered most by imitating a role model, be it a musician, an actor or a philosophy professor. In doing so, we might begin by rehearsing the things – half understood – we value most. After a while, though, we’ll find them pervading what we take to be our own voice.

Where to go from here? – Being a teacher myself, I think I should be aware of the facts surrounding the imitative ways of learning. After all, students don’t do as we say but imitate what we do. So if we act mainly as competitors on “the market”, students will see and imitate us in this respect. If we’re policing them as potentially fraudulent users of ChatGPT, they might follow suit. But what if we were to follow through with the idea that the best kind of philosophy develops in a community of friends?

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* Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003, S. 67:

Why should we encourage the study of canonical authors? Some reflections on the recent Collegium Spinozanum

Had you asked me three weeks ago what historians of philosophy should focus on, I would have replied that there is too much focus on individual authors, be they canonical or underrepresented figures, and return instead, at least every now and then, to the question of how certain texts fare in debates or in relation to problems. However, that was three weeks ago. Last week, I co-organised and participated in a summer school on Spinoza, the fourth edition of the so-called Collegium Spinozanum. Having experienced this, I am all in favour of focusing not only on individual authors, but on canonical ones. The reason is not that the current diversification attempts are bad or wrongheaded. Rather, I see studying canonical authors as a means to an important end in its own right: building a (research) community. In what follows, I’d like to explain this in a bit more detail and also say some things about forms of interaction and support in academic contexts.

(Collegium Spinozanum IV – Photo: Irina Ciobanu)

Unacknowledged reasons for being canonical. – The case for or against studying canonical authors is often made for supposed greatness versus political reasons. Great authors, it is assumed, are deemed thus because they were “great thinkers” who still speak to our concerns. Underrepresented authors, by contrast, are taken to be either just “minor figures” or “unduly neglected greats”. There is much that can be said critically about such lines of reasoning, but what I’d like to stress now is that these reasons largely ignore the community of readers, i.e. the recipients. Focussing on reasons in the “object of study”, they obscure the point that a good part of the reasons for choosing such an object might lie in the recipients and their common interests. But arguably it’s these common interests that shape a real community, not the supposed “lacuna in the literature”. So when a number of people thinks that we should read Spinoza, this might not be triggered by Spinoza (alone) but by the fact that there is something that speaks to certain people at a certain slice of time. In any case, this was the feeling I had when listening to all the papers and conversations at our summer school: We form a real community in that we want to talk and understand each other – a feeling that was not just sustained through the week but also by frequent references of participants to earlier editions of the Collegium (see the FB page related to earlier events).

A common corpus and language for diversity. –  Given the diversity of interests (ranging from well-rehearsed arguments in Spinoza to seemingly remote theological questions, from detailed historical reconstructions to actually practised meditations), reciprocal understanding required and found a common corpus and language in Spinoza’s works. We were mostly about 60 people in the room, with quite different leanings, but everyone had at least read Spinoza’s Ethics and understood how parts were referenced. This point is by no means trivial when you’re part of a group composed of people from very different academic stages (ranging from professors near retirement to third-year BA students) and various geographical regions. All too often, the diversity of assumed expectations and backgrounds silences people and lets impostor syndrome run wild. If you’re at a conference on a historical topic rather than a fixed author, you’ll shut up almost everyone when you steer the discussion to some notoriously understudied authors or areas. “Oh, you haven’t heard of this anonymous treatise from 1200? It’s quite important.” A relatively small corpus, by contrast, does not only facilitate the conversation, it ensures that I’m going to learn many new things about texts that I thought I knew inside out. 

“Canonical” doesn’t mean “well-known”. – Let me return to this last point once more. The status of being a canonical author is often equated with the assumption that we know this author fairly well (and thus should enrich our historical picture by studying underrepresented figures). But this is only true insofar as we repeat canonical interpretations of canonical figures. Once we enter into new conversations and accept that what (at least partly) drives our questions is owing to the interests of the recipients rather than to “the object of study”, we can see why every generation must start anew or, in Sellars’ words, why “the probing of historical ideas with current conceptual tools” is “a task which should be undertaken each generation”. This point should not be underestimated. What we did during this recent summer school on Spinoza was having a vast number of philosophical conversations, trying to push the limits as far as we could see. We were talking mereology, necessity, demonology, intuitions, the evil, and at the same time wondering how Ricœur and Wittlich or we ourselves were faithful to Spinoza’s texts or whether Spinoza had lied to his landlady. In this sense, the reference to the canonical author does not reinforce canonicity, but works like crossroads and allows for striking out in all directions. 

Ultimately, the focus is not the author but the community of readers. – The diversity of backgrounds as well as that of approaches should make clear that, ultimately, the focus of conversations is often not the author but the facets afforded by the interaction of the community. So the point of focussing on an author, a canonical one at that, is not to adhere to the canon or trying to restate ‘the intention of the author’. The point is rather what the author affords to us: growing into a community of readers, a corpus accessible across the globe, a common language to converse about many things we might only begin to understand.  

Summary. – At the end of the collegium, I tried and failed to sum up what we achieved together. Instead, I could only quote a poem by Robert Frost that I wish to restate here:

The Secret Sits

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

(Collegium Spinozanum IV – Photo: Irina Ciobanu)

Local challenges for the summer school. – Since summer school participants do not have angelic properties, they do need all sorts of things, not least a place to sleep. At the time of the summer school, Groningen also hosted two concerts of an infamous German rock band, entailing that most available accommodation was booked out long in advance. Had it not been for our personal efforts and our colleagues from the university’s summer school office, Isidora Jurisic and Tatiana Spijk-Belanova, the summer school could not have provided accommodation for the participants. A lesson for the future is that a university town should probably balance its interests accordingly and take responsibility for leaving some resources for such events.

Thanks. – It doesn’t go without saying that this wonderful event wouldn’t have been possible without the participants, all attentive and present till the very last moment. In particular, I would like to thank my co-organiser, Irina Ciobanu, and the inventor of the whole affair, Andrea Sangiacomo, who ran the first three summer schools on Spinoza since 2015, as well as our keynote speakers who are, besides Andrea, Raphaële Andrault, Yitzhak Melamed, and Gábor Boros. Thanks also to the Groningen Faculty of Philosophy and to the German Spinoza-Gesellschaft for financial support.