Hi Phil55, 

It’s a bit of a shame that you did not read the section of text you quoted from my post adequately. I clearly acknowledge (in the bit you quote no less) that there is “some room” for external critique. Of course there is! Its odd that where I say that there is “some room” you claim that I am saying that there is ‘no room’ and you imply that I am ushering in what might be, to borrow from Kant, “the nighttime of the sciences”. Its wrong and distorts my comments. It just seems to be a false assertion on your part. I would suggest that it is not good argumentative practice to rest much on a false assertion.  Perhaps that’s a standard we can agree on. No?

In regard to the quote from Philipse, the irony is too delicious to pass up, you appeal to the authority of Philipse who bases his comments around the idea that there is a fallacious appeal to authority occurring in Continental philosophy. You talk about the legitimacy of criticizing Aristotle from the perspective of the modern physical sciences. Well, if both discourses were trying to achieve a neutral/value free/third-person description of nature (that is, if both had the same goals and aims in mind) I cannot see too much problem here, although it would have to be done with some hermeneutic sensitivity so that we do not miss what is going on in Aristotle or misrepresent him. There could be a long discussion of that sort of thing as an important prelude to such an exercise – otherwise why bother, that is, unless you get Aristotle right why bother criticizing him from the perspective of modern physical science, as otherwise it might seem as a mere rhetorical piece of false triumphalism.

Regardless, and don’t hang too much on the prior comment, the quote from Philipse seems to miss the point by being too focused on micro issues. The point I was making in regard to internal versus external critique is not so much about an appeal to authority but about understanding what a particular philosophical endeavor is trying to do in the first place. So, for example, a mythographer might produce some set of writings about myth that attempts to explain the kind of world view that produced it and the norms at play in it, but if we reject their work on the basis that the myth makers were deluded about the existence of this or that entity we have just failed to see what the mythographer was trying to do in the first place, our critique is external to the praxis even if what we say is true, the mythographer was not assessing truth claims, they were asking about the world view and norms at play in the text. A perfectly legitimate exercise. Alternatively if we look at what the mythographer says and show that they have committed some methodological error, failed to take account of some feature of the culture that is vital to the interpretation of the myth or have radically misunderstood it for some reason or another, then we are offering them a criticism of their work that appreciates what it was trying to do in the first place, but shows that they failed to achieve it and why they have – here our critique is internal to the praxis. That sort of thing pushes the endeavor that they are already engaged in further,  its useful, whereas the former criticism just fails to understand the endeavor entirely and is perhaps only of use to the person who makes it, i.e., it’s the critic pursuing their own intellectual agenda (perhaps narcissistically so) and not engaging in a dialogue with the person they critique.

Would it be a fair criticism of someone working in the philosophy of biology, say problem solving within evolutionary biology by focusing on the kind of mechanisms that drive the evolution, to say that they have failed to take account of the richness of human embodiment? This might be true, they might have failed to consider this. But, do I not just miss the ballgame entirely by suggesting it? Is that not a failure on my part to see what is in front of me – basically an empirical failure? What would be the response to such a criticism? The response would be: “You are missing what is going on here, we are not denying that there is something interesting about human embodiment, its just that it is irrelevant for the project we are engaged in and so WE are not interested in it.” Why is that an appeal to authority? Its not really, at its core its an appeal to methodology, it says that such considerations, while not necessarily uninteresting, are methodologically irrelevant to the enquiry we are making. If an intellectual praxis cannot appeal to the methodology, goals and aims that orientate it then we are in real trouble.  Of course where the methodology of a discourse is failing to achieve the goals and aims of that discourse, or inadequate to them, we have a basis for criticizing it, but that is internal too – the goals and aims are the internal standard that the method or discourse is held to. Where the external criticism might come in is through assessing whether the goals and aims of the discourse are worthy in the first place; whether any discourse should have those particular goals and aims. But care needs to be taken when we consider the ‘worth’ of goals and aims. We can end up wallowing in parochialism and arrogance here. So, for example, we cannot presume that a third person description of the construction of nature is the only ‘worthy’ intellectual project. You have to demonstrate that and you have to demonstrate it in a non-circular way, a way that does not presuppose the good of that project to begin with.

But what is most important in a discussion about the possibility of creating some kind of reconciliation between two divergent approaches to philosophy is that a person who remains with an external critique of the other side is not going to take the discussion very far, and indeed does not seem to want to take the discussion very far.  They say “speak my language or leave my table” and that is parochial, not to mention arrogant. You seem to insist that analytic philosophy is a universal standard, but that mistakes the part for the whole. It claims that the project of analytic philosophy and the standards applied within it are more than merely valuable tools to employ if one is embarking on a certain type of intellectual project, embarking on a certain mode of enquiry, you are saying that analytic philosophy is the alpha and omega of philosophy and that there is only one valid philosophical project -  that which is defined by its norms. Again this seems parochial not to mention arrogant. Further it seems to mistake the part for the whole and is thus fallacious.

What I have suggested in my post is that rather than analytic philosophy judging Continental philosophy according to standards that fail to appreciate what is going on within it and perhaps vice-versa that we seek some meta-discursive orientation on both traditions.  To find some kind of discourse that can think through the relation between two modes of philosophical praxis that are historically related.  If such an orientation on philosophy can be found then both analytic and continental approaches to philosophy could be validly situated within it, criticizing either of them from that perspective would not be as problematic as criticizing each from the perspective of the other side. I am not saying that’s an easy matter but it might be something that we could hope for. Particularly in a discussion such as this. At least it seems more helpful in the context of this discussion than to simply assert the priority of analytic philosophy.

For my own part I am interested in philosophy and I read philosophy, that leads me to read analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy and I have been informed by both. I cannot judge a piece of work purely on formal criteria, I have to judge work by its own merits and so the terms analytic and Continental do not mask for me the value judgments good/bad as they seem to for you. In the end, I leave that as a matter for you. For my part I would just assert that to judge and pre-judge a piece of work along formalistic lines (so just determining its worth on the basis of whether its in one tradition or the other without reading it) is bad philosophy.

I will pass up any invitation to discuss Heidegger, some uses of him are interesting, but that is a matter for those whose primary interests lie with him and mine lie elsewhere.

Phil