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What is Humane Philosophy and Why is it At Risk?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2009

Extract

Let me begin with what may seem a very minor point, but one which I think reveals something about how many philosophers today conceive of their subject. During the past few decades, there has been an increasing tendency for references in philosophy books and articles to be formatted in the ‘author and date’ style (‘see Fodor (1996)’, ‘see Smith (2001)’.) A neat and economical reference system, you may think; and it certainly saves space, albeit inconveniencing readers by forcing them to flip back to the end of the chapter or book to find the title of the work being referred to. But what has made this system so popular among philosophers? A factor which I suspect exerts a strong subconscious attraction for many people is that it makes a philosophy article look very like a piece of scientific research. For if one asks where the ‘author-date’ system originated, the answer is clear: it comes from the science journals. And in that context, the choice of referencing system has a very definite rationale. In the progress-driven world of science, priority is everything, and it's vitally important for a career that a researcher is able to proclaim his work as breaking new ground. Bloggs (2005) developed a technique for cloning a certain virus; Coggs (2006) showed how certain bits of viral DNA could be spliced; and now Dobbs (2007) draws on both techniques to develop the building blocks of a new vaccine. The idea is that our knowledge-base is enhanced, month by month and year by year, in small incremental steps (perhaps with occasional major breakthroughs); and in the catalogue of advances, the date tagged to each name signals when progress was made, and by whom.

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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2009

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References

1 Often known as the ‘Harvard’ system, author-date referencing was apparently first used by a Edward Laurens Mark, a Professor of anatomy at Harvard University, in an article published in 1881 in the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations [Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953] (New York: Macmillan, 1953), Part I, §309Google Scholar.

3 ‘Can Analytic Philosophy Be Systematic?’ [1975], in Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), 458.

4 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 300ffGoogle Scholar.

5 For Quine's view of philosophy as continuous with science, see his ‘Epistemology naturalized’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 69–90, and ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA; Harvard, 1953; rev. 1961).

6 Leiter, Brian (ed.), The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), Editor's Introduction, 23Google Scholar.

7 Pierre Gassendi, Fifth Set of Objections, published with Descartes's Meditations [Meditations de prima philosophiae, 1641], AT VII 276: CSM II 193. ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes by Adam, C. & Tannery, P., Œuvres de Descartes (12 vols, revised edn, Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76)Google Scholar; ‘CSM’ refers to the English translation by Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R. and Murdoch, D., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

8 Gassendi himself actually seems to have held that the mind is an incorporeal substance, though he took this to be something known by faith. His empiricist view of knowledge, however, led him to insist that our understanding of the mind must be based on analogy with something perceived by the senses, and hence that the basis of the analogy will always be something corporeal. For an excellent discussion of his views in this area, see Lolordo, Antonia, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 10, 230–1Google Scholar.

9 See Cottingham, J., ‘Cartesian Dualism’, in Cottingham, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 8Google Scholar.

10 See for example Smart, J., ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’, in Chappell, V. C. (ed.), Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962)Google Scholar.

11 Descartes, Meditations, Second Meditation (AT VII 28: CSM II 19); see further Cottingham, J., Cartesian Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 4Google Scholar.

12 Benedictus Spinoza, Ethics [Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, c. 1665], Part II, prop. 7, scholium; Davidson, Donald, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

13 René Descartes, The Search for Truth [La recherche de la vérité, ?1649], AT X 516: CSM II 410).

14 Williams, Bernard, ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ [2000], in Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 184Google Scholar.

15 Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, [1690], (ed.) Nidditch, P.. (Oxford: Clarendon, repr. 1984), Bk IV, ch. 3, §25Google Scholar.

16 Wedgwood, R., The Nature of Normativity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 What is more, the multiplication of new terminology may give the impression of real new research, or quasi-scientific progress, when what is really happening is yet another swing back of forth of a pendulum, in a continuing piece of philosophical dialogue about the objectivity (or otherwise) of morality that goes back to David Hume versus Richard Price in the eighteenth century and ultimately to Plato versus Protagoras in the fourth century BC. See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [1748]; Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals [1758]; Plato, Theaetetus [c. 370 BC], 160 D.

18 Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Sectn IV, part 1, penultimate paragraph.

19 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) ch. 1, §4Google Scholar.

20 Matthew 19:21. Luke 9:59–60.

21 Matthew 11:30.

22 Compare Rawls's ‘maximin principle’, that requires inequalities to be justified by showing that they benefit the least advantaged (A Theory of Justice, §11).

23 It would take far more space than I can spare here to assess this question thoroughly. Among the extensive recent literature addressing some of the issues involved, see especially Sayre-McCord, G., ‘Coherentist Epistemology and Moral Theory’, in Sinnott-Armstrong, W. & Timmons, M. (eds), Moral Knowledge: New Readings in Epistemology (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 137189Google Scholar, and DePaul, M., Balance and Refinement: Beyond coherence methods of moral inquiry (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

24 Compare Strawson's, P. F. account of ‘connective’ as opposed to ‘reductive’ analysis in his Analysis and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discussed in Glock's, H-J. illuminating study What is Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity, p. 110.

26 Preface to the 1647 French translation of the Principles of Philosophy [Principia philosophiae, 1644], AT IXB 14-15: CSM I 186. For more on Descartes's ‘synoptic’ conception of philosophy, see Cottingham, Cartesian Reflections, ch 1.

27 Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, 197.

28 See Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; repr. 1987), sections 95 and 96.Google Scholar

29 The various phrases in this and the previous paragraph are taken from Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4652Google Scholar.

30 See for example Parfit's, The Puzzle of Reality’, Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992, 35Google Scholar, and ‘Why Anything, Why This?’, London Review of Books 20: 2 (22 January 1998), 22–5.

31 See Plato, Republic [c. 380 BC], Book III (376ff), Book V (474ff).

32 ‘[Philosophia] animam format et fabricat, vitam disponit, actiones regit, agenda et omittenda demonstrat, sedet ad gubernaculum et per ancipitia fluctuantium derigit cursum.’ (‘Philosophy shapes and constructs the soul, arranges life, governs conduct, shows what is to be done and what omitted, sits at the helm and directs our course as we waver amidst uncertainties.’) Seneca, Epistulae Morales [c. AD 64], 16, 3.

33 I explore many dimensions of ratiocentrism in Philosophy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

34 ‘Man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the … most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ego” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.’ Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 1916–17], trans. Rivière, J. (London: Routledge, 1922), ch. 18Google Scholar.

35 See Philosophy and the Good Life, ch. 4, final section.

36 Geuss, R., ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, Arion Vol. 11 no 1 (Spring/Summer 2003), 8Google Scholar. Cf. Empson, W., Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995)Google Scholar.

37 This paragraph draws on material from my The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 5.

38 Metaphorical language (when the metaphors are fresh and living) provide a striking case of this polyvalence or multiple layering; precisely for this reason the full meaning of a metaphor cannot be reduced to what might be asserted by a literal paraphrase.

39 Compare Nozick's, Robert critique of ‘coercive’ argument in philosophy, in Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), Introduction, 4ffGoogle Scholar.

40 See The Spiritual Dimension, ch. 1.

41 Hadot, Pierre, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), ch. 3Google Scholar. Originally published as Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).

42 Plato, Republic, 394d. The actual phrase is: ‘wherever the argument takes us, like a wind, there we must go’ (hopê an ho logos hôsper pneuma pherê, tautê iteon). This slogan, incidentally, should not be taken to mean that the only reasonable course in philosophy is to accept the conclusions that follow from our premises; where the conclusions are silly or outrageous, it will often be better to go back and question the premises.

43 See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time [Sein und Zeit, 1927], trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §44, 262Google Scholar; and Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ch. 18,

44 This theme, and that of the preceding paragraph, is developed in Cottingham, J., ‘The Self, The Good Life and the Transcendent,’ in Athanassoulis, N. and Vice, S. (eds.), The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham (London: Palgrave, 2008), 228271Google Scholar.

45 I am grateful for the valuable comments received from a number of friends and colleagues, especially from Peter Hacker, Brad Hooker and Javier Kalhat, and also for very helpful discussion points raised by Chris Pulman and other members of the philosophy graduate seminar at the University of Reading.