From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 09 2005 - 02:20:21 BST
Hey Ham,
Ham said:
I have before me a softbound book by Bertrand Russell that I've owned for
nearly half a century. It was first published in 1912. Guess what its
title is: . . . "The Problems of Philosophy". Sound familiar? Chances are
you've read this introductory gem on the substance of philosophy – possibly
as a textbook in Professor Picart's class.
…
Now, you tell me which of these problems have been satisfactorily resolved,
answered or are considered no longer worth discussing in the 83 years since
this little volume was published.
Matt:
Actually, my first teacher, Kay, wasn’t much into analytic philosophy, which
was a boon for me because she instead introduced me to Nietzsche, Kuhn, and
Pirsig. But, yes, I do have Bertie’s book on my own shelf.
So, my answer: all of them. You won’t accept them as resolutions,
dissolutions, answers, or appropriate non-considerations, but that’s the way
it goes. Nobody in philosophy has ever been able to convince every other
philosopher that the answers, nor even the questions, he has are good ones.
No, the question I haven’t been after is what these “problems of philosophy”
are (which is why I’ve only listed one or two by example), but where they
come from. You listed them from a historical source, which I gather is not
your final answer. If it were, you’d be susceptible to the fullness of my
argument. Rather, at root, you think these problems perennial to the
condition of humankind. Right? So, how does that not beg the question?
How would you prove that this were so? It seems to me that you can’t and
that you must beg the question over your historicist opponents. So the
question is: why? Why an ahistorical substance over a created, on-going
dialogue? What’s going to happen if we become historicist?
Ham said:
These are not changes -- they're the topics of study which these particular
philosophers happened to choose. This is not to say that one philosopher
does not influence the next, or that a philosopher is not affected by other
knowledge sources available in his time (scientism, politics, religion,
etc.). But what you seem to be suggesting is that the history of
philosophical thought represents a continuous advancement in human knowledge
(or conceptual development), as does the history of science, technology, or
music. Apart from a growing thesaurus of philosophical terms, and some
novel, off-the-track approaches like semiotics and symbolic logic, I guess I
just don't see that advancement.
Matt:
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the history of philosophy is
continuous or positive, even though I would think you had better say so if
you think we have perennial questions we are all working on answers for.
But really, I suppose, neither of us has to. We can both agree that the
history of philosophy is discontinuous (though I don’t see why you would
since you’ve just denied the discontinuities). What I am arguing is that,
despite historical discontinuity between Plato and Descartes, we can also
tell ourselves a story of continuous development, we can write narratives
that show how we dialectically got from Plato to Descartes to Kant to
Russell.
However, what we’ve learned over the last 2500 years is that what we call
progression over our fallen predecessors isn’t so much solutions to their
problems, but nonchalance over their problems. How Descartes didn’t so much
solve the problem of the relation between the Forms and the Material World
as he did create a different problem in the form of the Mind/Body problem.
We can show continuities between them, but if you tell a Platonic scholar or
a Cartesian scholar that Plato and Descartes were working on and giving
solutions to the same problems, they would have you hung. If you told the
Plato scholar that Plato had a mind/body problem or an a priori knowledge
problem or any kind of modal logic problem, but he just didn’t choose to
work on those topics, our little scholar would have a conniption fit. He
would also patiently tell you that it wouldn’t have been possible for Plato
to be working on the same things as Descartes or Russell without doing
serious damage to the historical record because the Greeks didn’t have the
conceptual resources to construct those problems.
But the only way to become acquainted with this type of view, the type of
view that takes history seriously and seeks not to damage it (or at least to
be conscious of how you’re damaging it) is to become acquainted with
Vlastos, Nehamas, Gilson, Randall, McKeon, etc., etc. But these scholars
are, unfortunately, disbarred from philosophy, and so, subsequently, one’s
reading list. They are simply philosophologists who have nothing to add to
philosophy, or are at least secondary to their problem solving colleagues.
This I think sad, especially for contemporary philosophy, which is only
slowly regaining a sense of historical consciousness from the help of
philosophers like Rorty, MacIntyre, Hacking, Toulmin, Derrida, Foucault,
Habermas, etc., etc. (Actually, historical consciousness was never really
lost on the Continent because of Hegel’s influence, but the particular
vicissitudes of Anglophone philosophy departments made the teaching of Hegel
frowned upon until very recently.)
Personally, I’m never more excited then when I’m reading a good historical
narrative of philosophy, like Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought, or
Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution, or Richard Popkin’s The
High Road to Pyrrhonism. I’m never so bored then when I’m reading the
sophisticated solutions to obscure problems by Russell, or Ayer, or Carnap,
or Searle, even philosophers I agree with like Davidson, Dennett, Putnam,
Quine, and Sellars. They don’t snap, there’s no verve or panache. I guess
at heart, I like a good story. But in any event, I’m not sure you could
make much of a case for your preference over historically-drained, general
theorization except as a personal preference (which you share with many).
Some people, like you, prefer theorems, some people, like me, enjoy stories.
I don’t think there’s a general point to be made from these differing
preferences except: if you’re going to make historical claims, you’d better
like stories.
Matt
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