From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 09 2005 - 08:43:27 BST
Matt, Ham,
I think this another false dichotomy -
philosophy v philosophology
writing v reading
doing v thinking
etc.
No new philosophy can ignore previous attempts - the creative spark
can come from anywhere outside philsophology, and generally will, but
the outcome must add something, sythesise something, fix some problem.
Isn't this just recognising the importance of both static and dynamic
quality ?
Ian
On Apr 9, 2005 9:20 AM, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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