New APPS

114 responses to “But What about the Children?”

1. 

   Rob Gressis

   February 9, 2014

   Mark, I was actually going to do that, but I thought: wait, why am I doing this again? So, without further ado:
   4. Vituperation of a group of people is something one should offer if that group unjustifiably harms another group of people, especially if that group of people is particularly vulnerable.
   5. SPEP departments harm a vulnerable group — graduate students — by giving them subpar training.
   6. Therefore, we ought to denounce SPEP departments.
   Again, I’m not saying I agree with any of 1-6.

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2. 

   Scu

   February 9, 2014

   I mean, we can seem to agree that Leiter’s moves (as well as Sprios, but I don’t know who that person is), is clearly intended to be ethos-stealing. To repeat what Jon, Mark Lance, and John have all said: there is a vast difference between engaging in vigorous arguments and critiques with particular thinkers or works, and engaging in a repeated and serial snarks, smears, and Schadenfreude of continental philosophy. He is not engaged in “argumentation and clarification,” he is engaged in a project of destroying legitimacy. And Rob Gressis, I am sure that Leiter believes that he is right. And he believes that his being right grants him the legitimacy to engage in non-philosophical personal attacks and name calling. Even if Leiter is right about the philosophical abilities of Simon Critchley, Graham Harman, Kelly Oliver, and Jacques Derrida, that does not grant Leiter the right to engage in petty name calling and personal attacks. And, of course, Leiter is not right. Derrida is not, for example, a used-car salesman of philosophy. You can vigorous disagree with Derrida, and think taking up is work is has negative consequences, without believing that. For example, Gary Steiner released an interesting book criticizing Derrida in animal ethics. I disagree with much of that book, but I think it is a smart book, and I think we need more serious engagements like it. Once we reach the level of calling people either idiots or liars, there is no ground for philosophical engagement after that. You can’t have an argument on that ground. Of course, there are plenty of people in this world I treat like that. I don’t enter into discussions with racists or sexists that begin in places for philosophical engagement.
   What is missing from all the attempts to defend or justify the behavior of Leiter/Spiros is any serious attempt to defend their moves toward ethos-stealing. Part of my problem is I cannot begin to wrap my mind around thinking that continental philosophy is on the same level of debating a racist or a sexist. I certainly do not feel that way toward Anglo-American/Analytic philosophy. Nothing about refusing to call people liars or idiots depends upon you thinking all avenues for doing philosophy are equal, much less equal in your investments of research. It simply grants the right and ability of other philosophers to be treated as philosophers.

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3. 

   sk

   February 9, 2014

   1) i seriously doubt that Professor Leiter has seen a whole lot of dossiers from candidates from continental (oh, i’m sorry, SPEP) departments. have there been a whole lot of searches at Chicago Law or at UT Austin in subfields in which continentally trained people tend to specialize? Even if there were, how many continentally trained people would even bother to apply, given that you can nearly guarantee that your file will get tossed, based on the provenance of your Ph.D.? i mean, we might not be Real Philosophers, but that doesn’t mean we’re stupid. this ceteris paribus, ideal theory approach tends to mask the very political conditions that themselves make up the analytic/continental divide, and pluralism as a response to it.
   2) i find it really disturbing that my professional career is spoken of as if i were a child, for precisely the reasons the OP refers to, but mostly for the self-aggrandizing paternalism here acting as a mask or even a justification for what appears to be a kind of resentiment politics, pure and simple. as ACP noted upthread, what is the threat, exactly? what justifies this sort of outsized response?

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4. 

   sk

   February 9, 2014

   i would also like to invite Scu to explain a bit more about what (s)he means by that last paragraph – i think it is an interesting point! i just want to understand it better (the connection between continental philosophers and debating a racist or a sexist).

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5. 

   ACP

   February 9, 2014

   A couple things and then I’m saying bye-bye:
   1. @Rob: what is Leiter’s evidence that programs like Emory and Stonybrook provide subpar training in philosophy? If his only evidence is that they teach students to do a kind of philosophy he doesn’t like (and which he calls “crappy philosophy”), that is obviously question-begging. The same is true if his evidence is that people from SPEPpy programs fail to get jobs at Leiterrific schools. So does he have any non-question-begging argument on behalf of that claim? I doubt it.
   2. @RM: please read Protevi’s discussion with Leiter. Most of the analytic metaphysics I have read (which is not a lot) strikes me as utterly incomprehensible. I did not graduate from an analytic department and have never taken a course in analytic metaphysics. Would it be fair or reasonable for me to make blanket statements about the “crappiness” of analytic metaphysics because I have failed to understand a statistically insignificant sample of it? Brian Leiter has most certainly not engaged with a statistically significant sample of writing by the 2000+ members of SPEP. Thus, his blanket attacks on SPEP are unwarranted.
   3. @Matt: To my knowledge, Brian Leiter has not published any work on Jacques Derrida, Simon Critchley, Babette Babich, Graham Harman, or any other philosophers he has ridiculed and demonized by name. If I am wrong, please provide evidence to the contrary.
   4. What SCU says in 52.
   The bottom line, as far as I am concerned, is that Leiter (and kindred spirits like Spiros) are bullies, and I don’t like bullies.

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6. 

   ACP

   February 9, 2014

   Yes. I left a Leiter top-20 school (whence I earned my MA) to attend a “SPEP” program. The training I received at the latter was definitely superior to that of the former. And I got a TT job my first year on the market. Granted, it wasn’t at a Leiterrific school, but then, why would I want to work at one of those anyway?
   People like Leiter talk about graduate programs, the job market, etc. like it’s all a pure meritocracy. It’s not–and the fact that a self-described Marxist appears so oblivious to this fact is incredibly ironic.

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7. 

   Yan

   February 9, 2014

   I’d just like to thank Jon for the OP. It was refreshing and heartening, since this cluster of issues is one that really demoralizes me about our profession sometimes.
   Of course, it demoralizes me about our broader culture and about human nature, too. But, like Jon in the OP, I have higher expectations of philosophy! (Although I suppose a case could be made that such expectations are unreasonable or unfair…)

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8. 

   Rob Gressis

   February 9, 2014

   @sk: I don’t know how many dossiers he’s seen (I doubt he’s seen many at Chicago, since he teaches in the law school rather than the philosophy department). My post was completely speculative!
   @ACP: I have no idea what his evidence is! Perhaps it’s conversations with other continental philosophers; perhaps it’s reading a lot of dossiers, like I speculated; perhaps it’s reading widely among the publications of prominent SPEP folks. That said, I doubt that he just “doesn’t like” philosophy done by at least some members of SPEP. I would guess that he thinks that their conclusions are more unsupported than he thinks is typical. (I imagine that he thinks that Christian philosophers like Dean Zimmerman, Mike Rea, Fritz Warfield, Keith DeRose, Peter van Inwagen, etc., are more wrong than the people who draw his ire, but he might think their approach to supporting their conclusions is more respectable than the approach of the people whose work he denounces.)

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9. 

   r

   February 9, 2014

   I’m worried about the idea that there are formal requirements of the form “be well-versed in P before criticizing P…” There may be some value of ‘well-versed’ for which that’s true, however, I doubt that it’s very stringent (I doubt, for instance, that Leiter or Spiros fails the level expertise demanded by any actually valid general norm here). Whatever standard of being well-versed is actually required here, I suspect it’s closer to ‘acquainted’ than ‘expert.’
   There’s a huge selection effect concerning who’s an expert in P. People who take the time to become experts in P usually do so because they antecedently think P is great, and once they become experts they have made themselves invested in the continuing greatness of P. If we only listen to the P-experts, putting to the side the various people who picked up P for a bit but dropped it out of disillusionment, or thought P too unfortunate to get involved with in the first place, then we’ll get an overly rosy picture.
   We get extreme examples with things like numerology, where there are plenty of experts and none of them are worth listening to. Slightly closer to home, I doubt that many philosophers, despite their willingness to offer blistering criticism, are actually experts in the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Perhaps they can point to a couple reported blunders or some surface howlers in bits they’ve seen here or there–as in her treatment of the law of identity–but no one I know has read the corpus, let alone tried to develop a sympathetic reconstruction of it. Rather, they think doing so would be a waste of time.
   I suspect that what underlies the criticism of Leiter here is not actually a formal norm after all. Rather, it’s a substantive judgment of the worth of what is Leiter is dismissing, coupled with some sort of material principle that it’s wrong to dismiss something that is of such substantive worth without having become expert in it first (are you comparing pluralist philosophy with Randianism? –if the principle really is formal, it shouldn’t matter). But the substantive criticism here is less exciting than the formal one.
   My view is ultimately that dismissals of Leiter’s sort, plus counter-attacks on the merits, are just part of what floats around ‘in the air’ and helps us collectively decide which parts of the sea of infinite logical space are worth our efforts to focus on. Furthermore, this big conversation includes–and ought to include–all sorts of people who lack any particular degree of expertise. So, if someone adds some ignorantly false chatter, then I think the right response is to add counter-chatter at the object level (you’re just wrong about X), rather than ascending to the meta-level to criticize the credentials-for-conversation of that particular bit of ignorant chatter.

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10. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 9, 2014

    R,
    This is well put, but just not true. Please read the note above about friends of mine who are very negative about Speculative Realism et. al. but who easily clear the bar. For that matter, Derrida is still not my cup of tea but I did spend the time reading Derrideans I respect precisely so I could place myself (however imperfectly) in philosophical community with people who work on Derrida. In my experience the norms we are encouraging are not onerous. Moreover, people who follow them are not rare.
    Jon

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11. 

    Daniel Nagase

    February 9, 2014

    I’d like to further add that part of what is objectionable about Leiter et al is that they generally imply that those who engage in philosophical positions they find “crappy” are simply charlatans or deluded. It’s one thing to say that one line of work is not worth my time, it’s another to imply that those who work in that particular line are liars or fools.

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12. 

    ACP

    February 9, 2014

    And this is why R misses the point. I don’t think anyone has suggested that one has to be an expert on X in order to criticize X. But surely anyone who wants to make extremely negative sweeping generalizations about X–e.g., describing X as “crappy philosophy,” or accusing practitioners of X of being charlatans and fools, etc.–is at least obliged to provide some kind of evidence in support of said generalizations, and this Leiter et al. never do. In other words, one doesn’t need to be an expert on X, but one must at least minimally engage with X and provide evidence drawn from this engagement in his/her assessment of X.

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13. 

    r

    February 9, 2014

    Daniel and ACP: I would concede that Leiter is kind of a jerk, to the occasional point of being embarrassing (in my view this happens whenever he opens his mouth about animal rights). But I thought the idea here was supposed to be broader than that–more than just that he’s doing things that would be acceptable if polite but because rude need censure. Rather, I thought we were looking for some methodological/ideological principles of pluralism and tolerance that managed the way we related to other sub-areas, institutions, people, and etc. If that’s not the case, then what I said was inapposite.
    Jon: maybe we’re just talking past each other? I took you to be advancing a view which basically required a publication-ready level of familiarity before one is in a position to judge it–one must know the complete catalog of the best, most current work in that area (such that one could pre-emptively answer “yes” to whatever “… but have you read” might be lurking). And for the sort of reasons I was outlining that seems to me too much. So, for instance, there are some sub-areas where I’ve read a few journal articles, some blog posts, a couple encyclopedia articles, found them universally abysmal for similar reasons, and on that basis concluded that this area was Not Great. This does not nearly approach an opinion I could defend in academic print. However, I think it still meets the much lower threshold of an opinion I could put in a blog, or use to direct a prospective graduate student, use to advise someone thinking about whether to pursue related question, or otherwise employ in the broader academic context. It’s an attitude I would use to direct myself (away from that Not Good subarea). Given the size of us (finite, flawed) relative to the logical space (infinite, perfect) that seems like a reasonable way to operate. Of course, in any given case one might be wrong. The hope, though, is that the whole of the professional system in which we are issuing these minor, defeasible judgments is arranged so as to eventually cancel out the wrongs.

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14. 

    Charles R

    February 9, 2014

    Jon, I like what you say about humility, or even just the very fact that you’re using this word in this context. Do you think humility is an end of philosophy? Is it a practice? Is it a mode of doing philosophy, any methodological approach to philosophy?
    I try to teach my own students humility by opening them up to philosophy as something we shouldn’t do with frustration in our hearts. It’s a dangerous thing to unpack a claim; it’s even more dangerous to meddle with how we go about believing things. But we act sometimes as though analysis done well is dispassionate in itself, without ever giving our students or ourselves ideas or advice or exercises to listen to our frustration’s roots and work them out, as though that’s for the counselors, the alcohol, or the medical disciplines and not what philosophy studies. I hone in on The Republic‘s book 7 too much lately, where all those bits throughout about dogs and training and pack behavior takes a different direction when the puppies, having spent time arguing without learning what it is for, turn upon one another and tear into each other, and they end up believing in nothing but flattery, viciousness, and teeth.
    Lately I’m trying to formulate the idea for my students this way: we’re all a bunch of knots, tying together various threads from various traditions, not all of which we’re aware are tied in with us. It’s a fun day to ask “How did that thread get in there?” of one’s self. There is a lot of power, in various senses of the word, in the philosophical methods who think about knots as things to be untied. It takes a lot of skill to untie knots, and impatience gets in the way of developing skill (some people bring swords or scissors, chopping their way into untying the knot…). But if all we teach ourselves and others is untying knots, really complicated knots getting really complicated untying methods, then we end up with seeing a whole world of loose strings needing untying, where our sole approach to philosophy is pulling at every loose thread we see. Every position, every claim becomes yet another opportunity to tug at loose ends, and the game becomes whom we can unravel first before we ourselves are left in threads. Rather than appreciate how a knot came to be, we jump immediately to the loose bits and start unraveling.
    But if we understand the value in knots, in sewing, in weaving, in darning socks and patching holes, perhaps we can see the value in studying knots, not for what we reclaim from them in terms of thread or rope, but for what the different kinds of knots do. Certainly, some knots and stitches and weaves are stronger than others, but strength has a lot to do with application and environment, so thinking this way about philosophical methods for me comes back to the question “What is the method supposed to do and under what conditions are we using it?” At times we do need to untie knots, especially when they are weakly performing in the settings we’re trying to use them in, but there is a lot more utility and aesthetic appeal in tying, in stitching, crocheting, weaving.
    It’s a different kind of patience; maybe it’s also a different kind of teaching or thinking about philosophical praxis. Having a good toolbox of various knots, stitches, weaves makes for someone able to adapt and be useful to others in a wide variety of situations. Having only the one knot makes for a very limited application, when clearly people in our world need all kinds of ways to deal with how the threads have gone awry, how the stitching needs repair.
    I guess I’m saying I find it a more helpful metaphor for me, and a hell of a lot more peaceful and puzzling and pedestrian, than thinking of philosophy as combat, where truth needs to be defended against its enemies. No wonder the metaphor we use to think of philosophy ends up in literal violence, making words hurt and devolving into just outright assault or humilitation. Combat metaphors, defense metaphors: adopting them makes us think of methodological strength as surviving attack, so we’re always already being tempted to think of questions and challenges and opinions as attacks on our position. Knot or stitch or weave strength, on the other hand, isn’t about tearing into another person’s ideas, or hitting weak spots, or smashing the flesh of a concept, or surviving these. It’s about application, figuring out what works quickly, what lasts, what will hold, what will slip when slippage is needed or tolerated, what looks nice, what looks elegant or what looks rugged, and so on.
    It also becomes about appreciating and sharing our knots, stitchings, weaves and figuring out where and when to use them. I love learning new knots, new stitches, new weaves. I love that there’s art and function to it all, a wide continuum of skill, and more complicated patterns take patience, fumbling around, and practice with applications to really get it, not simply practice in making the knot or following the pattern.

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15. 

    ACP

    February 9, 2014

    R: I think that we are looking for such principles. Here are a few which ought to be uncontroversial:
    1. Don’t be a jerk (this one is sorely needed in philosophy, especially compared to other humanities disciplines);
    2. Don’t make sweeping generalizations (which you’d think we’d already have a handle on, since the SG is a textbook logical fallacy taught in every introductory logic class).
    3. The principle of charity.
    As to your other point–I think that having limited engagement with a subfield is sufficient for having opinions on said subfield, provided that the opinions in questions are modest, measured, cautious, and open to correction and change. Indeed, I don’t think anyone would dispute that. The point is that Leiter and other high-profile Continental-bashers do not ordinarily proceed in this way. It’s not just that they are jerky–which they almost always are–but that they express opinions in a dogmatic, heavy-handed way which is disproportionate to their actual engagement with, and understanding of, Continental philosophy.
    It is also worth noting, for the record, that Continental philosophers seem to spend comparatively little time or effort bashing analytic philosophy. (There are exceptions, of course, but in general analytic-bashing does not seem to be a part of the culture of Continental philosophy in the way that Continental-bashing is a part of the culture of analytic philosophy, as evidence by high-profile blogs like LR, to say nothing of the program where I earned my MA.) This leads me back to my original point: this behavior makes very little sense when one considers how professionally powerful analytic philosophy is compared to Continental philosophy. Again, it just seems like bullying.

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16. 

    Jamie

    February 9, 2014

    I’m going to venture some armchair sociology to explain why certain “analysts” spend so much time bashing Continental philosophy without actually spending much time reading it. The dominance of the natural sciences at US research universities induces a philosophical culture of science-envy, which gets sublimated as aspirations to scientificity and ritualistic, stereotyped denunciations of traditions and figures repudiated as “unclear” or literary.
    Effectively contesting continental-bashing would requiring not only instituting norms of decent and charitable philosophical discourse but also the underlying social structures – the dominance of the natural sciences.

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17. 

    Mark Lance

    February 9, 2014

    Yeah, I’m not sure I buy the comparative claim, which also seems like the sort of bs generalization this post is about resisting. I’ve certainly heard plenty of analytic bashing in my day, as well as policing the boundaries of “real” continental philosophy. See the thing is that Jon’s post is a call for civility, humility, and serious engagement. Turning it into a call for the other team to win is not really helpful.

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18. 

    Scu

    February 9, 2014

    I agree with Mark on this one. I have heard plenty of silly, absurd, and uncharitable claims made in sweeping generalizations about analytic philosophy (or sub-parts of analytic philosophy), made by continentalists. And I am not sure the ‘sociological analysis’ gets us anywhere. For me, it is enough that a philosopher with an outsized megaphone has frequently, repeatedly, made it his stated mission to deliver professional harm on other philosophers. I don’t really need to know why, in Leiter’s heart, he believes his behavior is acceptable. It isn’t, and that is enough for me.
    I would add, mostly in response to “r”, that there is a deference between one the one hand making a distinction of what philosophy is worth pursuing, worth reading, worth suggesting your grad students go to, and on the other hand engaging in overt attempts to cause professional harm on all practitioners of that type of philosophy. If you are going to do the later, I think it is perfectly reasonable to hold such behavior to a higher standard of knowledge of the field you are attacking.

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19. 

    ACP

    February 10, 2014

    Agreed with all this.
    Look–one of the reasons why I like NewAPPS so much is because it provides a living example of what genuine “pluralism” looks (or ought to look) like (see, for example, Jon Cogburn’s recent posts on OOO). I applaud this and wish that there was more of a will in our profession to cultivate it.
    But there isn’t.
    The analytic/continental divide is a sociological fact of the profession which very few people with clout are attempting to overcome. And why would they? No one can seriously deny that analytic philosophy is hegemonic (at least in the U.S.–I can’t speak to other English-speaking countries) and that it has gained this status at the expense of other traditions. Those in positions of professional power and influence benefit from the status quo; there is no obvious advantage to them in challenging it.
    There is nothing unusual about any of this–all institutions acquire, consolidate, and maintain power by establishing orthodoxies and marginalizing heterodoxies. But as I noted many times above, the professional hegemony in American philosophy is so deeply entrenched that no longer has to pursue ongoing, proactive strategies (e.g., disciplinary gate-keeping) to maintain its power. That battle has been won.
    Speaking as a Continentalist, I can assure you that CP folks are not unaware of this fact. It has been accepted, and there is no serious effort to shift the balance of power. All many (most?) of us want, really, is to be left alone. We are, for the most part, content with our marginal status as long as we are free to operate unhindered within the autonomous subaltern networks we have established for ourselves. It seems like even this is too much for certain people (Leiter), who will not rest until we are driven into the ocean.
    Those who have convinced themselves that what we do is “Not Very Good” have nothing to lose by letting us be. So why won’t they? It is utterly inscrutable to us. Why would they not ignore what they consider “crappy philosophy,” especially when it poses no threat to them professionally? Why would they make a cottage industry out of ridiculing something which, they have made clear, is beneath their contempt? It just makes no sense to us.
    So, yeah–if it turns out that continental-bashing is an epiphenomenon of the aspirational scientificity of certain kinds of analytic philosophy, this at least makes the bashing seem a little less arbitrary. I would only note that this seems wildly out of sync with a good chunk of the Western philosophical tradition.

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20. 

    ACP

    February 10, 2014

    This is just my experience, Mark. I certainly wasn’t trying to make a blanket generalization about Continental philosophy.
    But even if it turned out that there is quantitative parity between continental-bashing and analytic-bashing, there most certainly isn’t qualitative parity. No one in the continental domain seems an “outsized megaphone” (to use Scu’s expression) capable of inflicting real professional harm on other philosophers. And that is because, again, even the most vocal continental philosophers do not have the kind of power and influence in the profession that certain of its most outspoken analytic critics do.

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21. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 10, 2014

    r.,
    To the extent that we’re talking past one another, it’s entirely my fault. I need to be much clearer about a couple of the examples I’ve used above.
    First, on my friends who think the speculative turn/new materialism/object oriented philosophy etc. involves a fundamental misreading of the accomplishments of phenomenology. You are right that not many of them have spent much time reading this stuff. And you are right that that’s fine. In an ideal world we would all be able to read a lot more philosophy, but in the real world most human beings have kids, church, administrative stuff, non-academic jobs, need for mental downtime, aesthetic obligations etc. that work together to set firm limits to the amount of philosophy they can digest.
    The point I was making about these friends is that all of them try very hard (more successfully than me) to not engage in the kind of condescending denunciations that Spiros and others routinely do. They don’t think I’m deluded or disingenuous because we disagree about some of the most fundamental philosophical (and exegetical wrt German Idealism and Phenomenology) issues. Nor I them. We try very hard not to say things in public that would professionally undermine one another, and if we do (and this has happened in conferences and the blogosphere) we try our best to make it right. Even though our disagreements are profound there is in the end a spirit of good will and mutual respect.
    That’s all I’m asking for. Moreover, I don’t think that it’s too much to demand as a disciplinary norm. I’m not suggesting by this that people do any more than you yourself do (which I find to be admirable from your description).
    Now, why did I do more than this with respect to Derrida and Ayn Rand? Because I myself have a history of Spirosesque fatwas with respect to both of these thinkers and people who cherish them. On my old personal blog I could reliably generate traffic by mocking them and people who work on them in a way that was inconsistent with minimal respect for those who disagree with me (I think I’ve scrubbed all of those posts now as I’m slowly shutting down that blog). And this worked! My blog was discussed on the Chronicle of Higher Education, and for a while it was reliably ranked in the top five by various content aggregators.
    But what I was doing was wrong, destructive to myself as a person and a philosopher, and unhelpful to other people.
    So yes, I did have a responsibility to charitably read Samuel Wheeler, Martin Hagglund, Lee Braver, Len Lawlor etc. on Derrida and also people like Roderick Long, Eric Mack, and other writers such as those at reason dot com on Ayn Rand and libertarianism more generally.
    I still have a hard time reading Derrida because I don’t resonate with the style and because I can’t get past what seem to me to be a lot of false dichotomies. But I can no longer use this to divide philosophy into good guys and bad guys just so me and my friends can get the psychic reward of engaging in unearned contempt. I just can’t. I’ve learned too much cool stuff from Derrideans at this point. And hence I am less likely to use my philosophy in a way that is antithetical to one of the basic points of doing philosophy (again, see the Russell chapter).
    Re: Rand and libertarianism, it’s a bit harder- I’m a (left Hegelian) Christian, and (unlike Derrida, as I understand him from the above thinkers) many of her doctrines remain metaphysically and morally abhorrent to me. But reading Long, Mack, and others has again taught me not to use my Christianity in a very un-Christian manner. This is very helpful, because to the extent that we use our status as Christians to claim the psychic wage of condescension, then we are absolutely doing it wrong.
    I hope this clears it up. I’m not saying that everyone has to spend a great deal of time charitably wallowing in stuff with which they disagree. I do think that most of us could probably spend a little more time (did I really have to watch every episode of “Justified” on amazon prime last weekend? Couldn’t I have been reading Pippin on Hegel instead?), but that’s completely irrelevant to the point of the OP. Thanks for helping me to see this more clearly.

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22. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    It is certainly true that “analytic” philosophers as a whole have more influence than “continental”. (One of these years I’m really going to refuse to use these bad words. I mean one could also say that NYU metaphysics has more influence on the profession than normative pragmatism, and so on. These are not intelligible categories.) And it is true that the single most influential blog has that focus. (I think ours is now second, and it doesn’t.) but I think people overstate how much influence PGR has. Most of the harm is done via the mechanism of individual departments where this sort of ignorant bashing takes hold resulting in people not having a shot at a job there. And given that, it is clear that there is real harm done to real people by “analytic” bashing. Do you think I, or a recent grad like me, would ever be considered for a job at, well, certain depts? So I guess I think it is a difference of quantity. The quantity of harm in the one direction is worse because there are probably more departments in which this bashing is accepted in the one direction than the other.

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23. 

    Neil Levy

    February 10, 2014

    Its true that I heard a lot less analytic bashing when I was being trained, but we were warned off analytic philosophy, by people who were a lot less knowledgable about what they rejected than Leiter is about his bete noises. We were told that analytic philosophy was ordinary language philosophy plus formal logic: repeatedly were told that according to analytic philosophy metaphysics was nonsenses (meanwhile, one floor below David Lewis was holding court regularly). I’m not sure that disrespectful ranting is worse than this kind of nonsense peddling. In both cases, it serves to construct walls which are, to say the least, unhelpful.

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24. 

    ACP

    February 10, 2014

    I agree with all this.

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25. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    I completely agree. Harmful dismissiveness can take lots of forms. A long time ago, Todd May – that’s Penn State PhD, books on Foucault, Deleuze, Rancierre, etc. Todd May – were giving a joint paper at a very SPEP-style interdisciplnary confeernce. The speakers before us all took time to make fun of “positivism”. We improvised the first part of our own talk by asking who in the audience had actually read anything by a positivist. Then we asked if people could name some positivists. The results were predictable. Then we pointed out that the views attributed to positivists in the previous papers were held by zero actual people and went on to give our own talk – which was in fact deeply anti-positivist. We made no friends that day, but it was worth calling out.
    So overall: I am not going to make guesses about the percentage of harmful dismissiveness on these ‘two” “sides”. There’s a lot more than should be accepted all around. And it is always damaging – including to real lives of job seekers. the total amount of it surely is greater in the one direction just due to higher total population.

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26. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 10, 2014

    Neil, I suspect there was a time when “analytic philosophy” was once just that way (I say this in part after anecdotal evidence from a friend who attended Oxford University back in the day), particularly prior to (roughly) the 1960s, a time when analytic philosophy was more like a school, doctrine, or form of allegiance than a literary style or group of methods for “doing philosophy” (the irony being that things changed across the pond before they did in this country). To say this is in no way to detract from the considerable achievements of such philosophy (as noted by the late Avrum Stroll: the theory of descriptions, speech act theory, the notion of family resemblance, rigid designation, and for Stroll at least, ‘most important,’ the development of mathematical logic). I myself happen to think that more than a few of those individuals …who take pains to identify themselves as analytic philosophers or profess allegiance to analytic philosophy are probably still liable to find unwarranted inspiration from an earlier claim by an earlier Putnam: “The way to solve philosophical problems is to construct a better scientific picture of the world…. All the philosopher has to do, in essence, is be a good ‘futurist’–anticipate for us how science will solve our philosophical problems.” We certainly see an orientation much like this in philosophy of mind. In any case (and from my admittedly limited and perhaps mistaken vantage point), philosophy as merely a handmaiden to science remains a bewitching picture in the profession (don’t get me wrong, I’m not against–who could be?–philosophy of science or philosophers engaged in clarifying methods and especially critical concepts in science, it’s rather the wholesale deference and unduly circumscribed role that is troubling).

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27. 

    Dave Maier

    February 10, 2014

    Thanks to Charles R back at #64 for that bit about knots. I’ll be taking that thread into my own knot (if I’m not abusing the metaphor … !). Like the toolbox (which he also mentions), it’s necessarily contextual and pragmatic, but it also avoids the former’s potential slide into instrumentalism, and brings in a self-constitutive element that works well in the context. And it moves easily back and forth between the necessity (sometimes) to untie knots, on the one hand, and the need (and value and diversity of method, etc.) of tying them oneself. Nice!
    Also, re: “pluralism” and “crappy philosophy”. There are a couple of things Leiter’s putdown might be thought to mean (and since he probably means both, that adds to the confusion). Maybe a “pluralist” department is a) a department that purposely throws its doors open to all approaches, which lowers intellectual standards and allows “crappy philosophy” (of various unnamed sorts) into the department. So the problem is: no intellectual focus, and no standards (of rigor or whatever).
    Or a “pluralist” department could be b) a department of “pluralists”, or with a focus on “pluralist” philosophy (with matching standards, albeit perverse ones when judged from other perspectives: pluralists only here!). But unfortunately “pluralism” is itself “crappy philosophy” — a rather different claim than (a), or at least potentially.
    Now I sometimes think of my own view as “pluralist” (e.g. when defending against accusations of “relativism”). Briefly (you get the idea, it’s kind of like Rorty, only more Davidsonian/Wittgensteinian) I think that even when I reject a philosophical view as “false,” I may help myself to “truths” available only from that perspective (where the accusation of “relativism” assumes that the latter makes the former impossible). No doubt Leiter thinks this is “crappy philosophy” (though one can find it in Nietzsche too … !). But there are no departments made up solely of people like me (what a thought).

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28. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    But philosophy as handmaiden to science is a very different thing that ordinary language philosophy + logic. And anyway, remember that in the 60s one had Sellars, and Anscombe, and Hector Castaneda, and Strawson, … So even the union of ordinary language, logic, and shallow scientific reductionism didn’t remotely characterize the range of people who would be identified as falling under “analytic philosophy”

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29. 

    Amy Lara

    February 10, 2014

    I had some thoughts about ACP’s interesting question earlier: why the outsized response? Why the never ending need for those who seem to have “won” long ago to ridicule those who are already marginalized within the profession? I was a grad student at Irvine during the time the philo department split up. As a grad student, I wasn’t in on most of the discussion, but it appeared to me at the time that forces external to the department were influencing the dynamic at least as much as internal forces. There was a battle for money and prestige within the university and within the larger academic community. Those who wanted the money and prestige that come with a seal of approval from the sciences were very anxious to distance philosophy from the other humanities. Their audience wasn’t primarily other philosophers but people in the sciences. (There was more of a battle at that school, though, than there would have been at a lot of schools because the humanities at Irvine were well-funded and well-respected within the university.)
    Since the late ’90s the power balance in the larger academic community has become even more skewed. The sciences have all the money and the humanities are suffocating. There’s very strong pressure for philosophy to distance itself from the rest of the humanities so that it can survive. Blogs like Leiter’s have a much broader audience than the discipline of philosophy, and I suspect a lot of the scoffing makes more sense as a form of communication with those who are in power in universities and in government granting agencies, than with people inside philosophy. Scoffing with our students is just a way to make sure they carry the message along to the outside world. We don’t want them ruining our reputation by going to their other classes and bringing up Sartre or something embarrassing like that!

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30. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 10, 2014

    I agree, and did not intend the description of a “handmaiden to science” tendency to be a generalization applicable to analytic philosophy in toto, or even as a doctrine or school. But from logical positivism through Quine to the Churchlands…and in comparison to continental philosophy (and, again, perhaps I’m mistaken or things are changing but it appears conspicuous in much of the philosophy of mind literature).

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31. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    I was reacting to your “Neil, I suspect there was a time when “analytic philosophy” was once just that way”.
    There is definitely a thread to be traced out in philosophy of that sort of dominating idea. (fwiw, a recent talk with Paul CHurchland makes me think that he doesn’t really believe this. He is only working on stuff that is in direct connection to science, but he does not want to claim that this is what philosophy – even all philosophy of mind – is.

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32. 

    bzfgt

    February 10, 2014

    This is totally anecdotal, but I spent 7 years at a one of the most prominent continental programs and can’t really recall very much analytic-bashing at all, if any (probably there was a little). I have heard it before, mind you, but not so much there. But it seems to me it would be impossible to be at one of the many more analytically-oriented departments that long and not hear one’s fair share of continental-bashing. That is not an informed opinion, though, it’s just my impression which may be wrong.

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33. 

    Neil

    February 10, 2014

    Patrick, the irony is that a lot of my work is precisely the philosophy of mind you dislike!

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34. 

    Scu

    February 10, 2014

    bzfgt, I would say that most of the Anglo-American/analytic bashing I have seen has tended to be the way Mark Lance described in #75. In other words, it tends to be handwaving about certain parts of analytic thought, often without any serious engagement. Again, if you look at the number of highly dismissive comments of positivism, or utilitarianism, or what have you, without any serious knowledge of the subject, it is pretty common. I would add that I seldom see any real venom in these comments. It almost isn’t taken seriously, and is mostly a gesture we do in order to contrast our work with what we believe has already been done on the subject. Now, I think this is not on par with the Derrida as used car salesman lines, and we clearly have less institutional power. But at the same time, it clearly is not a practice of generosity.
    I really can’t tell you how much continental bashing occurs in predominately analytic circles. My guess is if you spent your whole time doing work in continental/pluralist circles (which your post implies), I doubt you can, either. I have worked with, and chatted a lot with, Anglo-American philosophers who do social and political and/or ethical work, and those people have almost universally treated me well, even when we disagree. But I also understand that they are fairly marginalized in analytic philosophy. I don’t really know any older, more established analytic philosophers who work in the “core” areas. Most of the analytic philosophers I have met who are roughly my age, have all been really nice and generous. Or generic jerks to everyone. I honestly have quite a bit of hope that in the next couple of decades things will change.

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35. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    No offense, but that does sound like a pretty ill-informed generalization. In my experience, this stuff is highly variable. Would you consider GU a “more analytically-oriented department”? No one is going to bash any style of philosophy publicly here. That is both a practice and a rule. And if anyone did, they would be corrected by everyone else. I know of lots of other places – some more paradigmatically “analytic’ where this is true. At others, the opposite culture gets in place. When I was at Syracuse way back in the late 80s, it had a really bad continental bashing culture when I arrived. But with the efforts of several of us – a few grad students, me, Jonathan Bennett and some others, along with the hire of some new folks I think that began to change fairly quickly. I can’t speak to the current climate, but given the people there, I suspect it is not that way at all.
    Anyway, yeah, again, let’s not make broad judgments without evidence.

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36. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 10, 2014

    Ah, yes, that’s true, but as my views on such matters count for absolutely nothing and thus have absolutely no effect whatsoever on how such philosophy is conducted, they can be (and assuredly are) safely ignored.

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37. 

    bzfgt

    February 10, 2014

    “No offense, but that does sound like a pretty ill-informed generalization.”
    That’s why I mooted it, to see if there was any sense here that this was or wasn’t a decently accurate judgment. So no offense is taken.
    “In my experience, this stuff is highly variable. Would you consider GU a “more analytically-oriented department”?”
    I don’t know what GU is. Of course I could click your name or google it, but that would hardly improve my state of ignorance enough to answer your question. And I realize that “analytic” is not a terribly current term for a lot of the stuff that goes on in the anglo-american non-continental non-“American”/pragmatism world.
    My impression is that (as scu points out) younger people–i.e., regardless of their age, people in grad school or relatively recent graduates–are much less likely to bash in either direction, which I think is a fantastic development. So saying that I had the impression c-bashing is endemic is not a passive aggressive attempt at a-bashing; I just had the impression that the majority of people up to a certain philosophical generation think continental philosophy is pseudo-philosophy. I am not bringing it up because I think it’s necessarily true, but partly because I’d be pleased and edified to learn it isn’t true. So I’m not trying to make broad judgments without evidence (if I was I’d probably try to conceal the fact that I don’t have much evidence).

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38. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    Sorry: GU is Georgetown University.
    And fair enough. Didn’t mean to suggest that you were bashing. I grew up in philosophy in some of the worst of this shit, and so I’m really sensitive to generalizations.
    I think you are right that it is dying out in the new generation. Which is a wonderful development.

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39. 

    anonymous phenomenologist

    February 10, 2014

    (I’m going to actually discuss specific philosophers in this post because I think that this debate can have traction only in the context of specific texts)
    I did my undergrad at a prominent SPEP department and I am in grad school at a “pluralistic” department. Much of my dissertation is connected to Continental philosophy. I have found the education and the expectations to be very different. In undergrad I was encouraged to stay within the language of the philosophers and stay within the continental tradition. In grad school, I’m expected to translate dense prose into clear arguments, and I’m encouraged to read across traditions. The second approach seems far superior to me.
    I find the defense of difficult prose not compelling at all. It seems to me that philosophers working on really dense texts, like most of those in the Continental tradition, have a particularly high motivation for writing clearly. If anyone is ever going to be convinced that, e.g., Dasein’s essence is its existence, then it will only be because they have understood the arguments. I’m not claiming that any piece of secondary literature that is challenging is not worth reading, but it frequently seems as if clarity was never even considered to be a goal. Usually when I read secondary literature that contains really dense prose, especially if that prose mirrors the style of the primary source, then I become suspicious that the author is merely summarizing. Most of the texts from SPEP publishers that I read engage in more summary than argumentation. (On the internet, the articles on Merleau-Ponty in the SEP and the IEP are particularly egregious examples of summarizing without argumentation.)
    I find the defense that SPEP departments are more “pluralistic” to be debatable. In my mind, pluralism means being open to philosophy from lots of different sources. I have no doubt that there are many excellent philosophers at SPEP departments doing excellent pluralistic work in that sense, but there are quite a few SPEP philosophers who accuse any philosopher who brings Continental philosophy into the analytic philosophy as not really doing Continental philosophy. This strikes me as boundary policing of the worst kind and belies the claim of pluralism. A good (bad?) example of this is Babette Babich’s essay in “A House Divided.”
    One of the most bizarre moments in the book Analytic vs Continental is when Stroud’s objections to transcendental arguments are given and used against the transcendental claims of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, etc. The Continental philosopher agrees with the Analytic philosopher on all of Stroud’s points, but rejects that this challenges the transcendental claims of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. I found this both absurd and incredibly frustrating. First, because if Stroud is correct, then the transcendental claims are bad arguments. Consequently, if someone wants to defend phenomenology, then one is obligated to defend the transcendental claims. This makes the Continental philosopher’s agreement with all of Stroud’s premisses and rejection of his conclusion completely irrational. Second, there is a good debate about the nature of transcendental arguments (and the various kinds of transcendental arguments) and their consequences in the contemporary Anglo-American literature, which the Continental philosopher could easily have drawn. Perhaps if the Continental philosophy world was less hermetically sealed, then this debate could have been brought to the table.

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40. 

    Scu

    February 10, 2014

    A quick response to part of anonymous phenomenologist’s post.
    I think we all have had the issue of following into the idea that pluralism is somehow a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy. I would just like us to keep in mind anonladygrad’s point from #1. Pluralism can mean a serious engagement with feminist, queer, philosophy of race, decolonial philosophy, and/or non-western philosophy (not to mention the American pragmatic tradition). I think it is great to see departments bringing together continental and analytic philosophy. I don’t think a failure to do this means that the department (predominate SPEP associated or not), means the department is not pluralistic. This was the point I made about Oregon in response to Matt above. Calling Oregon not pluralistic is seriously ignoring all the ways it transcends simply doing Modern and Contemporary European philosophy.
    I know this doesn’t address the concerns of most of your post, I just really want us to keep this in mind when we throw around definitions of pluralism, or what counts as a pluralistic department.

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41. 

    Cynic

    February 10, 2014

    Just wanted to reiterate the importance of post #1, perhaps the most relevant post of this thread, and in fact the actual direction the discussion in this thread should be taking. Immediately, discussion of pluralism descended into the old analytic/continental split, two areas of philosophy dominated by the problems and discussions of white men, where even the concerns of their female counterparts are considered “boutique” and external to the core M&E (the whitest of inheritances). Although Continental perhaps does a slightly better job of recognizing this problem, it still remains strongly unrepresentative.
    We complain that philosophy struggles and doesn’t find sympathy with the larger culture. Maybe it’s because logic chopping and proposition analysis do not resonate with real people on the ground (for good reason). No wonder Leiteriffic PhD’s (and also top Continental) bemoan the lack of research positions. They are forced to teach students material that the latter find cold and abstract, stalely categorical, and bereft of practical consequence. There is a large culture of impatience with students due to this (constructed) fact.

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42. 

    anonymous phenomenologist

    February 10, 2014

    A quick response to scu: sometimes “pluralism” seems to be thrown around as code for “not primarily analytic.” For example, “the pluralist’s guide to philosophy.” My, possibly implicit point, was that there is nothing about doing Continental philosophy per se that makes a department or its members genuinely interested in engaging with a wide variety of views. This is especially made clear when one sees that “the pluralist’s guides” emphasize the usual continental departments and specialities. I don’t know if it needs to be said, but I think that feminism and race theory are of deep importance to philosophy and should be way more prominent throughout the discipline.
    With regards to UCR and Oregon: they both look reasonably pluralistic, but if I wanted a broad understanding of the contemporary discussion I would attend UCR. If I went to Oregon, my guess is that I would not have a grasp of the debates shaping the mainstream. The more important reason is that I would rather my scholarship take after Mark Wrathall than Ted Toadvine.

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43. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 10, 2014

    Well I think they’re both pretty great.
    Wrathall’s “How to Read Heidegger” opened up a new world for me, and Toadvine’s “Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature” is near the top of my reading list.

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44. 

    Noelle McAfee

    February 10, 2014

    Regarding this theme that runs through these comments about whether certain kinds of philosophy are good or not, I say, good for what? I will not agree, as Mark does trying to find common ground with Matt, that “some ways of doing philosophy are not as good as others.” Please read (or re-read) MacIntyre’s Short History of Ethics on how Socrates tried to turn arete / excellence into a universal rather than the particular quality it had earlier been (e.g., the arete of a butcher is one thing, the arete of a soldier anoather.) Any philosophy is for something. Whether it is good or not is whether or not it is good for achieving some particular aim. So the goodness of a type of activity should be judged in terms of what it is trying to achieve. Currently I’m working on revising a SEP entry on feminist political philosophy. There are lots of different approaches to feminist philosophy, but for the life of me I’m not going to say that some are prima facie good and others are not. Again, good for what? And in terms of what? Those (and we know who they are) who try to rise above it all and proclaim some kinds of philosophy good and others crappy without any reference to anything in the real world are making crappy claims, and I can say that objectively. My work that is steeped in continental and feminist philosophy actually does a hell of a lot of good in the world of grassroots citizens trying to deliberatively and sometimes agonistically improve their lot. That’s my measure.

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45. 

    anonymous phenomenologist

    February 10, 2014

    I found “Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature” incredibly frustrating because it commits the cardinal sins of most SPEP style philosophy: engaging in summarizing as opposed to interpreting, and eschewing arguments. Discussing a philosopher’s entire oeuvre in a relatively short book only exacerbates this problem. Consider the first chapter on The Structure of Behavior: Toadvine devotes the chapter to examining Merleau-Ponty’s “preferred metaphor for explaining the ontology of gestalts, and in particular the relationship between life and consciousness, namely, melody” (p. 23). First of all, there’s nothing at all original to Merleau-Ponty in using melody as an analogy for the relationship between life and consciousness. Almost identical phrases can be seen all over the works of the Gestalt psychologists. So unless there is a discussion of the difference in the use of the analogy (which there isn’t), then we won’t really be learning about Merleau-Ponty. Second of all, The Structure of Behavior is an amazing book, but it gets its punch from the arguments for why (in addition to high-level phenomena as learning) such seemingly low-level phenomena as simple reflexes and perceptual fixation are not mechanistically governed but normatively governed (which Toadvine at best only glancingly addresses). Who cares what Merleau-Ponty’s preferred metaphor is?
    In addition, Toadvine’s chapters go in chronological order so each incredibly long and complicated work gets about 30 pages of summary and some superficial connections to the philosophy of nature. The best book on Merleau-Ponty is the Routledge Guidebook to Phenomenology of Perception.

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46. 

    Mark Lance

    February 10, 2014

    I’m not sure why you think this is disagreeing with me. I completely agree that philosophy can have different purposes. I too write things that are designed for grassroots movements. I write other things that are designed to improve our understnading of mathematics, and some that are designed to increase the expressive power of our normative theory, just to pick some examples. I think this is a very important point that you raise – we definitely should not think that all philosophy aims for the same end.
    But that is not incompatible with the claim that some is better than other. I think some philosophical approaches fail – at their own ends, and indeed at every end.

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47. 

    Noelle McAfee

    February 10, 2014

    Mark, I was disagreeing with your claim that some ways of doing philosophy are better than others. If you agree that philosophies should be measured by their aims and not some other vague generality, then surely we’re on the same page. What I resist, and I think you do too, is that there is some kind of Platonic form of philosophy to which some measure up and others don’t. Even if that form is as simple as “good argumentation,” I say screw that. Sometimes we don’t need an argument, but we need a metaphor. Mostly I think philosophy should shake us loose from our presuppositions and ways of thinking to consider other alternatives. Here too I think you’d likely agree.

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48. 

    anonymous phenomenologist

    February 11, 2014

    If we aren’t giving arguments, then I’m not sure that we are still doing philosophy. And I’m not sure I understand why there would be any resistance to giving arguments. Typically, people who defend that view would identify as continental philosophers. But my impression is that the actual philosophers on the continent are not at all opposed to giving arguments. Certainly if we are looking at the phenomenological tradition from Husserl to Derrida we see arguments. They may not always be the most convincing arguments (and sometimes arguments are desperately needed to defend phenomenological description), but there are arguments. Metaphors can be very effective, but why not explain the metaphor? (Also, I sometimes wonder if the vitriol directed at object-oriented ontology would be greatly decreased if instead of slinging around world views, there was actually debate over arguments. Metaphors can be so vague that it’s not clear what is and isn’t being defended, and consequently where one can object).
    I restate (and then I’ll shut up): the philosophers who I usually see criticizing the value of arguments usually specialize in texts with very dense prose (like Heidegger or Nietzsche’s). But these sorts of texts are precisely the sort that most require clear exposition and argumentation if one ever hopes to convince philosophers (and people in general) who are not specialists that the texts are worthwhile. In addition, connecting the text with a contemporary debate is also a good way to forestall potential objections and to potentially strengthen the original position. In other words: it’s no surprise that Dreyfus’s Heidegger book has been so successful. What’s more surprising is that no one else did it first, and that it’s taken so long for the flowering of books to appear connecting analytic and continental philosophers that we seem to be undergoing now.

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49. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 11, 2014

    Re: “If we aren’t giving arguments, then I’m not sure that we are still doing philosophy.”
    Here we might consider an argument from Nicholas Rescher:
    “This fact that philosophical exposition cannot in the end operate satisfactorily in the linear manner of an axiom system* proceeding from a starter-set of self-evident truths is reflected in the nature of philosophical exposition. There are two very different modes of writing philosophy. The one pivots on inferential expressions such as ‘because,’ ‘since,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘has the consequence that,’ ‘and so cannot,’ ‘must accordingly,’ and the like. The other bristles with adjectives of approbation or derogation—‘evident,’ ‘sensible,’ ‘untenable,’ ‘absurd,’ ‘inappropriate,’ ‘unscientific,’ and comparable adverbs like ‘evidently,’ ‘obviously,’ ‘foolishly,’ etc. The former relies primarily on inference and argumentation to substantiate its claims, the latter primarily on the rhetoric of persuasion. The one seeks to secure the reader’s (or auditor’s) assent by reasoning, the other by an appeal to values and appraisals—and above all by fittingness and consonance with an overall scheme of things. The one looks foundationally towards secure certainties, the other coherentially towards systemic fit with infirm but nonetheless respectable plausibilities. Like inferential reasoning, rhetoric too is a venture of justificatory systematization, albeit one of a rather different kind.”
    Rescher uses “ideologically kindred” passages from Hume (Treatise of Human Nature) and Nietzsche (The Genealogy of Morals) respectively to illustrate these two “ideal types” of philosophical exposition: “In the Nietzsche passage, the ‘argumentation ratio’ of inferential to evaluative expressions is 0:12, in the Hume passage it is 9:6. Hume in effect seeks to reason his readers into agreement by a deduction from ‘plain facts;’ Nietzsche seeks to coax them into it by an appeal to conceded suppositions and prejudgments.”
    Rescher proceeds to tie these predominant modes of exposition or philosophical style to “rather different objectives.” The connection is not necessary but rather “congenial:” “The demonstrative/argumentative (inferential) mode is efficient for securing assent to certain claims, to influencing one’s beliefs. The rhetorical (evocative) mode is optimal for inducing a reader to adopt certain preferences, to shaping or influencing one’s priorities and evaluations.” More could be said, but Rescher believes most philosophers are socialized into or compelled in some sense to choose one or the other mode of philosophizing, although “philosophy as such has to accommodate both.” And, not surprisingly, he concludes that the “irony of the situation is that philosophers cannot dispense altogether with the methodology they affect to reject and despise. Even the most demonstration-minded philosopher cannot avoid entanglement in evaluation by rhetorical devices. [….] Even the most sentimental philosopher must invite assent to through an appeal to sympathetic acquiescence based on experience as such.” Rescher believes the best philosophy will result in “the two modes of philosophizing come into mutually supportive overall harmonization.” [See A System of Pragmatic Idealism, Vol. III: Metaphilosophical Inquiries (Princeton University Press, 1994: 36-58)]
    The above might profitably be compared to Martin Warner’s elaboration of “alternative conceptions of rationality” in his book, Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 1989).
    * The reason being that “philosophy cannot provide a rational explanation for everything, rationalizing all of its claims ‘all the way down.’ Sooner or later the process of rationalization and explanation must—to all appearances—come to a halt in the acceptance of unexplained explainers” [the reliance on unavoidable presuppositions]. This is part of Rescher’s larger brief on behalf of a “coherentist” methodology that nonetheless allows for philosophical explanation to be “holistically systemic.”

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50. 

    Mark Lance

    February 11, 2014

    I’m saying that the denial of a single standard is no reason to disagree with the claim that some ways of doing philosophy are better than others. In fact, this discussion of arguments is a case in point:
    In the case of almost any philosophical project I think it is wrong to adopt a methodology that holds that arguments are the only source of justification. That is, I hereby claim: Philosophy that adopts other techniques than merely linear argument is better at almost any philosophical goal than philosophy that doesn’t.
    AP: there are all sorts of things that philosophers do other than “give arguments,” and I’m happy to give examples of each from within the group of canonical analytic figures: they try to formulate synoptic visions, they point our attention to rich phenomena of philosophical relevance that have been missed, as noelle says, they offer useful metaphors, they draw historical connections, they explain historical contexts, they offer systematic interpretations (say of a scientific theory), they demonstrate new ways of methodologically engaging with a topic, they vividly depict the first-person psychological character of an experience, they relate empirical work to philosophical issues. That’s just a few. I’m sure many more will occur to me after I’ve finished my coffee. The point is not that one can do any of these well without ever giving arguments. Some you might be able to, but most you won’t. But in none of these cases is the philosophical work remotely reducible to the arguments.

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