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    Speculations V (on Aesthetics)

    Sometime in the next two years I hope to teach a class where the only texts are issues of Speculations.

    Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler and Philipp Schweighauser did a great job editing Issue V. The introduction by Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser is worth the price of admission alone.* Anyone interested in all the hoopla surrounding Speculative Realism could do much worse than to begin there.

    Analytic philosophers tend to dismiss Continental metaphysics because they don't think that the principle historical figures (German Idealists, phenomenologists, soixante-huitards) have much to offer. Continental philosophers tend to dismiss it because they misunderstand Meillassoux's critique of correlationism as a critique of transcendental epistemology, instead of as a recapitulation of Hegel's critique of the claim that transcendental epistemology must replace metaphysics.


    The reality is that none of us can read everything, so we usually just have to go with methodological hunches concerning what is going to be most helpful for our various projects and what is going to be fruitful for coming up with new ones.** But, this being said, it's still nice to read good overviews such as Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser's piece to see what people are up to.***

    [*Minor infelicity above. Every issue is actually available free as a PDF. But you can purchase a print edition for $19.00 U.S. here.

    **The empirical sciences are no different in this respect.

    ***Among other things, taking some time to read survey pieces like this helps keep us from falling into the all too human tendency to mock philosophical approaches and positions we don't find helpful with respect to our own work. I should note that empirical scientists on the whole have the good sense not to do this to each other. For some reasons it's philosophers who have perfected the art of the circular firing squad. Feh.]

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    6 responses to “Speculations V (on Aesthetics)”

    1. Matt Avatar
      Matt

      I should note that empirical scientists on the whole have the good sense not to do this to each other. For some reasons it’s philosophers who have perfected the art of the circular firing squad.
      Have you read, say, the exchanges between Gould and Lewontin on the one hand, and E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins on the other? Or the exchanges between people who think string theory is the right foundational theory and those who think it’s garbage? Those are at least a vicious, maybe more so, than what you see in philosophy. I largely agree that this sort of attitude is unhelpful, but think it’s hardly limited to philosophy. (I actually also think you’re often a bit too quick to attribute an ignorant dismissal to people who don’t like the work you like than is justified, but that’s a different problem and would be somewhat harder to show. But, the claim that empirical scientists don’t do this sort of stuff is, I think, obviously false.)

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      I’ve read chunks of Woit and Smolin’s attacks on string theory and they are far, far less vicious than what I’ve heard dozens of schlubs say about Continental Philosophy at every single APA I’ve ever been to. I’m not competent to adjudicate claims about string theory, but it did seem to me that Woit and Smolin had taken the time to learn about what they are criticizing and that they weren’t dismissing their interlocutors as fools.
      I don’t know about biologists. My impression is that the big ticket controversies you are pointing at don’t have very much to do with what the overwhelming number of biologists get up to in their lab. That might actually be analogous to philosophers, but I think probably not.
      Chomsky is about as bad as philosophers, and arguably done far more damage to linguistics as a result. If his fatwas concerning formal semantics and computational linguistics hadn’t been so assiduously followed and endorsed, then far, far less linguistics programs would have been shut down by administrators over the last two decades. I think analytical philosophers being such condescending jerks to people doing “theory” in other humanities departments probably has been the closest level of professional incompetence we’ve achieved.
      You are probably right that on the blog I give the impression of being too quick to attribute ignorant denial to people who don’t dig the stuff that I do. I’m not really like that in the real world. Crowell and Brandom are pretty implacably opposed to speculative metaphysics, yet they both know what they are talking about and metaphysicians would be batty not to learn from them. I know for a fact that Crowell has a good grasp on the so-called speculative turn because I’ve seen him at two SPEPs now engaging really helpfully with people who buy into it. Brandom is a mountain.
      I don’t have any beef with people expressing strong opinions about what they like and don’t like. I have a beef with people who say things that presuppose anyone who likes what they don’t like is a fool.* Again, I didn’t see anything like that in the two big anti-string theory books. But I do see it in the philosophical blogosphere and at conference hotel bars pretty constantly.
      [*Mark Wilson actually gave an impassioned speech about this during a class on the logical positivists he was teaching with George Pappas at the Ohio State University. If I remember right (this was around twenty years ago), it was in reference to Albert Casullo’s digs at Wittgenstein in his otherwise great book, “To The Vienna Station.” This was before blogs; Wilson said he had started seeing job candidates expressing complete disdain for whole swaths of philosophy and he found it distressing for all sorts of reasons (not least of which dismissive people end up shutting the door in the muse’s face). Fine if at the end of the day we thought Davidson and Dummett were wrong about the centrality of “the theory of meaning,” but don’t presuppose that people who agree with them are idiots.
      Wilson actually taught a class on Wittgenstein the next year. It was the highlight of my second year in graduate school; he worked through a paper he was writing during the course and it gave us a concrete view of how to engage with someone you disagree with. The paper is on-line at http://www.philosophy.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/wilson/documents/wittgensteinphsicasuntnonleguntur.pdf . It’s fascinating stuff.]

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    3. Anon Avatar
      Anon

      Minor correction: I think you meant Alberto Coffa, not Albert Casullo, who wrote “To the Vienna Station”.

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Oops. I wonder if that happens often.
      For at least the first four editions (haven’t checked the new one) of the Martinich phil. language anthology under one of the recommended readings is listed “Indiscernibility and Ontology” by Richard Kraut. I told Robert about this and it didn’t bother him; he said that once he’d been invited to chair an APA session on Aristotle.

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    5. Matt Avatar
      Matt

      For at least the first four editions (haven’t checked the new one) of the Martinich phil. language anthology under one of the recommended readings is listed “Indiscernibility and Ontology” by Richard Kraut. I told Robert about this and it didn’t bother him; he said that once he’d been invited to chair an APA session on Aristotle.
      Getting far off topic now, but it’s not unusual for books in the philosophy of law to mean to talk about the 19th century legal positivist, John Austin, but to list “Austin, J.L.” in the index, despite the fact that legal positivist’s middle name wasn’t anything starting w/ “L”. Even better, in the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Law, there is one entry, “Austin, J.L.” that includes the references to both J.L. Austin (the ordinary language philosopher) and John Austin, the early legal positivist. Be careful, people!

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    6. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Wow.
      Our campus bookstore used to be in the habit of ordering “Sense and Sensibility” instead of “Sense and Sensibilia.”

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