Author: Curt Doolittle

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6958WHAT MAKES ONE A PHILOSOPHER?

“Philosophy is a big tent kind of thing. There is a world of difference between being philosophical, being a proper philosopher, and being a professional philosopher.”

The rest of the post is various contributions on a philosopher, almost none of which are based on output-tests.

From http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6958

(Long thread)

I THINK THAT THIS IS THE CORRECT ANSWER:

An analysis of history would argue that the criteria for membership in the category of philosophers, whether literary, analogical (continental), analytical (anglo), or symbolic (logical) is entirely a factor of whether one produces an idea that originates or contributes to a system of thought, and demonstrates its application through argument, where that argument rearranges or changes, perceptions, associated values, and actions.

Whether one is a philosopher is determined by whether one produces books, not whether one holds academic positions. One can teach philosophy, but that does not make one a philosopher since the criteria for a philosopher is writing philosophy – not philosophical criticism, not philosophical history, but contributing an innovation to the history of ideas.

Whether one is a professional philosopher is determined by whether it is one’s primary occupation. Spinoza for example ground lenses. He was not a professional philosopher, but a lens grinder. But he was still an influential philosopher.

Many philosophers have not had academic positions. Hume, and Machiavelli are possibly two of the most influential men in history. In recent political philosophy, it’s interesting that because the academic discipline of philosophy has been distracted by an attempt to define itself at peerage with science, that, very little has been contributed by philosophy in the past century – and that which has (Postmodernism) turns out to have been almost entirely wrong.

Rawls and Nozick for example were both philosophers, at odds with one another and both academics. And we live in a political world that has been largely influenced by Rawls – and his one concept; the veil of ignorance.

But we also live under the ideas of Hume and Smith. It’s arguable that we live more under the philosophical influence of Edwards, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Paine, than anyone other than Calvin, Locke, Hume and Smith.

Marx was a madman living in the bowels of the british library and he managed to get 100M people killed trying to justify the erroneous labor theory of value, and is somehow loved and admired for it – which is why he’s taught in english and philosophy departments but not economics departments.

Today, Nassim Taleb is having a profound effect on our political and economic lives, and he was a speculator in the investment community. Mandelbrot’s single idea has helped us not only understand nature’s complexity, but the fact that the stock market is almost entirely made of noise rather than signal.

The criteria for being a philosopher is generating one or more ideas and writing essays or books on the application of that idea to a variety of examples, illustrating how that idea will change our perception and value about the world – so that we think or act differently than we do.

In contemporary philosophy, the criteria, I think, is “produce a system of thought”. Which is, easy to misinterpret, as something very grand in scope. It doesn’t have to be grand in scope. It just has to be articulated and then the applications of it demonstrated and argued.

You can be professional philosopher, which means, a good craftsman, in that you’re work is not flawed according to its own criteria (whether you’re a literary Nietzxche, or a questionably literary Heidegger.)

You can be a good philosopher (Newton, David Hume, or Thomas Kuhn ) or a bad philosopher (Zoroaster, Johann Joachim Becher, Karl Marx or Noam Chomsky) in that you’re wrong (which is OK) or both wrong and produce negative consequences (which is a really bad thing.) But whether you’re a right philosopher or a wrong philosopher doesn’t change your status as a philosopher.

Philosophers produce ideas that change the way in which we perceive and value the world around us, and therefore change our actions. To do this they write works that articulate and then apply that idea. The form of argument can vary from the novel, to the poetic, to the analogical, to the analytical to, arguably the symbolic, but the criteria is idea and application for the purpose of changing our perceptions, values and actions.

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RESPONSE

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Hi Curt,

I am amenable to the remarks that you have made about the aims of philosophizing, the dominant mood of professional philosophy (what I called “programmistic” here), and the kinds of ways in which philosophy can be productive (mentioned above).

FWIW, I don’t agree at all with your choice of examples. e.g., I do not endorse any picture of the political universe where Chomsky and Marx wear philosophical black hats while Thomas Kuhn wears the white hat. sp.: Chomsky has been an effective steward of the intellectual ideal, and someone I find personally inspiring. Marx philosophized badly, but he managed to do it productively. Many believe that Kuhn’s doctrine of ‘incommensurability’ was both quixotic and not very well defended; e.g., Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” succeeded as an effective enough take-down of the doctrine, and nothing else.

I also don’t agree with the parenthetical caricatures in the first paragraph. “Analytical” is not “Anglo”, because of Frege. Nor is “continental” the same as the merely “analogical” — frankly, there is only marginal difference between the amount of rigor in WVO Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” when compared with the essays that J.F. Lyotard wrote for children. (In this, I do not mean to offer any compliments to Lyotard.)

I sympathize a bit with your claim that philosophers primarily write books, but I won’t bank on it. Socrates wrote nothing. And there are many have a credible claim to being philosophers (e.g., Donald Davidson) even though they wrote articles over books.

In recent political philosophy, it’s interesting that because the academic discipline of philosophy has been distracted by an attempt to define itself at peerage with science, that, very little has been contributed by philosophy in the past century – and that which has (Postmodernism) turns out to have been almost entirely wrong.

But that’s entirely wrong! In the very next paragraph you mention two massively influential voices, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. You might have also mentioned Jurgen Habermas, a major intellectual backer of the EU. Bertrand Russell was an influential figure who did his part in defining the post-war liberal internationalism. etc.

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FOLLOWUP

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Excellent response. Thank you. Rare. 🙂 More than you probably want to bother with below but since you put out a pretty good response it’s worth replying.

RE: “I am amenable to the remarks that you have made about the aims of philosophizing, the dominant mood of professional philosophy (what I called “programmistic” here), and the kinds of ways in which philosophy can be productive (mentioned above).”

OK. Although, I”m not sure I understand yet what you mean by productive. 🙂 One can be highly productive. The discipline is productive in the sense that it produces outputs. But, as we say in economic philosophy, you con’t know if you were productive, or whether you wasted the world’s resources until someone buys what you made. Otherwise you’re just having fun watching some resource transform – and that’s personal entertainment, not production 🙂

RE:”FWIW, I don’t agree at all with your choice of examples. e.g., I do not endorse any picture of the political universe where Chomsky and Marx wear philosophical black hats while Thomas Kuhn wears the white hat. sp.: Chomsky has been an effective steward of the intellectual ideal, and someone I find personally inspiring. Marx philosophized badly, but he managed to do it productively.” Many believe that Kuhn’s doctrine of ‘incommensurability’ was both quixotic and not very well defended; e.g.,

As I said in my followup post, I failed to finish the paragraph that distinguished from good/bad, right/wrong, and to incorporate craftsmanly or not (which you call ‘proper’ or not). 🙂 It was too late at night here in Kiev. 🙂

1) Good/Bad: the consequences of the ideas, including externalities.

2) Right/Wrong: whether the reasoning used has survived scrutiny for the period of the utility of the idea in enacting change. (It is also true that a good idea can exist despite the author’s really bad reasoning. Searle’s Chinese characters and all…)

3) Craftsmanly: the logical discipline used, the coverage of applications, the refutation of counter arguments, and the ability to communicate the ideas without imposing significant deductive burden on the reader.

Kuhn can be wrong without terrible consequence. The paradigmatic nature of disciplines and methods was a valuable insight. Marx was so wrong with such a magnitude that he caused 100M people to die horrible deaths and left more than a billion others suffering in horrid poverty. All based on the error of the labor theory of value. I’m not sure how deeply to criticize Zoroaster or Postmodernists who use the same strategy of contradictory statements. I mean, I don’t really understand why we should desire any philosophical framework that’s made of false statements. Or one that’s made of highly contrived and loaded statements (the Germans et al.) I that’s the case we can just go back to mythology and mysticism for our guidance – at least that has stood the test of time, and it’s easily recognizable as mythology for use in general applications.

Or perhaps your view of philosophy is that philosophers have no responsibility for their public statements – that shouting fire in the theater is not creating a hazard. 🙂 There is some tendency to adopt this rather questionable ethic in academia under the rubric of the competition of ideas, but that ethic is logically limited to physical sciences not to political or even personal philosophy. WE don’t let physical scientists publish everything either and we hold them accountable for doing so. And history does hold philosophers accountable for their ideas. We phlogiston theory (which is analogous to the labor theory of value) is the whipping boy of philosophical discourse in the physical sciences.

It is certainly possible to construct a series of arguments that are contradictory to direct observation and indirect evidence, but which deliver such psychic rewards that the audience desires to treat them as truths. In fact, ideology and mysticism pretty much require that technique. And, as most ideological historians will confirm, the bigger the lie the better.

RE: :Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” succeeded as an effective enough take-down of the doctrine, and nothing else.”

Davidson’s attack on Kuhn is a straw man. Kuhn comes first and tries to describe a problem, and communicate it effectively, and Davidson takes the argument to the extreme as only a disciple of the metaphysical problem could. The error here is the difference between the metaphysical skepticism of the philosophy of science and the desire for the majority of the discipline of philosophy to remain lost in the absurdity of the metaphysical problem – the entire program of which has been a total failure as far as we can tell. Thus leaving the solution to be provided by neuro science at the organic scale, behavioral and experimental psychology and the personal and interpersonal scale, and behavioral economics at the grand scale. (Albeit most of this progress has occurred after 1980 when the cost of computing began to make such research more affordable.)

RE: “I also don’t agree with the parenthetical caricatures in the first paragraph. “Analytical” is not “Anglo”, because of Frege. Nor is “continental” the same as the merely “analogical” — frankly, there is only marginal difference between the amount of rigor in WVO Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” when compared with the essays that J.F. Lyotard wrote for children. (In this, I do not mean to offer any compliments to Lyotard.)”

Well the terminology isn’t my invention. That’s just common usage when loosely describing the analytical and continental movements. (I”m pretty sure… yes, that it’s even on wikipedia as stated.) It isn’t a question of rigor it’s a question of a) clarity b) testability c) loading, d) objectives. Continental language is loaded from Kant onward in an attempt to find an alternative to prior moral sentiments in the absence of church and aristocracy, just as the Postmodernist movement is an attempt to load current language in an attempt to find an alternative to the failure of socialism in theory and practice. Any act of philosophizing has a network of goals, even if it’s not stated. And, just as you cite in Davidson, just because we can’t articulate them or we ignore them doesn’t mean they aren’t the causal properties of the relations that we identify and work with. They are. That’s what continental philosophy is for: a reformation in an attempt at restoration by other arguments – a new religion of europe. It’s just another of the same objection to the anglo model that europeans have been objecting to since the French took the English empirical innovation, and restated it in moral terms (thereby creating potential for teh bloody revolution, napoleon’s conquest, and marx’s devastation of life) in order to preserve their more Roman and hierarchical preferences.

I mean, words have consequences. We aren’t cutting paper doilies here. Or maybe were’ just really entertaining ourselves? And not productive at all? 🙂

RE: “I sympathize a bit with your claim that philosophers primarily write books, but I won’t bank on it. Socrates wrote nothing. And there are many have a credible claim to being philosophers (e.g., Donald Davidson) even though they wrote articles over books.”

That’s a degree of precision that doesn’t alter the argument that history tells us that you must produce outputs, even if the constituent form of those outputs change over time. (Even though, it looks like, from the data, that we should question the article and journal process. Particularly in philosophy. If no one had written Socrates down (Plato or his students) there wouldn’t be any more of an Aristotle than there is a Zoroaster. It’s hard to argue that Kripke isn’t a philosopher. It’s genius, but I’m not sure it’s important. And most of what we have is lecture notes to work with. 🙂 (For some reason I think that’s really neat. it just feels… honest somehow. like we ought to write our work on metal sheets and leave it under trees and shrubs for people to find. 🙂 But categorically speaking, it’s hard to argue that you’re a philosopher if you dont produce works. Especially when the cannon requires that you read the author’s original works. (albiet, no one ever seems to read papers.) 🙂

“CURT: In recent political philosophy, it’s interesting that because the academic discipline of philosophy has been distracted by an attempt to define itself at peerage with science, that, very little has been contributed by philosophy in the past century – and that which has (Postmodernism) turns out to have been almost entirely wrong. ——NELSON: But that’s entirely wrong! In the very next paragraph you mention two massively influential voices, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. You might have also mentioned Jurgen Habermas, a major intellectual backer of the EU. Bertrand Russell was an influential figure who did his part in defining the post-war liberal internationalism. etc.

Well, I don’t know how I”m wrong. I said it was distracted and that philosophy had not produced much worth in the past century, and that’s not an uncommon evaluation. Compared to the physical, biological, anthropological, technical, and economic disciplines, most of the profession as in fact either remained distracted by the metaphysical program (a chimera) or distracted by the problem of consensus under heterogeneity in an effort to justify central controls. I mean, I”m not just pulling this out of thin air, Im simply looking at hw many people work in which disciplines, and what their relative impact has been. There are anthologies on this topic. It’s not my thimble-full-observation. 🙂

As for Habermas, the EU is operating contrary to economic evidence, and contrary to the reason for the rist of western economic advantage. WHile open markets are a good thing, and free movement of people is a good thing, fundamentally societies can not function any longer without fiat money and credit, and different normative and moral codes are vastly different in their productive capacity. The germanic and scandinavian countries are not wealthy because of their location or resources, they’re wealthy because they’re high trust societies that over generations outbred, and because the church forbid cousin marriage, and because under manorialism it was hard to get land without demonstrating you were worthing of investment (credit risk) they became high trust societies. The inability to coalesce central power increased competition and innovation. As soon as the Italians imported accounting so that complex investments could be made, the fact that Europe was poorer and less populous didn’t hold it back from 500 years of rapid expansion. The south is still familial, corrupt, and by comparison, less hard working. Fundamentally, you cannot mix these cultures without conflict any more than we seem to be able to mix cultures without conflict in our country. Europe wants to create an america, and half of america wants to break into european states. (The europeans are always a generation behind us at everything.)

I’d argue that Rawls was wrong and exacerbated the problem. Nozick wasn’t right – even if I wish he was. The reason is that both persons assume ether an optimum or compromise of interests on ends is possible under heterogeneity of norms. The data from voting patterns tells us that this isn’t true – particularly that trust declines and economics and redistribution suffer. The more individual we become as economic and family units the more diverse our moral perceptions become. It’s all well and good to write in the 70’s when the change is underway, but we have data today that they didn’t. The veil of ignorance, like all moral dilemmas is a nice parlor trick which attempts to identify an abstract morality as if we were still appealing to heaven. But moral foundations are biological and reproductive, and that is how people act, vote, and moralize.

Anyway, at this moment philosophy requires multidisciplinary knowledge in order to make any judgment whatsoever. And that knowledge is sorely lacking from the discipline. We have had to work very hard at philosophy since the start of the industrial revolution started changing the world around us so quickly. The job of Hume and Smith after the 3o years war and increased trade made a new way of looking at the world necessary.

I don’t like the distinction between the analytical, continental and post-analytical movements, because the analytical program incorporated the physical sciences, while retaining it’s attempt to solve the metaphysical problem. The continental program is an attempt to restore the past with a new form of narrative framing. The post-analytic program is an attempt to justify the failure of socialism in theory and in practice.

Experimental Philosophy and Naturalism at least imply that we have dropped the metaphysical program as a failure, and instead concentrate on the interpretation of and judgement of, the knowledge provided us by the disparate physical sciences.

Political Economy and Economics, at least in some parts, rely upon philosophical techniques. And that’s the dominant system of thought that affects policy.

Thanks for playing with me. It’s fun. Nice Blog.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine