Cheerskep, I'm glad to hear that you find some of my comments interesting. And I agree with what you say below: great philosophy is "more" than technical skill. IN fact I said so in the message from which you quoted: "Great philosophy, however, somehow changes the subject, asks new or different questions and develops new/different technical capacities for thinking about them. [...] they were driven, I think, by something -- an inarticulate, inarticulable problem -- that didn't fit, didn't find a home in the prevalent modes of thinking." Perhaps the appropriate word for this is imagination.
Unfortunately, as you and I both know, great philosophy is the exception, not the rule. Consider (this really depressing fact, which sometimes keeps me up at night): In the USA, for every single tenure-track job offering in philosophy, there are 250+ applicants. one job, 250 applicants. 1:250. Now, we can pare down this number by realizing that the applicants aren't all fresh PhDs. Some have tenure-track positions, some have been teaching in adjunct positions for some time, etc. So we might be able to slim down the number to 150 new Philosophy PhDs a year (and that's reasonable; a medium sized dept. produces approximately 2-5 new PhDs a year; their's easily 50 such depts in the USA. see here: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/ [my own dept is within the top 25 schools for continental philosophy, but comes nowhere near breaking the top 50 schools in general philosophy, and we graduate on average 3+ doctorates a year -- but we're huge]). Anyway, here's the point: out of this year's 150 PhDs, how many will do "Great Philosophy"? think of the history of philosophy. There are less than 200 names in it. and most are from the last 400 years (indeed, most are from the last 200, and they increase the closer you get to the present). Point being, some of the stuff we consider 'great' now is due to the fact that the dust hasn't settled on them yet. We don't know who will be buried and forgotten, and who will be cared for and read. Hume is only interesting in light of Kant (or so say many historians). he's a minor figure, who's kept alive in the curricula for the sake of preparing for Kant -- indeed, Hume's skepticism is a nice way to introduce transcendental arguments. But now I'm depressing myself, so I should leave off. All things told, you're right, Tom. Great philosophy is more than skill. but there's just not very much of it. >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/30/08 4:36 PM >>> I'd dispute some aspects of Alexei's interesting, thoughtful post about "genius", "art", and "philosophy". In this post I'll confine myself to "philosophy". Alexei writes: "by and large most philosophy *is* nothing other than a series of technical skills. Problems and themes are handed down through the tradition and are taken up by each successive generation. Techniques are improved, problem-spaces refined, responses become more mannered or stylized. etc. But this is all taught (yes, one must have a head for it, like one must have an eye, say, for colour. but even much of this can be taught, if one is willing to learn it). It's a matter of technical skill. Philosophy, at least, is by and large a matter of technical skill." As a freshman and sophomore in college, with no idea what I'd major in, I was drawn to philosophy because of how happily startled I was by various philosophers' insights that exposed as quite wrong stuff I'd always unquestioningly taken for granted. Or at least untenable. Or the insights revealed new ways of looking at old things. Or they simply put questions I should have asked but never had. I've mentioned Peirce's assertion that a belief is no more than "an anticipation of future experience". That way of looking at a "belief" shocked me, and it seemed "true". Before Peirce it was Hume, pointing out that we assume something we call a "self" but in fact we've never "seen" it. I remember being knocked back by his observation we also assume something we call a "cause", but all we have ever seen is a repeated conjunction of events -- event A seems constantly followed by event B, so eventually we come to say A causes B. And yet all we ever see is sequence, not causal necessity. As I read more, I realized these novel insights were also shocks to all the sophisticated philosophers who came before these guys. Wittgenstein's insights into language were blurry but obviously novel, and they threw a generation of philosophers into a tizzy. My point here is this: The insights that made these guys special were not merely the product of technical excellence. Hume, coming hard on the heels of those other empiricists, Locke and Berkeley, was technically no different from them, he used no novel technical tools -- but he went far beyond his predecessors. The leaps of the "great" philosophers are perhaps comparable to Einstein's leaps in the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, he was surrounded by guys with greater "technical" skills than his. But he had an imagination that propelled him out of the confining box of received opinion. Again and again, other physicists cried, "What made him think of it?!" In grad school I once offered that as the very definition of 'imagination': "that which makes an informed observer slap his head and say 'What made him think of it?'" Bertrand Russell had very great technical skill -- at mathematical logic. And it took what might be called a "technical imagination" to expand it, principally in "Principia Mathematica". But for all his virtues we can now see that his imagination was limited. He was baffled by the later Wittgenstein, couldn't grasp what Ludwig was on about, thought Ludwig had rather lost his senses. Russell was a very great technician as he developed his mathematical logic -- and yet he could never see what a very faulty tool it was. I must look into his autobiography to see if Godel is in the index. I'm interested to see what Russell's reaction was to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which proved that Russell's basic assumption in "Principia" was inherently wrong. Admittedly, though Godel's imagination was "technical", it did produce a startling new insight. But it stopped there. The insights of such folk are into mathematics -- not how we think. In sum, I don't accept that "by and large most philosophy *is* nothing other than a series of technical skills." In fact the essential thing in great philosophy is something quite "other" than technical skill. "Yes, one must have a head for it," and what has to be in that head is...imagination. ************** Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL Home. (http://home.aol.com/diy/home-improvement-eric-stromer?video=15&; ncid=aolhom00030000000001)
