Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
At 10:27 PM 12/11/00 -0500, you wrote: Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly cultivated man. I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal and very macho professional culkture of intense competition. Okay, we agree in practice. _In practice_, AP's method involves discouragement of scholarship as Justin defines it here. [BTW, I like the typo, the spelling of "culkture," though maybe "kultur" would be more appropriate.] The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what distinguished it from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy (except maybe post modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since Aristotle thought that formal logic was extremely revealing if not absolutely necessary to clear thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that previous philosophers didn't know about? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
While I agree with Justin re most of what he has to say there are exceptions: both Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach were very much interested in Aquinas, and Aristotle as well. On the other side of the coin being cultured is not a necessary condition of being a first rate philosopher. I would not consider Wittgenstein cultured. He seems to have read little in the philosophical classics. WHen he did read them he often misunderstood them, or just picked up bits and pieces for his own purposes--as Augustine. He like Betty Hutton, and to read mystery mags.. Also being cultured was associated in the minds of many analytical philosophers with abstract speculation and lack of clarity even meaninglessness. Many adopted the recurring idea that philosophy had to be clear and adopt a new methodology to progress as did the sciences and other disciplines. The analysts may have been dogmatic and bitten off less than they could chew but given the rise of post-modernism I often call out...Oh Carnap where art thou now all the West is a fen of "meaninglessness". CHeers. Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 9:27 PM Subject: [PEN-L:6054] Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books? Of course I think philosophers (of all people) ought to be cultured people of wide curiosity. However, it's a fact that in high-powered reserach institutions and places that aspire to be like those places, they are mostly not. I don't think philosophers are unique here: we see a general pattern of the effects of professionalization on higher ed. Didn't someone post a reference to a nice chapter of a book what happens to physics students? Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly cultivated man. I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal and very macho professional culkture of intense competition. But you have to look at the problem in a wider context. Few academics are intellectuals. Moreover the kind of humanistic education all good scientists, philosophers, and scholars used to get is lost foreover, an artifact of a lost world. A dimly recalled story: von Neumann, a logician's logician and a founder of game theory, honored the nuclear physicist Fermi for something brilliant he'd done, maybe it was getting the first reactor to work at Chicago, at a Manhattan Project dinner, by standing up and announing in Latin, "We have a Pope," a reference to what the cardinals say when a new Pope is announced. He knew the expression, probably knew Latin; made a joke about Fermi's Italian background, and could safely assume that at least the Europeans present (which many Manhattan project scientists were) and Oppenheimer would get it, although it would be lost on the Americans, thus reinforcing the European exile sense of superiority over the barbarians like young Feynman. Today, they are all barbarians, European and American alike; and no one would be capable of making such a joke. Alas. --jks [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/11/00 02:03PM Justin writes: My experience of academia is that philosophy professors are not . . . readers or people of wide culture, or even much curiosity. Jim: Maybe I'm naive, but I can't understand this. Shouldn't philosophers, of all people, be experts on a wide variety of philosophical thought CB: They should be, but I think Justin is telling us they are not the way they should be. Speak on , Justin. Jim: , going back to the ancient Greeks and nowadays stuff from non-"Western" cultures? After all, don't we build on the foundations created by Aristotle and all those old guys? Does this ignorance -- and non-intellectualism -- have anything to do with the method of "analytical philosophy"? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
There are different types of analytical philosophy. Logical atomism and positivism stressed logic but modern symbolic logic rather than syllogistic logic--although the latter can be incorporated as part of symbolic logic. But the method is analysis and in both atomism and logical positivism there is a definite theory of meaning that ties in with the Humean distinction between relationships of ideas (maths and logic) and matters of fact (contingent truths about the "world"). The positivists held that traditional speculative philosophy contained propositions that were neither analytically true or false (as math and propositions of logic) nor verifiable through observation and experience ie. contingent truth or falsehoods, matters of fact... BUt this is just one stream of analytical philosophy and would include people such as Carnap, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein (Tractatus) G.E. Moore represents a different stream stressing analysis without any ideal language in mind and using ordinary language rather than technical and formalized concepts. Moore did not follow the positivists in regarding traditional metaphysics as meaningless. Rather he tried to puzzle out what traditional metaphysicians might mean and often he tries to show that what is said is false. Eg. time is not unreal I had my breakfast before my lunch !.Moore came to philosophy not from science or maths but from the classics Austin is even further away from the positivist and atomist group stressing that philosophers really faill to understand how language works and subjecting other analysts such as Moore and Ayer to a clever and ruthless critique. Austin is a master at delineating the nuances of the English language.and of exposing how philosophers misuse and misunderstand it...In his later work he began to look at spoken language a bit more systematically ie. How to do things with words... and this began the whole speech act stream.Searle.Alston...and some of this was adopted into Habermas' views on the ideal speech scenario...no doubt causing Austin to turn over in his grave.. The later WIttegenstein is in many ways contradictory to the atomist and positivist trends. He considers that positivists and his own views on language were quite wrong. Viewed at from the point of view of an ideal language ordinary language is seen to have all sorts of problems...ie proper names with no referent...that are not really problems at all...if u consider for example how language is actually used.. A lot of traditional problems will dissolve (ie how can we really know that another is in painz) if we understand how our language works and don't imagine that some theory must be true. Analytical philosophers are vastly different from one another.. At most they have family resemblances.. Cheers, Ken Hanly. - Original Message - From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 10:30 AM Subject: [PEN-L:6065] Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books? The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what distinguished it from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy (except maybe post modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since Aristotle thought that formal logic was extremely revealing if not absolutely necessary to clear thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that previous philosophers didn't know about? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
"Ken Hanly" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: There are different types of analytical philosophy. . . . Sure, but, I wasn't trying to give a history or a typology. I was just trying to explain why the culture of APis anti-intellectual and hostile to humanistic cultivation. Also, incidentally, to wave at the contributions of AP to logic. The hostility to culture ersal, of course: I did not say that every analytical philosopher is a narrow technician. By some accounts _I_ am an AP, and I hope I am not a narrow technician. I have also studied with some APs who are humanistically educated--Rorty, for one; when I studied with him, he was still an AP. It's rare, though: none of my other AP teachers strikes me as fitting the bill, on reflection. Maybe Nick Jardine. Nor did I say that humanistic cultivation is necessary or sufficient to be a good philosopher. (Wittgenstein, btw, certainly did have a humanistic education; he just didn't do much with that side.) What I said was that a humanistic education was a good thing and it's a shame that it's largely vanished and its values are not ! ! promoted among analytical philos ophers. Also, if Ken wants logical positivistic type contempt for postmodernism, there's a lot of it goinga roung among APs. Some would say, gain, that I manifest it. --jks
Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
Of course I think philosophers (of all people) ought to be cultured people of wide curiosity. However, it's a fact that in high-powered reserach institutions and places that aspire to be like those places, they are mostly not. I don't think philosophers are unique here: we see a general pattern of the effects of professionalization on higher ed. Didn't someone post a reference to a nice chapter of a book what happens to physics students? Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly cultivated man. I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal and very macho professional culkture of intense competition. But you have to look at the problem in a wider context. Few academics are intellectuals. Moreover the kind of humanistic education all good scientists, philosophers, and scholars used to get is lost foreover, an artifact of a lost world. A dimly recalled story: von Neumann, a logician's logician and a founder of game theory, honored the nuclear physicist Fermi for something brilliant he'd done, maybe it was getting the first reactor to work at Chicago, at a Manhattan Project dinner, by standing up and announing in Latin, "We have a Pope," a reference to what the cardinals say when a new Pope is announced. He knew the expression, probably knew Latin; made a joke about Fermi's Italian background, and could safely assume that at least the Europeans present (which many Manhattan project scientists were) and Oppenheimer would get it, although it would be lost on the Americans, thus reinforcing the European exile sense of superiority over the barbarians like young Feynman. Today, they are all barbarians, European and American alike; and no one would be capable of making such a joke. Alas. --jks [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/11/00 02:03PM Justin writes: My experience of academia is that philosophy professors are not . . . readers or people of wide culture, or even much curiosity. Jim: Maybe I'm naive, but I can't understand this. Shouldn't philosophers, of all people, be experts on a wide variety of philosophical thought CB: They should be, but I think Justin is telling us they are not the way they should be. Speak on , Justin. Jim: , going back to the ancient Greeks and nowadays stuff from non-"Western" cultures? After all, don't we build on the foundations created by Aristotle and all those old guys? Does this ignorance -- and non-intellectualism -- have anything to do with the method of "analytical philosophy"? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
At 10:27 PM 12/11/00 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Of course I think philosophers (of all people) ought to be cultured people of wide curiosity. However, it's a fact that in high-powered reserach institutions and places that aspire to be like those places, they are mostly not. I don't think philosophers are unique here: we see a general pattern of the effects of professionalization on higher ed. Didn't someone post a reference to a nice chapter of a book what happens to physics students? if anyone has that, i'd appreciate a forward or clues as to where to search in the archives. thanks, kelley
