Nova PhDs

Well, I don't think that anyone would mistake me for an analytic philosopher (aside from the large community of analytic Heideggerian poetologists at Oxford), but . . .

Your anticipation not withstanding, Joe, I think that I am largely in agreement with at least one interpretation of the first claim:

1) Provided we give "know-how" a broad enough meaning (hopefully not so broad that it becomes vacuous . . .) I think that we would end up with a good description of the way in which most 20th century philosophers are (and ought to be) commited to a certain kind of nominalism (I suspect that this interpretation would no longer be stictu sensu a form of pragmatism, giving some credence to Joe's anticipation of my possible recalcitrance). That is to say, philosophical thought is a praxis whose concepts don't have meaning apart from the linguistic communities that employ them . . . but, as John points out, at this point we're in pretty broad terrain. To my mind, this doesn't make it an unimportant claim nor even historically unilluminating. It strikes me that this first claim would be a little like saying that 17th and 18th century rationalists all held that the truth of a judgment depended upon proper use of the faculty of reason, whose development was critical for the progress of science and philosophy. This is both true and an essential part of their project, but doesn't really distinguish them from empiricists, for whom it is still true, and still important, but in a strikingly different way.

I guess I'm not clear how what we'd be talking about differs in a substantive way from the so-called linguistic turn, which cuts across the analytic-continental divide. . . This explains why the poor Husserlians don't make the cut (maybe somebody who knows more about Deleuze than I do can tell me if Deleuzians —- or Deleuzers? —- do). Similarly, I think you'd be hard pressed to impute any interpretation of what Fodor is calling semantic pragmatism to someone like Frege, or even to early versions of logical positivism and logical atomism (although the day I claim to be an expert in pre-analytic philosophy, hell will have already been frozen over for some time —- and deep apologies for this aside, I really enjoy using the future perfect tense and try to find cases where it is relevant, as you will have noticed it was here). Incidentally, while I agree with both of you that the second claim of Fodor is both obviously wrong and not a good description of very many philosophers, I do take it that a version of this claim was actually endorsed by the logical positivists, for whom, if I am not mistaken, the rules of inference were ontologically distinct from empirical investigations, and the exclusive proper object of philosophy (Philosophy didn’t get to decide what was shown, just what could properly be said about that which was shown . . . )

2) (I bet that by now you will have forgotten that there had been a number 1). If, however, you mean something narrower, then I take it this point becomes more debatable as an interpretation of either analytic or continental philosophy (it also becomes an inappropriate goal for what I will follow Heidegger in pretentiously calling ‘The Task of Thinking’ —- as an aside to any e-passers-by who don’t know me and think it’s insufferably pretentious, please be assured that my tongue is thoroughly ensconced in my cheek. To borrow a phrase from Al Franken, I’m “kidding on the square”).

If we interpret “know-how” more narrowly to refer to how to pragmatically engage in a (non-conceptual? or non-linguistic?) world, this seems to me not to describe a good deal at least of what I take some continental philosophers to be up to (and from the little, and admittedly idiosyncratic, bit that I know about analytic trends in the philosophy of science and cognitive science, I take it that it would no longer describe all, or even most, analytic philosophers either). To stick with Heidegger, for example, even in Being and Time, it isn’t simply the case that use-relations constitute Dasein’s primary relationship to the world. It’s certainly true, as we’ve all heard countless times, that in Division One, he argues that this is the primary form that Dasein’s everyday relationship to the world takes, and he takes it as the proper task of philosophy to explicate the meaning of this relationship. But even in Being and Time, before Heidegger sells the farm —- if that’s the word I’m looking for —— as Ryle, Dreyfus and so many others seem to have seen it, the meaning of these pragmatic relationships isn’t itself necessarily understood pragmatically, but linguistically. I’m thinking in particular of the end of Chapter Five of Part Two, where Heidegger is talking about historicality. Two quick asides before I try to wrap up a comment that is already far-too-long. 1) This same section will also be one of the few places where Heidegger discusses what he calls the temporality of concept-formation and the place where he most directly engages the questions this post is discussing in language that might be comprehensible to the larger philosophical community. 2) Although this chapter is crucial to the hermeneutic tradition, this also serves to distinguish Heidegger from the hermeneutic answer which, while less cognitivist than the position we’re discussing here, is thoroughly ensconced in the interpretation of philosophy as principally a praxis. This is because the temporality of discourse, which underwrites how we discuss and understand Dasein’s historicality, should be understood on the horizon of the present (through the phenomenon of dating) rather than the past . . . It’s not that our conceptual and pragmatic relationships to the world are thoroughly ensconced in the historical configurations of language that we think in, it’s that we think in historical configurations because we are beings whose projects project themselves onto the past. In this way, I think he might be able to avoid some of the scruples you all are expressing with too-broad a usage of the work language. As an aside to this aside, it’s interesting to note that in Being and Time, all of this is the task of philosophy, which would mean that Heidegger goes through the “linguistic turn” before he undergoes the “poetic turn” which supposedly happens simultaneously. My deepest apologies for such a long aside).

If I have a point here, and it’s debatable whether or not I do, it’s that the transformation of philosophy into practical philosophy isn’t necessarily the done deal that we’ve been assured that it is. Even if we endorse a version of what I would prefer to call “nominalism” and not pragmatism, and say that the meaning of our concepts is given only through some sort of intersubjective consensus (another concept which cuts across the analytic-continental tradition), this doesn’t necessarily entail our accepting the position that all meanings are therefore pragmatic. I take it that this is important insofar as twentieth century critiques of metaphysics (be they the critiques of Quine or of Derrida) largely depend upon such a move. Kant said that nothing moved him so much as the starry skies above and the moral law within. (My apologies for being to lazy to go look up the exact wording). My concern is that we post-metaphysical philosophers (urban-dwellers that we are) have let the bright lights of the big city blind us to even remembering that there are starry skies above. To paraphrase someone else (I’ve forgotten who), we’ve forgotten that there are ontological questions worth forgetting about . . .

I remember a discussion we had several years back, Joe, where I think we were in agreement that the ultimate horizon for understanding the meanings (and truth) of things was something like intersubjective verification, given not by an ideal community, but by factually existing socio-political communities. Where we differed (and correct me if I’m wrong) was that you took this to mean that ultimately, the value of all questions ought to be referred to the life of these communities (we only care about questions insofar as they pertain to humanity), whereas I didn’t want to make this move (while language, truth and meaning might be only possible within a community of human beings, the meaning of humanity can still be in a sense ecstatic, oriented beyond itself to questions that don’t pertain to us at all except for insofar as we are the ones being so oriented.) If I’ve understood you correctly, I’d be tempted to say that you were endorsing what we are here calling semantic pragmatism, and I was endorsing what I think I’ll call (referring to another conversation we had) neo-metaphysical nominalism or critical ontology.

I hope that some of this pertains to some of what we are talking about.