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On Construing Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jocelyne Couture  and
Kai Nielsen
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Introduction
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Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 19: New Essays on Méta-Philosophie - Reconstructing Philosophy? , 1993 , pp. 1 - 55
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Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 Wittgenstein, LudwigPhilosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1953), 49Google Scholar; Cavell, StanleyMust We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner's 1969), xvii–xixGoogle Scholar; Granger, Gilles-GastonPour la connaissance philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob 1988), 9–12Google Scholar

2 Anti-philosophy philosophy is not anti-philosophy simpliciter. It is not Aristophanes lampooning Socrates or, in our time, some academics (to say nothing of some non-academics) dismissing philosophy as bull, as either being rhetorical hot-air or nit-picking ‘logic chopping’ to no issue. Some anti-philosophy philosophers will acknowledge that there is sometimes more in such scoffing dismissals than many philosophers are willing to acknowledge. (The usual defense mechanisms are at work here.) But anti-philosophy philosophers also realize, and acknowledge, that there are deep intellectual as well as other pressures that drive some people into thinking philosophically. Philosophy has a long history in our Western tradition and cannot, and should not, be just shrugged off or joked off. Anti-philosophy philosophers do not just engage in ridicule and such shrugging off, but, with all the perils of pragmatic self-contradiction, argue philosophically for the end of philosophy as it has been traditionally conceived (conceived of either in the grand metaphysical-epistemological tradition or in systematic analytical philosophy). The work of both Wittgenstein and Rorty is crucially paradigmatic here. But Rorty (to say nothing of Wittgenstein), I suspect, would not welcome the term ‘anti-philosophy philosophy.’ Rorty rightly argues that there is no sensible talk of ‘the end of philosophy’ sans phrase. (See the last section of this essay.) But, all the same, Rorty, perfectly and brilliantly, exemplifies what, in Section II and the beginning of Section III, we characterize as anti-philosophy philosophy. Rorty distinguishes, in a way that is germane here, between philosophy and Philosophy. The former is something Rorty takes to be quite unproblematic and as something that is not about to come to an end. It is — he adopts the phrase from Wilfrid Sellars — ‘an attempt to see how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term’ (xiv). He goes on to add that in ‘this sense, Blake is as much a philosopher as Fichte, Henry Adams more of a philosopher than Frege. No one would be dubious about philosophy, taken in this sense’ (xv, italics added). But besides philosophy, a desirable and, he believes, an unproblematic activity, there is Philosophy, something which is much more specialized and, he believes, very dubious indeed. It is Philosophy — either in the grand metaphysical and epistemological traditions or in the naturalistic and scientistic forms of Quine or Armstrong — that Rorty opposes and rejects. He agrees with the pragmatist, indeed he is himself a pragmatist, in believing ‘that one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti-Philosophical, that the best way to make things hang together is to step back from the issues between Platonists and positivists, and thereby give up the presuppositions of Philosophy’ (xvii). Key programmatic statements by Rorty, occur in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982), xiii–xlvii and 211-30Google Scholar. It is from this text that we have been quoting in this note. Given his distinction between philosophy and Philosophy, when we call him an anti-Philosophy philosopher, the anti-Philosophy part is with a capital ‘P.’ In this crucial sense John Dewey is an anti-Philosophy philosopher as well, though his tone is less arch. Wittgenstein, however, might be thought to be an anti-philosophy philosopher in both senses of ‘philosophy.’ See here Williams, Michael ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’ in Macdonald, Graham and Wright, Crispin eds., Fact, Science and Morality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986), 20–4Google Scholar. Joseph F. McDonald, in an unpublished doctoral dissertation from the University of Ottawa, 1993, entitled Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Conception of Philosophy, sets out a convincing textual and argumentative case for the claim that, from his early Notebooks, through the Tractatus, the Investigations, and on to and through On Certainty, Wittgenstein retained a thoroughly therapeutic conception of philosophy. See also James Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus,’ Philosophical Topics 20 (Fall 1991) 100-66.

3 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 48

4 Nielsen, Kai ‘On There Being Philosophical Knowledge,’ Theoria 56 (1990) 193–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See his essay in this volume as well as his exchange with Rorty: McCarthy, Thomas ‘Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism,’ Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990) 355-70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rorty, Richard ‘Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy,’ Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990) 633-43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCarthy, Thomas ‘Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to Rorty's Reply,’ Critical Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990) 644-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McCarthy, ThomasIdeals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991), 11–42Google Scholar. Also see in this context, and vitally, Bjorn Ramberg's essay in this volume.

6 Berlin, IsaiahConcepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980)Google Scholar, 1. In this volume of Berlin's more generally see vii-viii, 1-11 and 143-72. See, as well, his long interview with Magee, Bryan in Magee's Men of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982)Google Scholar, 2-27 and his ‘Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’ in Warnock, G.J. ed., Essays on J.L. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1973) 1–16Google Scholar. Stated just like that Berlin's claim is too strong. It would have been better if he had said that we must at least have some idea, though sometimes not a very clear one, of where to look for answers.

7 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 1

8 Ibid., 1-2

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 3-4

14 Nielsen, Kai ‘Can There be Justified Philosophical Beliefs?’ Iyyun 40 (July 1991) 235-70Google Scholar and Kai Nielsen, ‘Is “True Philosophy” Like “True Art“?’ Philosophical Exchange (1993-94)

15 Kai Nielsen, ‘On There Being Philosophical Knowledge,’ 193-225

16 Passmore, JohnPhilosophical Reasoning (London: Duckworth 1961)Google Scholar; ‘The Place of Argument in Metaphysics’ in Kennick, W.E. and Lazerowitz, Morris eds., Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1966) 356-65Google Scholar; and his entry ‘Philosophy’ in Edwards, Paul ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and the Free Press 1967) 216-26Google Scholar

17 Austin, JohnPhilosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1961), 180Google Scholar

18 Bernard Williams, Introduction to Concepts and Categories, xiv

19 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 5

20 Williams, xiii

21 Hampshire, Stuart ‘A Statement About Philosophy’ in Bontempo, Charles and Odell, S. Jack eds., The Owl of Minerva (New York: McGraw-Hill 1985), 89Google Scholar. See also Hampshire, Stuart ‘Identification and Existence’ in Lewis, H.D. ed., Contemporary British Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin 1956), 191–208Google Scholar.

22 Hampshire, ‘A Statement About Philosophy,’ 89

23 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 7

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 9

26 Ibid., 8

27 Ibid.

28 Most directly and concisely, see Berlin, ‘Reply to McKinney, Ronald H. “Towards a Postmodern Ethics“,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry 26 (1992) 557-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more developed, historically reflective account, see Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1991), 1–19 and 70-90Google Scholar.

29 Rorty, RichardObjectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1991), 126-61Google Scholar and Rorty, ‘Putnam on Truth,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (June 1992) 415-18CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Davidson, Donald “The Structure and Content of Truth,’ Journal of Philosophy 87 (June 1990) 297–326CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, vitally, ‘Afterthoughts, 1987’ in Malachowski, Alan ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1990), 134-7Google Scholar; Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 126-50; and Rorty, ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace,’ The Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993), 460, n. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 162-3

32 Davidson, DonaldInquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 181–242Google Scholar. See also, relatedly and importantly, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’ in Krausz, Michael ed., Relativism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1982), 159-81Google Scholar.

33 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 158

34 Ibid., 156, 158, 160

35 Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,’ 159-81 and Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism and Truth, 1-17, 151-72

36 Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 9

37 Tugendhat, Ernest ‘Reflections on Philosophical Method from an Analytic Point of View’ in Honneth, Axel et al., eds., Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992), 113-24Google Scholar

38 Waismann, FrederichHow I See Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's Press 1968), 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ryle, GilbertCollected Papers, Vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson's 1971), 319-25Google Scholar

39 Hacking, Ian ‘Styles of Scientific Reasoning’ in Rajchman, John and West, Cornel eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press 1985) 145-65Google Scholar; Maclntyre, Alasdair ‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’ in Baynes, Kenneth et al., eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987) 385–421Google Scholar; Taylor, CharlesHuman Agency and Language (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1985) 248-92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rescher, Nicholas ‘Conceptual Schemes,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1980) 323-45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Damon Gitelman judiciously adjudicates some of the issues here in his Conceptual Scheme Differentiation (diss., University of Calgary 1991). Rorty, particularly in response to Taylor, makes some powerful Davidsonian arguments in support of a rejection of ‘the third dogma’ (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 93-110 and 162-72).

40 We are quoting from Bryan Magee's extended conversation with Quine. This BBC text is printed in Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas, 143-52. The passage cited is from 143-4.

41 Ibid., 148

42 Ibid., 151-2

43 Brand Blanshard, ‘The Philosophical Enterprise’ in Bontempo and Odell, ed., The Owl of Minerva, 174, 176-7. Nielsen has criticized Blanshard's and similar rationalisms in his ‘Jolting the Career of Reason: Absolute Idealism and Other Rationalisms Reconsidered,’ The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (forthcoming).

44 W.V. Quine, ‘Words Are All We Have to Go On,’ Times Literary Supplement (July 3, 1992), 8

45 Quine in Magee, 142. To think that philosophy is more theoretical than chemistry, biology, or economics is to reveal what a fragile grip philosophers not infrequently have on reality.

46 Ibid., 143-4

47 Ibid., 144

48 Quine, ‘Words are All We Have to Go On,’ 8

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Hilary Putnam, “The Philosophy of Science,’ conversations in Magee, Men of Ideas, 202

56 Ibid.

57 Quine in Magee, 143

58 Ibid., 144

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid., 139

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 144

63 Putnam, HilaryRealism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990), 260-77Google Scholar. See Quine in Magee, 145.

64 Quine in Magee, 145

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid. Here we must also ask what are its presuppositions and what are their status? See here Nielsen ‘Is “true philosophy” like “true art“?’ Philosophical Exchange, (1993-4).

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Rudolf Carnap, ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4 (1950). See also his Meaning and Necessity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1956)Google Scholar.

70 Such rough and tumble arguments, along with a few more refined, occur in Nielsen, Ethics Without God (Buffalo: Prometheus Press 1990)Google Scholar; Nielsen, God and the Grounding of Morality (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1991)Google Scholar; and Nielsen, Philosophy and Atheism (Buffalo: Prometheus Books 1985)Google Scholar.

71 Quine in Magee, 151

72 Ibid., 150

73 Marcuse, HerbertOne-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press 1964)Google Scholar and Habermas, JürgenToward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press 1970), 81–122Google Scholar

74 Quine, ‘On the Nature of Moral Values’ in Goldman, Alvin and Kim, Jaegwon eds., Values and Morals (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1978), 37–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 301. For Dewey, ‘physical fact’ would have to have a broader construal than Quine gives it such that social facts would be a subspecies of physical facts.

76 Quine, ‘Reply to Putnam’ in Hahn, Lewis Edwin and Schilpp, Paul Arthur eds., The Philosophy of W.V. Quine (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1986), 429Google Scholar

77 Ibid., 430

78 Ibid., 430

79 Ibid., 431

80 Rorty's views are well known and well documented here. For a brief but forceful recent statement of them, see his ‘Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism’ in Murphy, John P.Pragmatism from Peirce to Davidson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1990) 1–6Google Scholar. Concerning Putnam, we should remark that the thoroughness of his rejection of scientism, his increasing distance from the analytic tradition and the linking of his historicist conception of how to proceed in philosophy with the work of Wittgenstein and Dewey, place him, his own views to the contrary notwithstanding, very close to Rorty. Putnam thinks there is a greater distance than there actually is between them because he mistakenly attributes to Rortya relativism and a Derridean lightmindedness about truth. But Rorty, arguably, never was the former and has grown out of an earlier pragmatist account of truth. (What Rorty says of Putnam about his continued self-critical development—his not staying put, fixated in, and defensive about old positions — is exactly true of Rorty himself.) Rorty now goes disquotationalist about truth and he, as much as Putnam, rejects relativism, although, like Putnam, he believes no God's eye view of the world, or even (pace Bernard Williams) an Absolute conception of the world, is possible. So, like Putnam, he is historicist, but historicism is not relativism. The differences that remain between Putnam and Rorty are over Putnam's epistemological theory of truth, his belief in a need for a theory of truth, rationality, and normativity, and his belief in the explanatory power of normative properties. Here it appears to be the case, or so it seems to us, that Putnam stands himself in need of some Wittgensteinian therapy. (Psychoanalysts sometimes go back for renewed therapy themselves. Why should not the same thing be true for conceptual therapy?) See Rorty, ‘Putnam on Truth’ and Rorty, ‘Life at the End of Inquiry,’ London Review of Books 6:14–15Google Scholar (August 2, 1984), 6-7. For Putnam's powerfully articulated Deweyian-Wittgensteinian non-scientistic, non-reductive naturalism, see his Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992).

Since this note was first written, this discussion has been further significantly extended by both Putnam and Rorty. See Putnam, Hilary ‘Truth, Activation Vectors, and Possession Conditions for Concepts,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992) 431-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Richard Rorty, ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace,’ 443-61.

81 Quine in Magee, 143

82 Nielsen, ‘Peirce, Pragmatism and the Challenge of Postmodernism,’ Transactions of the Peirce Society (forthcoming). If a holism such as Davidson's or Rorty's compels us to drop all talk of ‘facts of the matter,’ then there is something wrong with such a holism. See here Quine, ‘Let Me Accentuate the Positive,’ Malachowski, Reading Rorty, 11-119; and Quine, ‘In Praise of Observation Sentences,’ The Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993) 107-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 51

84 Nielsen has argued that in his After the Demise of the Tradition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1991) and in the following articles: ‘Reconsidering the Platonic Conception of Philosophy,’ International Studies in Philosophy (forthcoming), ‘Jolting the Career of Reason: Absolute Idealism and Other Rationalisms Reconsidered,’ The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (forthcoming), ‘How to Proceed in Philosophy: Remarks after Habermas,’ Theoria (forthcoming), ‘What is Philosophy? The Reconsideration of Some Neglected Options,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming). Rorty, who regards logical positivism as in effect a retrograde and reactionary philosophical movement — he was not complaining about their typically liberal or radical politics — also remarks:'… the positivists were absolutely right in thinking it imperative to extirpate metaphysics when “metaphysics” means to give knowledge of what science cannot know. For this is the attempt to find a discourse which combines the intersubjective security of objective truth… with the edifying unjustifiable but unconditional moral claim’ (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979), 384).

85 Rorty, ‘Habermas, Derrida and the Function of Philosophy,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie (forthcoming)

86 Ibid.

87 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 211-30. See also his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), particularly 384-5,389-90,392.

88 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 65-77

89 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 211-30