Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T07:06:40.844Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Philosophy as Synchronic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2021

DANIEL STOLJAR*
Affiliation:
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL [email protected]

Abstract

Bernard Williams argues that philosophy is in some deep way akin to history. This article is a novel exploration and defense of the Williams thesis (as I call it)—though in a way anathema to Williams himself. The key idea is to apply a central moral from what is sometimes called the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s to the philosophy of philosophy of today, namely, the separation of explanation and laws. I suggest that an account of causal explanation offered by David Lewis may be modified to bring out the way in which this moral applies to philosophy, and so to defend the Williams thesis. I discuss in detail the consequences of the thesis for the issue of philosophical progress and note also several further implications: for the larger context of contemporary metaphilosophy, for the relation of philosophy to other subjects, and for explaining, or explaining away, the belief that success in philosophy requires a field-specific ability or brilliance.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were given to audiences at the Australian National University, Uppsala, and Umeå, and as the presidential address at the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, in Adelaide, in 2017. I thank all present on those occasions, and others with whom I have profitably talked about this material. I found particularly helpful reactions from Lucy Allais, Adrian Currie, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Alan Hájek, Torfinn Huvenes, Daniel Kilov, Matthew Lindauer, Conor Leisky, Sebastian Lutz, Knox Peden, Una Stojnić, Pär Sundström, and Hezki Symonds. I am sure I have forgotten some people; I apologize for not mentioning them. I am also grateful to the journal's editor and two anonymous reviewers for this journal; their hard work made this a better article than it would otherwise have been.

References

Antony, Louise. (2012) ‘Different Voices or Perfect Storm?Journal of Social Philosophy, 43, 227–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballantyne, Nathan. (2014) ‘Knockdown Arguments’. Erkenntnis, 79, 525–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Karen. (2017) Making Things Up. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassam, Quassim. (2014) Self-Knowledge for Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Currie, Adrian. (2019) Scientific Knowledge and the Deep Past: History Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currie, Adrian, and Sterelny, Kim. (2017) ‘In Defense of Story Telling’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 62, 1421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Currie, Adrian, and Walsh, Kirsten. (2019) ‘Frameworks in Philosophy and History’. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 9, 134.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur C. (1995) ‘The Decline and Fall of the Analytical Philosophy of History’. In Ankersmit, Frank and Kellner, Hans (eds.), A New Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 7088.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. (2001). Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, Tom, Baron, Sam, and Miller, Kristie. (2015) ‘Female Under-Representation among Philosophy Majors: A Map of the Hypotheses and a Survey of the Evidence’. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 1, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dray, William H. (1964) Philosophy of History. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Fine, Kit. (2001) ‘The Question of Realism’. Philosophers’ Imprint, 1, 130.Google Scholar
Frankish, Keith, ed. (2017) Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness London: Imprint Academic.Google Scholar
Hempel, Carl G. (1942) ‘The Function of General Laws in History’. Journal of Philosophy, 39, 3548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwich, Paul. (2012) Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Frank. (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Little, Daniel. (2017) ‘Philosophy of History’. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/history/.Google Scholar
Lewis, David. (1986) ‘Causal Explanation’. In Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press), 214–40.Google Scholar
Lycan, William G. (2019) On Evidence in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyer, Meredith, Cimpian, Andrei, and Leslie, Sarah-Jane. (2015) ‘Women Are Underrepresented in Fields Where Success Is Believed to Require Brilliance’. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin. (2011) Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Henry. (1999) Why Weren't We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth about our History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Railton, Peter. (1978) ‘A Deductive–Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation’. Philosophy of Science, 45, 206–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Railton, Peter. (1981) ‘Probability, Explanation, and Information’. Synthese, 48, 233–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosen, Gideon. (2010) ‘Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction’. In Hale, Bob and Hoffman, Aviv (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 109–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roth, Paul A. (2016) ‘Analytic Philosophy of History: Origins, Eclipse and Revival’. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 37, 351–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan. (2009) ‘On What Grounds What’. In Chalmers, David, Manley, David, and Wasserman, Ryan (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (New York: Clarendon Press), 247383.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan. (2016a) ‘Ground Rules: Lessons from Wilson’. In Aizawa, Kenneth and Gillett, Carl (eds.), Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground (London: Palgrave-MacMillan), 143–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan. (2016b) ‘Grounding in the Image of Causation’. Philosophical Studies, 173, 49100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaffer, Jonathan. (2017) ‘Laws for Metaphysical Explanation’. Philosophical Issues, 27, 302–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sellars, Wilfrid. (1962) ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’. In Colodny, Robert (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 3578.Google Scholar
Skow, Bradford. (2016) Reasons Why. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoljar, Daniel. (2017) Philosophical Progress: In Defense of a Reasonable Optimism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoljar, Daniel. (2019) ‘Williamson on Laws and Progress in Philosophy’. Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, 56, 3742.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Inwagen, Peter. (2004) ‘Freedom to Break the Laws’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 28, 334–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Inwagen, Peter. (2009) ‘Listening to Clifford's Ghost’. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 65, 1535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Inwagen, Peter. (2010) ‘We're Right. They're Wrong’. In Feldman, Richard and Warfield, Ted A. (eds.), Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1028.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Inwagen, Peter. (2016) ‘In Defense of Transcendent Universals’. In Calemi, Francesco F. (ed.), Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honor of David Malet Armstrong (Berlin: De Gruyter), 5170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Bernard. (2000) ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’. Philosophy, 75, 477–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, Timothy. (2007) The Philosophy of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, Timothy. (2018) Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jessica M. (2014) ‘No Work for a Theory of Grounding’. Inquiry, 57, 535–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar