for me both Marxists and Randians are ideologues like the dogmatic religionists just because they posit some old "one way for all". It seems to me we all inhabit the same world in the empirical sense of "world"―but on the other hand beyond that we each inhabit our own worlds, which are microcosms, along with our family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. — Janus

Are you comfortable with an approach to philosophy which takes as its subject matter not claims for universally true content (a dogmatically correct way the substantive world is , whether ethically, epistemologically, or ontologically), but the sorts of content-free general descriptions that you have offered (“there is a sense in which everyone practices philosophy, even if they unconsciously adopt presuppositions about how they ought to live”, “we each inhabit our own worlds”). This is a way of using philosophy to speak generally of the utterly particular.

↪J I think Heidegger is referring to his distinction between between vorhanden "present at hand" knowledge and zuhanden "ready to hand" wisdom. I see that distinction as being basically similar to the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". — Janus

Yes, good point. But the ready to hand can itself reify experience. My response to J focuses on Heidegger’s critique of technology, which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings.

…the standing-reserves do not possess constancy in the sense of a steady, unchanged presence. The kind of presencing of the standing-reserves is orderability… The transformation of the presence of what-is-present from objectiveness to orderability is, however, also the precondition for the fact that something like the cybernetic way of representation can emerge and lay claim to the role of the universal science at all.”

It seems that when we speak of anything we are bound to generalize, so I see generalizations as necessary, but acknowledge that they can be misleading, because our experience is itself particular to each of us. I am not in favour of absolutist thinking, with the traditional idea that there are timeless truths, but at the same time I think there are some basic general cross-cultural truths about the human condition.

I agree with the critique of the human tendency to view nature and other humans as mere resources. I'm afraid I cannot understand just what the quoted passage is getting at. Would you care to unpack it according to your understanding?

So from Williamson's standpoint, @Joshs is doing bad philosophy—obscure, unstructured, and unconcerned with convergence or clarity.

But from a Heideggerian or Derridean standpoint, Williamson is doing bad philosophy—blind to its own historical situatedness, epistemologically naive, and overly committed to scientistic ideals.

How do we move past this?

How do we move past this? — Banno

Acknowledge that there are different styles of philosophy with very different aims. It seems that the Postmodernists aimed to develop new conceptual lenses―novel ways of thinking. I see this as being a kind of literary philosophy―about as determinate as the aesthetic ideas of beauty or quality.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? Does he need to take that into account? If he tried to do that would not his accounts of our historical situatedness be themselves historically situated? Then we might need an account of the historical situatedness of the account of historical situatedness. Easy enough to see where this is headed. It seems we inevitably must begin from where we are and we cannot attain a "god's eye" view of our situatedness, and nor do we need to to begin to inquire into whatever it is we wish to inquire.

The demand to include historicist considerations seems like the idea we've encountered on these forums of a purported "blind spot of science".

Why should, for that matter how could, any investigatory discipline in the natural sciences take into account "the subject"? For example, how to include an account of the subject in geology. I've asked this question of the proponents of the "blind spot" and received no answer, or even an attempt at an answer.

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why?

Well, first, it resolves the problem of seemingly presupposing giveness as a spontaneous, self-contained movement of potency to act, which would seem to make the world untinelligible. If something can just be given, "for no reason at all," or "no reason in particular," then there is no way to explain why the world is one way and not any other, no way to explain man's progress towards self-determining freedom, or the Good as such. The charge of solipsism against Kant always made some sense to me—not that he suggests it—but that it seems like he might actually be implying it against his will. But, and it's been a while, when I was reading Husserl's later stuff it sort of struck me as in some ways coming close to "Kant with extra steps."

For one thing, the starting position of even allowing the Descartes and Kant has strong cases we must 'overcome' strikes me as giving up too much (which goes along with assuming too much).

How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning?

Well, consider my original question, in what way is this even a "ground?" Does it secure the authority of reason? Does it explain it in virtue of its causes or principles? Is the cause of giveness giveness-itself, man self-moving and spontaneously self-creating? The purely descriptive is not really a "ground" in the traditional sense. It is not a first principle either. And there is the issue I mentioned before where other "Great Names" attempt the same exercise and come to a radically different conclusion from Husserl, which seems to me to cast doubt on what we are to make about claims to have stepped behind all mediation. This same issue haunts the Greater Logic. Even advocates like Houlgate readily admit people following the same method are unlikely to come to the same "deductions."

How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity?

Many ways, consider for instance personalism. Persons are ontologically basic, but people are also more fully persons when they are unified in the Good, etc.

Like I said in the other thread, the idea that immediate sensation is maximally unabstract is a presupposition that enters the door with Enlightenment materialism. I don't think it's an obvious conclusion; indeed Hegel's point is that this is the sort of least stable phenomena, devoid of content, and so the least itself and its own ground, the most abstract. The inability to transcend these sorts of presuppositions is partly why I think there is no truly post-modern philosophy, just the same trend of nominalism and individualism cranked continually upwards.

Consider the etiology of "reify' in "res," and it becomes clear that the idea that moving away from immediate sensation as "reifying" is itself a loaded metaphysical supposition, just one that is often being ignored and taken for granted by "bracketing" (arguably, simply dogmatically assumed if this is then used to supplant metaphysical inquiry). It's true that some thinkers do the opposite, and elevate the universal inappropriately. But I think the more subtle thinkers on this topic are often at pains to elevate neither of the "two streams"—particular or universal—over the other. Rather, they are like Ezekiel's two wheels, passing through one another, each reflecting the other and revealing it.

Of course, if one just assumes nominalism as a starting point by bracketing out realism a priori, one has already elevated the individual, but that's not the same thing as justifying that move, so I think that's one of the difficulties to be addressed. If we presuppose that phenomenology can be understood without reference to what lies outside the bracket we have already cleaved the part from the whole and declared the whole subsistent; or declared the part the whole (solipsism).

Subsistent-Bing-Itself cannot be an "abstraction." It is rather most subsistent, most determined by itself, etc. Being truly infinite, it is not contained in any "abstraction,' hence the via negativa and analogia entis. Whereas the giveness of human phenomenology is always referred outside itself. Being radically contingent, it cannot be its own ground (unless it is self-moving potency), or so the concern goes.

Plus, we might consider descriptions of an a full move around intelligibility and mediation. Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her stroke is an interesting one. Yet it is not obvious that we best know being, cutting through illusion, when we are undergoing severe brain damage that disrupts our faculties

if we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

How can you imprison transcendence? If it is imprisoned, it has simply failed to be truly transcendent. The true infinite isn't a prison, because it is beyond all concepts; e.g. Dionysius, Plotinus, etc. That Nietzsche never studied this tradition and projected the popular 19th century German Protestant pietism he grew up with backwards onto the whole of Christian (and Jewish, Islamic, and Pagan) thought is not really a failing of those traditions, but of Nietzsche as a source of historical analysis. This is also why I wouldn't put him beyond modernity. The God of the German Reformers looms large in the Overman. So too for Heidegger, projecting Suarez back onto the whole of scholastic philosophy, although I will allow he has a vastly better grasp.

You have to appreciate these remarks in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technology. When he says that the “immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries”” , he equates the the familiar and immediately effective with the technologizing instrumentalism of empirical science as well as the Cartesian metaphysics that grounds it.Philosophy cannot be the mere putting into practice of a pre-conceived plan. — Joshs

Thanks, that's helpful, and probably connects with @Janus's insight about "knowing that" and "knowing how." As long as we acknowledge that Heidegger's context in re technology is not the only one from which terms like "essential thinking" can be evaluated, I'm fine with it. Well, that's not quite true . . . in general, I wish Heidegger and other continentals could be a little less pompous in their language. But as I don't read German and would to have struggle through difficult French, I don't really know their language, so perhaps that's unfair. Suffice to say, it doesn't translate well.

I think Heidegger is referring to his distinction between between vorhanden "present at hand" knowledge and zuhanden "ready to hand" wisdom. I see that distinction as being basically similar to the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how". — Janus

The connection seems right to me. I'm willing to believe that Heidegger at least had this partially in mind, especially given what @Joshs says above, about the tension between the two types of "rationalization" that so many philosophers were concerned with at that time. As Josh writes, the fear is of a process "which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings." How do we prevent "rationality" from becoming Weberian "rationalizing," the instrumentalization of the world? What is "at hand" can be taken either way.

But I also think the Heidegger passage is more combative than that. He writes:

such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries.

"Prevented" is very strong, especially when coupled with "in its truth." If he'd said, "in its misunderstanding" or "in its misapplication," that might be different. But H seems to want it both ways: "What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology."

What I really think: This is all rhetoric of a bygone moment in philosophy. We can find plenty to think about in Being and Time without worrying about whether H was often defensive and hyperbolic.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? Does he need to take that into account? If he tried to do that would not his accounts of our historical situatedness be themselves historically situated? Then we might need an account of the historical situatedness of the account of historical situatedness. Easy enough to see where this is headed. It seems we inevitably must begin from where we are and we cannot attain a "god's eye" view of our situatedness, and nor do we need to to begin to inquire into whatever it is we wish to inquire. — Janus

Exactly, we must begin from where we are. But if we take where we are in a traditional way that understands temporality in static terms as an endless series of punctual ‘nows’ , where the past and future are interpreted on the basis of an already fixed present, then taking historical situatedness into account would seem to involve an infinite regress. By contrast, if beginning from where we are is beginning from a more radical notion of temporality and history, where our past and present come to us already remade by where we are headed, then thinking historical situatedness is thinking past, present and future together as the ‘now’, and thinking from within the ‘now’ as the event of transit.

The historiographical, as the word itself is supposed to indicate, refers to the past insofar as it is explored and presented, either expressly or inexpressly, from the perspective of what happens to be the present. Every historiographical consideration turns the past as such into an object... It is now clear that happenings and history are not what is by- gone and what is considered as such, i.e., the historiographical. But just as little is this happening the present. The happening and the happenings of history are primordially and always the future, that which in a concealed way comes toward us, a revelatory process that puts us at risk, and thus is compelling in ad vance. The future is the beginning of all happening.

The historical does not denote a manner of grasping and exploring but the very happening itself. The historical is not the past, not even the present, but the future, that which is commended to the will, to expectation, to care. This does not allow itself to be "considered"; instead, we must "reflect" on it. We have to be concerned with the meaning, the possible standards, the necessary goals, the ineluctable powers, and that from which all human happenings begin. These goals and powers can be such that they have already come to pass -in a hidden way-long ago but are precisely therefore not the past but what still abides and is awaiting the liberation of its influence. The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning, that which-withdrawing itself constantly-reaches back the farthest and at the same time reaches forward the farthest. (Basic Questions of Philosophy)

Williamson finishes by explicitly acknowledging that his own essay does not meet the criteria it advocates.

He couldn't, becasue the essay is not an argument as such, so much as an aesthetic critique. He is showing us again what is beautiful in philosophy, and what isn't. — Banno

This is possibly the most interesting part of the paper, for me. We could take W's remark to mean two things:

1) I have not lived up to the highest possible standards of rigor here, though I have tried.

2) The nature of what I am saying in this paper contradicts, or at least blurs, the whole idea that the only good philosophy is "rigorous" philosophy of the sort it advocates.

I rather take him to be saying the former. But I think he ought to say the latter, perhaps along the lines that you paraphrase.

Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamson’s piece is fundamentally rhetorical: — Banno

If "rhetorical" is taken as the alternative to "argumentative," then yes. But rhetoric often gets rejected as not philosophy at all -- and sometimes for good reason. W's paper is very clearly philosophy. But from its very title, "Must Do Better," it is meant to be ameliorative. A certain course is being recommended, not merely analyzed. What sort of philosophy is that?

What is philosophy for?

That's the question that will decide what you think philosophy is, and how you will do philosophy. — Banno

Or we can pose a question Witt might pose: Is this language on holiday? in this sense: We seem to be asking for a definition, or at least a useful description, of an activity that, among other things, constantly asks the question "What is philosophy?" Does a question about itself still mean anything?

I think it does, and believe strongly in the self-reflexive character of philosophy, but I'm not sure how to fit that into a question about what philosophy is, or is for. Not saying it can't be done, I'm just uncertain how to proceed.

Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamson’s piece is fundamentally rhetorical:
— Banno
If "rhetorical" is taken as the alternative to "argumentative," then yes. But rhetoric often gets rejected as not philosophy at all -- and sometimes for good reason. W's paper is very clearly philosophy. — J

I don't disagree with you. But I would go much further. We warp our understanding of philosophy by thinking that rhetoric is something that can be removed from our use of language, like cutting out the rotten bits of an apple. Rhetoric is often assumed to be an optional strategy, mostly relied on by those who do not have good arguments. Argumentation is not an alternative to rhetoric. When arguments are presented to an audience/readership, it is an attempt to persuade and consequently rhetoric. Much of what is labelled rhetoric is not an alternative to argumentation, it is simply bad argumentation.

Rhetoric covers a wide range of facets of writing. Good writing always invoves these as well. It's a cliche, that when we dress, we never simply cover our nakedness or announce our membership of some social group. Whether we intend to or not, we give an impression of the kind of person we are how we are feeling and much else. So we think about the effect we will have on people and dress accordingly. It's no different with language.

This post is intended to draw your attention, not necessarily to persuade you. But it is not difficult to see it in whatever you read, if you look for it. After a while, you can see the rhetoric in any writing - including the writing of whatever brilliant philosophers you love most.

Consider this from Williamson's last paragraph. He is talking about Dummett:-

But when participants in a debate are allowed to throw out both (Sc. the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle simultaneously, methodological alarm bells should ring

So he is representing the debate as something like a boxing match. When a foul is committed the referee stops the match and makes the participants start again. That's not even possible in a philosophical discussion. If Dummett has committed a foul, someone will likely call him out and he will either accept the criticism and take the remark back or not. There's no referee. Why does he present things in this way?

The argumentation is not at issue here. It's about the way that (professional) philosophy works.

W's paper is very clearly philosophy. — J

I think that's actually an open question, particularly given Williamson's standards.

It's certainly chitchat *about* philosophy, but it's not a piece of philosophical work itself, if that work is understood as rigorously analysing some issue, building a theory, criticizing another theory, addressing a criticism, all that nuts and bolts *work*.

And I have some sympathy with that view, and have said before that the overwhelming majority of my own posts are just chitchat, sometimes gossip, like talk in the faculty lounge or at a bar. Now and then I've done some actual work here, but not often. There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking.

You'll want an example. Suppose a couple old friends, mathematicians, are having dinner, and the Continuum Hypothesis comes up. They could chat about their intuitions, about implications of a result, prospects for a result, work that's been done. Very well-informed discussion, and possibly a discussion that would give one of them the impetus to work out and publish something related, but it's not really the work itself. It's still just chitchat. Possibly valuable, and no doubt this sort of thing is very important to the progress of the field, but it's not the actual work.

It looks like there's room to theorize about that, as a contribution to the sociology of mathematics or something, but that's still not mathematics.

Anyway, that's the hard view. I'd like to be able to state the opposing view as clearly, but it's quite a bit more difficult. I think you'd want to abolish the distinction between the practice of mathematics and its products (proofs, concepts, etc), so that there's a point to blending together proof-making practice and other things like chatting about math. You might even want to abolish the individual mathematician as the agent of a practice or author of a proof. In other words, a rigorous, coherent version of treating chatting about math as part and parcel of mathematical practice, just as much as working out proofs, is going to look awfully continental awfully quickly.

Or so I suspect. Maybe there's a less revolutionary way to pull that off. But I don't think acknowledging the truism that mathematicians talk to one another and that's important amounts to a real theory.

So thinking being the male and its object being the female?

Metaphorically. Or maybe archetypally. — Srap Tasmaner

More simply, the idea that beauty and intelligence seek out beauty and intelligence. Thinking well will seek out a high object of thought, and a high object of thought will attract strong thinking. It doesn't really matter which is associated with male or female, but even sociologically we see that males tend to take on the role of pursuer, and therefore it is natural to compare the beautiful and intelligent man seeking out a beautiful and intelligent wife to the "thinking well" seeking out a beautiful object.

Another way to say this might be that good thinking is portable, which I think most of us want to believe, but I suspect the evidence there is a little mixed. Right from Socrates we get, "If you want to know about horses, do you ask a physician or a horse breeder?" — Srap Tasmaner

I don't find that mixed. Anyone who thinks well about one thing will therefore—ceteris paribus—think well about other things. It doesn't follow that the physician knows more about horses than the horse breeder. What follows is that the physician will think better about horses than the non-physician (i.e. ceteris paribus).

Maybe the point you are making is that generalists tend to be better all-around thinkers than specialists? I agree with that too.

Yet another way to put this might be that the good reasoning that went into a good piece of thinking, or the good thinking that went into a good decision, ought to be 'extractable', that you in your field (or life) could learn from someone else doing something else. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. :up:

And that again relies on a distinction between the movements of a mind and its object. To draw them back together, as you are inclined to do, would be instead to distinguish reason from instrumental rationality, giving to reason not only the expertise in reaching the desired result but something like the 'proper' selection of a goal, or of an object of thought. Instrumental rationality would then be only part of reason, not the whole thing.

Is that close to your view? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that seems fair. But I don't think I've said that explicitly, and I would be wary about how someone is inferring that view.

For example, when you say, "philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about," you have already drawn together thought and object according to the very definition of philosophy. So I feel as though I can also draw them together simply in virtue of your own definition. In fact the whole notion of "what is important to think about" is presumably going to be troublesome for any view which resists the thesis that some things are more important than others—for any view that privileges methodology over object.

-

If we take a step back I think we have this:

• Leontiskos: The most uncontroversial point of departure for philosophy is Socrates and Plato.
• Srap Tasmaner: I agree, and therefore philosophy is "thinking well about what it is important to think about."
• Leontiskos: I agree.
• Srap Tasmaner: I would say that non-Analytic philosophy does think about what is important, but it does not think well.*
• Leontiskos: I would say that Analytic philosophy does think well, but not about what is important.

How do we adjudicate this question? I would point to all of the non-Analytic philosophers who think well about what is most important. First and foremost, we have again Socrates and Plato. After that I am thinking of people like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Charles De Koninck, Peter Simpson, Gyula Klima, etc. (I could also add continental thinkers, but I omit them for the sake of argument). Analytic and rigorous methods have been used for millennia, and I myself was trained in a kind of Analytic Thomism which was very comfortable with ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious reasoning. This whole notion that one must choose between rigor of method and import of subject matter strikes me as a non-starter.

Gödel is a very interesting example. A theist who thinks well, applies his thinking to God, and thinks quite a bit better than the Logical Positivists (in virtue of his incompleteness theorems). He is the guy who does Analytic philosophy better than the Analytic philosophers, and who also does not limit himself to the objects of thought to which Analytic philosophers tend to limit themselves. I don't see that as coincidental or uncommon.

Anyway, that's the hard view. I'd like to be able to state the opposing view as clearly, but it's quite a bit more difficult. — Srap Tasmaner

The opposing view that I favor can be brought into view by looking at amateurs rather than "professionals." It's not as easy to tell the difference between an amateur who is engaging in "chit-chat" (or else unprincipled reasoning), and an amateur who is engaging in philosophy.* Nevertheless, that difference is still crucial in the case of the amateur, and yet it cannot turn as heavily on what are essentially professional methodologies. More simply: just because the amateur is not capable of understanding or utilizing professional methodologies, he is not therefore barred from true philosophy. This is precisely where I see Williamson faltering. He highlights very well the crux in the paragraph I pointed out, but then he seems to at least partially fall away from that clear insight, into a preference for specific methodologies.

(In Plato we see clearly the idea that the "professional" is not necessarily the most philosophical.)


* In fact I think it is also hard to tell in the case of the "professional," but I am leaving this aside for the sake of argument.

But I also think the Heidegger passage is more combative than that. He writes:

such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries.

"Prevented" is very strong, especially when coupled with "in its truth." If he'd said, "in its misunderstanding" or "in its misapplication," that might be different. But H seems to want it both ways: "What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology — J

I know it sounds like he’s celebrating obscurity for its own sake, as critics of postmodern writers have a field day accusing them of doing. But what he’s trying to say is that, as Wittgenstein would agree, to understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way, in a fresh context. To treat what is understood as already familiar as a derivative of a pre-existing scheme or picture is to render it meaningless, to fail to understand it in Heidegger’s primordial sense. We do of course comport ourselves toward things in this everyday way all the time, but in doing so we fail to recognize this mode of interpreting the world as derivative and secondary.

Srap Tasmaner: I would say that non-Analytic philosophy does think about what is important, but it does not think well.* — Leontiskos

For the record, of course I didn't say that, even inadvertently.

Leontiskos: I would say that Analytic philosophy does think well, but not about what is important. — Leontiskos

This, on the other hand -- I'll admit I was trying to coax someone into saying exactly this. Not with any particular goal in mind, it's just that this is what people always say about philosophy in the analytic tradition, so I wanted to sort of set a place at the table for this view.

Thinking well will seek out a high object of thought, and a high object of thought will attract strong thinking. — Leontiskos

@Hanover did you read the other essays in the Dover collection that has "The Will to Believe"? In one of them -- and I can't dig it out just now -- James makes a similar claim about the human mind needing an object adequate to its capacity, or something, and that object is God, the ultimate object of thought. Does that ring a bell?

Maybe that's also in the title essay, I don't remember.

For the record, of course I didn't say that, even inadvertently. — Srap Tasmaner

Well I gave the quote where you seem to say that implicitly, and in the context of comments about Analytic philosophy.

This, on the other hand -- I'll admit I was trying to coax someone into saying exactly this. Not with any particular goal in mind, it's just that this is what people always say about philosophy in the analytic tradition, so I wanted to sort of set a place at the table for this view. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Those are two well-represented views on TPF.

Acknowledge that there are different styles of philosophy with very different aims — Janus

...discourse and dissection. So I'll go back to the suggested demarcation criteria, that we stop just making shit up when we start dissecting, and that this is what marks the move form myth making to doing philosophy.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? — Janus

He explicitly situates himself within realism within the realism/antirealism debate within analytic philosophy. But the expectation is that he explicitly situate himself in Heidegger's history.

"What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology."

What I really think: This is all rhetoric of a bygone moment in philosophy. We can find plenty to think about in Being and Time without worrying about whether H was often defensive and hyperbolic. — J

The work done on Heidegger that made progress was that which interprets it in analytic terms, and dissects it accordingly - Dreyfus, Brandom, Carman...

All somewhat tangential.

Finished my first read. Something I think worth noting from the conclusion:

Unless names are invidiously named, sermons like this one tend to cause less
offence than they should, because everyone imagines that they are aimed at other people. — Timothy Williamson

I was impressed by that because I began to think while reading "Is this just a sermon?"

Well, not just -- but an earnest sermon to pay attention to.

Still mulling, but there's a lot of good reflections in there. (And, actually, I thought the paper had demonstrated its point at around page 15-ish)

Excellent post. Yes, one cannot write without writing rhetorically. It's no depreciation of the paper to point out that it is rhetorical or aesthetic.

*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*—what he elsewhere calls "the philosopher’s genuine rebirth" . — Joshs

thought Williamson didn't go far enough in naming names.

I wish I could claim this came from recollection, but I found this, from The Sentiment of Rationality, which I haven't read, but got a couple cool quotes from:

“The mind asks for a universe that suits it, and must believe in such a universe or despair.”

And also:

“The deepest need of our nature is not to be rational, but to believe that life is worth living.”

The unapologetic idea that belief arises from needs and wants is such a profoundly different worldview than a scientific one that pretends objectivity. "Pretend" is my bias in that sentence.

What follows wasn't intended as a bit of silliness as I began writing it, but I think that's what it turned out to be. It may provide amusement if not insight.

For my money, Williamson strikes his best chord in the second paragraph on page 10, beginning, "Discipline from..." — Leontiskos

Let's talk about that then. Here's the whole paragraph:

Discipline from semantics is only one kind of philosophical discipline. It is insufficient by itself for the conduct of a philosophical inquiry, and may sometimes fail to be useful, when the semantic forms of the relevant linguistic constructions are simple and obvious. But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, …) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, …). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip-service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. Of course, each form of philosophical discipline is itself contested by some philosophers. But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything. It may be a reason to welcome methodological diversity in philosophy: if different groups in philosophy give different relative weights to various sources of discipline, we can compare the long-run results of the rival ways of working. Tightly constrained work has the merit that even those who reject the constraints can agree that it demonstrates their consequences. — pp 10f

There's a bit of a muddle at the beginning, because he says

(P) Discipline from semantics is by itself sufficient for the conduct of a philosophical inquiry.

is false.

Insufficient, so something else must be needed. But then he says you need something else when the following condition holds:

(D/s-) Philosophy is not disciplined by semantics.

But the denial of (P) already guarantees that when philosophy is disciplined by semantics, it must also be disciplined by something else as well.

The condition suggested in (P) is a conjunction:

(D/s) Philosophy is disciplined by semantics.
(D/o) Philosophy is disciplined by some other field.

Then (P) is the claim that philosophy is disciplined when both (D/s) and (D/o) hold.

But that means there are two ways for (D/s-) to hold: failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o).

Suppose (D/s-) holds because (D/s) fails: philosophy needs another source of discipline because it is missing semantics. If it happens that (D/o) holds ― so there already was another source ― you need yet another one. Which he will address:

philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously.

Only (D/s-) seems to rule out the possibility of being disciplined by a single field, so this condition can never hold.

But what about the other way for (D/s-) to hold: (D/s) holds but (D/o) fails; philosophy is disciplined by semantics but not by anything else (and so is not disciplined). Then philosophy needs to be disciplined by something else, precisely because it is not already disciplined by something else.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined".

This is rather unfortunate. Because Williamson is a classical logic man, the language of sufficiency and necessity comes readily to hand (it's all over that paragraph), and he's inclined to piece together his thoughts in conditionals (which point one way or the other, depending). But what he wants to describe is quantitative, not an all or nothing business, so by the end of the paragraph we're relying more and more on quantifiers to round out the picture ― one is not enough, several are needed, and "not any" is right out.

But what he really seems to need is measurement: how disciplined is this practice, to be answered by checking first how many other disciplines are brought to bear, and then checking how well the practice is disciplined by each. He seems to recognize this because he points out that "different groups in philosophy [might] give different relative weights to various sources of discipline," which is to say that their practice might be more or less disciplined by a given field.

The numerical model is clearly what's needed ― so why didn't we start there? Why does the model begin with "is" and "isn't", "insufficient" this and "necessary" that? Why does it sound like he wants to say "Be disciplined rather than undisciplined" when it will turn out, quite soon, that he means "Be more disciplined by more things, rather than less disciplined by fewer things"?

It's not a very interesting question, in itself, but I think there's an answer: this is a quirk of the way Williamson's mind works.

His two central pieces of work are on vagueness and knowledge. As I understand it, the work on vagueness supports the view that vague predicates do, as a matter of fact, have a sharp, definitive cutoff for when they apply and when they don't: there is a number of hairs on a man's head, having one fewer than which makes him bald. But ― and this is the curious bit ― we are unable to know what that cutoff is. I understand this was called the "margin of error" argument.

Come along to knowledge ― much of this I've actually read. There are several theses to this work, but one of them is the "luminosity" argument: knowledge is a mental state which an agent definitely is or is not in, but it is generally not luminous, meaning the agent generally cannot know whether he is in that state or not. Why not? Because the difference between being in a state of knowledge and not being in a state of knowledge is too fine for us to reliably discriminate between them. He argues for this by showing that between two states apparently easily distinguished you can interpose stages that take you gradually from one to the other, so gradually that failing to reliably discriminate each step, you cannot claim to reliably discriminate the easy cases. It's a boiling frog argument. Or a slippery slope.

It's obvious enough that the positions are related. (I don't remember clearly whether he notes the similarity in his book, but I do recall him mentioning the work on vagueness, so he probably does.)

Now what about discipline? Here again, he seems to want to stake out what we might call "realism about discipline" ― i.e., that there is a fact of the matter about whether you are or aren't ― but where he ends up is with this scale of gradations between being disciplined and undisciplined.

Now what you'd expect from his other work (I believe this paper falls between vagueness and knowledge) is that the important corollary to the discovery of this area of gradation between disciplined and undisciplined, is that we cannot know for sure where we fall on it! We may indeed be doing proper disciplined philosophy, but we cannot know it.

Well, he certainly can't say that! The whole point of the lecture is that you should make sure you are properly disciplined, so this must be something you can do, and you must be able to know whether you are doing it or not. Otherwise, it's just "try to", which he's clearly not going to countenance.

One more little note. I think I've told this story elsewhere, but it'll have a different point now. Williamson somewhere tells the story of explaining Gettier problems to an economist, who was entirely nonplussed. "What's the big deal?" he asks. "So there are exceptions, so what? All models are wrong." Williamson reflects on this and thinks maybe the economist is onto something and that philosophers should take a stab at this model-building business. (I believe he took his own advice and collaborated with more numerical types on at least one paper.) ― So this is the odd thing: Williamson is a diehard realist of the first order, all of whose work seems to force on him a recognition of degrees and weights and multiple factors that should be considered in building a model, but either he cannot bring himself to join the Bayesian revolution @GrahamJ has recommended to us (and where I'm inclined to land, truth be told), or his own practice already falls on the "more Bayesian" end of the scale, but he is unable to know it.

"The Sentiment of Rationality" is one of my favorites, but not the one I was thinking of. I found what I had in mind in the next essay, "Reflex Action and Theism":

Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. I must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which, if he did exist, would form the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward reality of a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation. Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible, if the human mind be in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction which we at the outset allowed.

I think he's saying you could discipline your philosophy purely by semantics, but it's likely to end up "distorted." He might mean that you could end up with a theory that's semantically unafflicted, but which carries a glaring logical fallacy. Obviously the reverse could happen if you just use logic as your discipline: it's logical, but it's language on holiday. We end up using multiple disciplines because experience warns us that we ought to.

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking. — Srap Tasmaner

I know what you mean, and the mathematical analogy makes clear what "actual philosophical work" might look like, on this view. But I think -- and don't you? -- that this view is wrong. Two reasons: First, to hold the view, you have to dispute or ignore the overwhelming consensus; you have to deny that all the "non-mathematical" philosophers are also doing philosophy.

Second, this view is ameliorative. It proposes a way that philosophy should be understood and practiced, and suggests that we come up with a different word for what the others are doing. This seems unnecessarily radical. As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, we have the same situation involving the post-structuralists or continentals, to speak loosely. I don't think we should encourage wrangles between overarching schools of thought and practice about who is "really" doing philosophy. I'm happy to read the Williamson paper as a defense of more rigor and care within analytic phil. I don't need to be persuaded additionally that this is the only way of being philosophical.

I took a class through Oxford a while back on philosophy of religion. It was entirely focused on analytic philosophy, mostly stuff since 1950. I recall thinking that one drawback here was that the "God" being considered seemed alien to all religious traditions.

At any rate, we read a number of articles on "The Problem of Evil." Did analytic techniques help here? I am not sure. I put the Brother's Karamazov far above any of the influential articles we read. Is it philosophy? Arguably not. But it's lent itself to a great many philosophical treatments. I mentioned Williams earlier. David Bentley Hart's book on theodicy also focuses on BK, as does a quite large body of scholarship that crosses from the literary into the philosophical and theological. But the methodology here is obviously going to be quite different from the analytic school. Likewise, MacIntyre probably cites more poems, dramas, and novels in After Virtue than philosophers, or at least it's about equal, but it's better for that.

Or, for a more direct example, we might consider how someone like Plantinga goes about showing how "God cannot create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it," is merely logically equivalent with "God can lift any rocks." Does this bit of work resolve the issue?

Not really, it simply misinterprets the problem by trying to squeeze it into formalism. The problem is much deeper. It is twofold. First, there is the ultimately contradictory nature of freedom as a total absence of constraint and sheer, undetermined movement of the will, constrained by no determinancy, which itself collapses into the contradiction that any choice at all, in being determinant, is a limitation of freedom (a point Hegel makes towards the opening of PR).

Second, we have a sort of self-reference in play in that the ability to "do anything" presumably would include to ability to make it so that one "cannot do anything." The unlimited contains within itself the potential for limitation. We perhaps have something of Hegel's "bad infinite" in play here. Either way, it's a thorny issue the formal solution simply obscures.

And I would say the exclusion of this sort of option is precisely why academic philosophy is increasingly irrelevant. If one looks at the best sellers on Amazon or Audible in "philosophy" it is overwhelmingly New Age, informed by Eastern thought, or religious. If one looks at philosophy sections in bookstores, which normally bracket out the religious and New Age to either side, you see Nietzsche and other, older existentialists dominating, as well as the old perennials (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) and a smattering of Enlightenment tomes. Some Continental stuff shows up, very little analytic.

Arguably, Continental philosophy still has a fairly large effect on culture through the arts and the humanities, although the effects on some fields like Classics hardly seem to its credit (e.g., publications quadruple as enrollment plunges by 80+% and big names in the field start openly calling for its own destruction). Analytic philosophy? Not so much. I suppose there is "effective altruism" and New Athiesm, but these aren't as obviously "analytic." Obviously, liberalism remains immensely influential, even totalitarian in some respects, but this isn't really "analytic" philosophy, but almost a sort of parallel, less Enlightenment-skeptic thread of Anglo-American thought that largely exists in the sciences and politics. This birthed the very influential, now hegemonic "neo-liberalism;" again, probably not to its credit.

A common theme in the move towards bracketing and siloing down philosophy, and these aforementioned streams, seems to be a sort of skepticism of man's capacities (a key thread of modernity from Luther and Calvin) and of logos itself, and also an almost tyrannical irony, particularly wherever optimism is concerned (e.g. "liberalism is the worst of all ideologies, except for all the others"). I think this helps explain New Age and Eastern texts supplanting these in book sales to some degree.

The difference is perhaps most obvious in ethics, where the entire focus seems to shift over to "what is right," theoria, and not "how do we make ourselves do what is right," i.e. praxis. What the New Age, Eastern, and religious texts have going for them is that they don't neglect praxis, or the need for "rhetoric" in motivating praxis.

One way this plays out is in the absolutely catastrophic job market for philosophy PhDs. This is, in a way, less extreme for some areas of philosophy, which can take advantage of adjacent fields and work in religious institutions. Particularly, the boom in classical schools offers a lot of positions with pay better than many university positions, but that's also a praxis heavy area of focus. By contrast, the main outlet for analytic PhDs tended to be computer coding, a field which seems to be facing its own devastating wave of automation. And, to my mind, teaching younger students at a classical school is vastly closer to the original aim than being forced into coding shopping and finance apps. But this is just part of a much larger issue in academia, the German model of the "research university" making "progress" the chief focus, and not cultivation and education. I will allow that the case for bracketing down philosophy to focus on tractable "progress" is at least significantly stronger than it is for some disciplines such as classics, and yet the same drive has been present in those fields as well.



Yes, this idea shows up a lot. There is, for instance, even in the athiest Leopardi a recognition of our orientation towards an infinite good, a desire that finds its rest in no thing. Robert M. Wallace is pretty good on this in Plato's conception and psychology of the Good and Hegel's true infinite. David Bentley Hart has an interesting article on this in "Ye Are God's" focusing on Nicholas of Cusa:

In Christ’s human—which is to say, rational—nature, we see the rational human spirit in its most intimate and most natural unity with divine Spirit, which is absolute reason, and the most intimate and natural unity of human intellect with divine intellect.31 And so on. One should not let the sheer grandiloquence of these apostrophes to the God-man distract one from their deepest import, or from the rigorous logic informing them. Because what Nicholas is also saying here, simply enough, is that in Christ the fullness of human nature is revealed precisely to the degree that it perfectly reveals the divine nature of which it is the image, and that human spirit achieves the highest expression of its nature only to the degree that it is perfectly united with divine Spirit. That is, in Christ we see that the only possible end for any rational nature
is divine because such also is its ground; apart from God drawing us from the first into ever more perfect union with himself, we do not exist at all. We are nothing but created gods coming to be, becoming God in God, able to become divine only because, in some sense, we are divine from the very first

The idea that the goal of philosophical education was to become "like onto God" was common to both pagan and Christian education in late-antiquity. I don't know if these can be excluded we philosophy without making some pretty dramatic assumptions about philosophocal anthropology.

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking. — Srap Tasmaner

So wouldn’t one have to do some philosophical work before one could draw that conclusion?

Could you be wrong here, and there is some degree of philosophical work buried in the thread?

Or is the point that, even observations like this one (namely, that this thread and Williamson’s afterword contain no philosophical work), are not properly ‘good philosophy’ until we can expressly show and see the work that goes into them? (Not meaning to call your observation improper philosophy, or maybe you are actually okay with that for purposes of this thread.)

I think -- and don't you? -- that this view is wrong. — J

I'll take another swing at it, and recast the question using a different analogy, instead of the mathematicians talking over dinner. (This will be something else I've talked about before, but there you go.)

If you look at a grade school math book, one with a chapter about "word problems", you'll see something like this:

Let A = the number of apples
and P = the number of pears

And from there you'll get equations that translate the conditions set out in the problem, and a demonstration of how to solve the problem once all this setup is done.

Introductory logic textbooks do something similar. In both cases, some students find it extremely difficult to do this "translation" into formal notation.

What's curious is this "Let A = ..." business. On its face, that's not ordinary English such as the problem is written in. It's also not just mathematical notation, and apparently isn't exactly math at all — what kind of "equation" could that be?!

"Let A = ..." is a sort of snapshot of the translation process. A bit of intermediate work product. Not exactly ordinary English, not exactly math, but some of the connective tissue that embeds mathematics in our lives and without which mathematics would be pointless, meaningless, and inapplicable.

There are some corollaries: the learning of mathematics is inconceivable without this intermediary "mathematical English," which is what math teachers speak most of the day, and what students speak when answering questions; similarly, the work of mathematics, the practice of mathematicians, is mostly carried on in a more developed form of this same mathematical English. No article in any mathematics journal has ever consisted entirely of notation — not to mention the fact that published proofs are not genuinely formal proofs but more like sketches or summaries of what such a thing would look like.

And so it is with philosophy.

Now, there are still differences between the three sorts of paragraphs you find in a math textbook, the English, the mathematical, and the transitional. Not all of them exactly *are* math, but all are necessary to math and for math even to be a thing.

And so I think it is with philosophy. It's not really a matter of formalism at all, but more like the distinction in a legal opinion between the actual decision, the language of which is binding on parties, and obiter dicta, which could be important to understanding the decision and complying with it, but which does not have the force of law. (Maybe I should have gone for this analogy first.)

Now, there are still differences between the three sorts of paragraphs you find in a math textbook, the English, the mathematical, and the transitional. Not all of them exactly *are* math, but all are necessary to math and for math even to be a thing.

And so I think it is with philosophy. It's not really a matter of formalism at all, but more like the distinction in a legal opinion between the actual decision, the language of which is binding on parties, and obiter dicta, — Srap Tasmaner

So would you still have to say?:

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking.
— Srap Tasmaner — Fire Ologist