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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Is Philosophy at the “peak of maturity” or a subject in decay?

Brian Leiter

Dr. Lillehammer also raises an interesting question at the end of his review:

“Is it a sign of maturity or decay when an area of philosophy reaches a stage where virtually every possible view, however implausible, is represented by a treatise-length study written in its defense? Do contemporary debates about modality, properties, causation, or the mind-body problem represent philosophy at its peak of maturity, or are these debates paradigm examples of a subject in decay?”

The question is not unrelated to the worry raised by Daniel Dennett in “The Higher Order Truths of Chmess” . Dennett asks us to imagine the game of “chmess,” which “is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one.” Dennett notes that, “There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess.”

But says Dennett, noting Donald Hebb’s dictum that, “If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well,”:

“Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other’s laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say….

“One good test to make sure you’re not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you’re right about whether Jones’s counterexample works against Smith’s principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don’t ‘get it,’ you really should consider the hypothesis that you’re following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.”

I’ve opened comments, and invite philosophers to react to the issues raised above; no anonymous postings, as always. And please bear in mind that I take neither Dr. Lillehammer nor Professor Dennett to be disputing Timothy Williamson’s point in his contribution to The Future for Philosophy that, “Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.”

UPDATE: There is an exceptionally lucid and quite compelling explanation here by Daniel Nolan (Philosophy, St. Andrews) of why the “Twin Earth” thought experiments (which Chris Bertram [Philosophy, Bristol] had mentioned on the same site as a possible example of “chmess”) are philosophically important, illuminating fundamental issues that philosophy ought to address.

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12 responses to “Is Philosophy at the “peak of maturity” or a subject in decay?”

  1. Andy Streich

    "Is it a sign of maturity or decay when an area of philosophy reaches a stage where virtually every possible view, however implausible, is represented by a treatise-length study written in its defense?" asks Dr.Lillehammer.

    I answer, "Decay." And wonder if someone can show me what I'm missing.

    I am not a professional philosopher; I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy from a small college. But I stopped at that point and pursued a different course of study in graduate school when I could not see how philosophy as it is done today, the academic professional sort I think Lillehammer is refering to, would enhance life — mine or others — in any significant way.

    Do philosophers (again, professional ones) work outside of academia? I know of just one, an ethicist at a hospital. She has a PhD in philosophy from a large mid-western university and was the chair of a small philosophy department at a small college for 15 years or so before taking her current position. Can there be that many more out there beyond the ivory towers?

    Does the work of philosophy affect people, society, and other areas of study? Perhaps it is more like chamber music, keeping something a live for a small number of people to appreciate. There is merit in that, but it seems to me that chamber music contributes more to society than contemporary philosophy.

    Timothy Williamson's phrase "the long haul of technical reflection" is brilliant. And he goes on to say, "Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.” Well, math and the sciences are technical, serious subjects which have obvious and direct influence on people, the world, and our body of useful knowledge. What of philosophy today?

    I trust there is another side to this that someone will offer. I love some contemporary work in philosophy and am delighted there are still people who can play the Beethoven string quartets. They are both an aesthetic pleasure for me. What have I missed in the nearly 20 years since my last philosophy course? How might I have benefitted or been able to benefit others had I remained on my original path?

    Reply
  2. jdsm

    The question seems to be directed at the idea that professional philosophers tend to pick a minute area of research and then milk it for all its analytical worth, regardless of whether they think it might get us any closer to answering the question it seeks to answer. I used to think that was a waste of time but I've actually changed my mind.

    What you're after is progress in answering the questions of philosophy. The obvious path is to see what you think is right and then follow it to see if it stands up. Unfortuntaley, it's not clear that it is the most productive way to proceed. As in science, a lot of insights are discovered by accident while generally working on other things or just messing around and playing with things. It's an indirect but I would guess fruitful path to progress to have professional philosophers exploring every avenue until it bleeds.

    While I think it may be the best path to progress it does put a dent in the philosopher's conception of himself as a seeker of truth. Most professional philosophers do seem to prefer messing around with clever arguments than actually answering the questions. They do philosophy for its own sake. It's useful in the long run but I can see why it's a turn off for those genuinely wanting answers.

    Jonathon Martin
    Graduate Student
    University of Helsinki

    Reply
  3. Ralph Wedgwood

    I would say that philosophy is *neither* at the peak of its maturity *nor* in decay. Perhaps it is making slighty slower progress than in the recent heroic age of Lewis, Rawls, Nozick, Williams, et al. But I remain optimistic that it is making progress, although no doubt it has far to go before it will reach the "peak of its maturity" (if indeed it ever will).

    I fail to see why Brian thinks that Lillehammer's comments are so closely related to Dennett's. Lillehammer seems to be repeating the old complaint about the extent of radical disagreements among philosophers. Compare e.g. the Preface to Hume's Treatise: "[E]ven the rabble without doors may judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all is not well within. There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which [philosophers] are not of contrary opinions. Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain …. From hence … arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds even among those who have a just value for every other part of literature."

    Dennett's point seems quite different. Presumably the mathematical properties of "chmess" would attract no more disagreements than other (more interesting) branches of mathematics. Even if there were no disagreements in philosophy, presumably he could still ask whether the questions of philosophy are any more worth bothering about than the mathematical properties of chmess.

    I must say that I am singularly unimpressed by both Lillehammer's and Dennett's points.

    On Lillehammer: It is true that there is much disagreement over the fundamental questions of philosophy. But there is considerable agreement now, much of which did not exist before, about the logical relations between different philosophical propositions. There have been genuine philosophical discoveries, not perhaps about how to answer the fundamental questions, but about philosophical propositions of the form 'If both A and B and C, then not both (D and E and F)'. So I think there is no reason for pessimism about the possibility of philosophical progress.

    On Dennett: The analogy of chmess seems plainly inapplicable to philosophy. In my experience, large numbers of undergraduates are immediately and intuitively attracted to the problems of philosophy. Some of them lose interest when they find out how much patience is required, how difficult philosophy is, and how painfully slowly progress is achieved. But the immediate intuitive appeal of philosophy obviously sets it apart from subjects like the higher-order truths of chmess.

    In the end, I am inclined to think that both Lillehammer are failing to exercise the patience that Williamson demands of us. According to J. M. Keynes, whenever someone claims that economics is useless, they invariably turn out to be dogmatic adherents of a particular economic theory, which they simply lack the patience to subject to further probing and scrutiny. Exactly the same thing can be said of philosophy.

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  4. Jonathan Weinberg

    There are numerous sub-fields of philosophy that are obviously relevant & of consequence outside of philosophy. Political philosophy and philosophy of law are obvious examples (and I include the latter not just to flatter the host here!) One of my own fields, philosophy of mind, has not been merely epiphenomenal within cognitive science; just think of how much good work by connectionists was produced in response to the Fodor/Pylyshyn challenge. The philosophy of art (especially, e.g., Arthur Danto) has had some influence within the world of art-criticism. And the philosophy of logic is in many places completely indistinguishable from logic itself. And so on.

    For Prof. Lillehammer's argument against metaethics to work, then, he must be presupposing that relevance is, one might say, compositionally additive: if a field X is made up of sub-fields A, B, C…, then X's relevance is the sum of the relevance of A plus the relevance of B plus…. Thus one could 'subtract out' sub-fields that aren't pulling their weight. "Sure, let all those 'philosophies of X' continue to flourish, but can't we fire the blasted metaethicists?" But I would argue that relevance within a field is not usually compositional in this way. Work in one area influences work in others, by routes that are many & varied, direct & indirect. For example, grant me arguendo that philosophy of language has relevance. Then one example of indirect influence comes quickly to mind: metaethical debates have had influence in the philosophy of language, as philosophers have tried to figure out what to say about the Frege/Geach problem.

    (Consider an analogy with physics: probably at first no one had any idea of how QM would have any 'real world' relevance. But it's a good thing that we didn't try to get physics to 'subtract out' QM, because otherwise we wouldn't have, say, PET scanners.)

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  5. Vic Crome

    I think that my answer to this question is a bit different than those posted above.

    Firstly, I think the often rehearsed "call for relevance" is really misplaced. Except for a short time in the revolutionary days of the Enlightenment, perhaps not even then, the kind of armchair, ivory tower philosophy that we are discussing was the norm. Every age has had its political philosophers and applied ethicists, but they also had their metaphysicians, discussing the proverbial angels on the pin.

    Philosophy, much like many disciplines in the humanities, is an end in itself, one that offers enjoyment, and even fulfillment, to the academics in those disciplines, and entertainment, when sufficiently watered down, to the amateur scholar. While philosophy, unlike some parts of the humanities, takes scientific results and methodology more seriously, and bears, historically, a closer relationship to the sciences, if viewed honestly, the product of philosophical work can be seen as much closer to works in history, for example, than in physics.

    That said, I think that to a certain extent that philosophy can still be seen, in some ways, as a discipline in decline.

    One could ask, picking up on Ralph's comment, why we don't see the kind of creativity and output today, as we saw with "Lewis, Rawls, Nozick, Williams, et al."?

    Often times I entertain the answer that a Lewis would have a hard time today creating the kind of work he did, when every possible position, within a fairly limitied paradigm, is completely vetted. It is hard enough to come up with something new when, if one strays too far from the boundaries of what is already out there, you will open yourself to scorn or dismissal, compromising the hard-won philosophical position of scores of philosophers. But, given the saturation of many fields today, coming up with something new within the paradigm seems even more daunting. What good are intuitions, the life-blood of novelty, when it is hard to even know what you would believe if you did believe some new position, e.g., "non-cognitivist moral realism".

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  6. Bryan Frances

    I wonder whether the ‘What is this bit of philosophy good for?’ question can often be adequately answered in the affirmative in a straightforward way. The reason the problems of vagueness, material composition, and the semantic paradoxes, for instance, are so important is that reflection on vagueness, composition, and truth & representation, respectively, generate groups of individually highly plausible yet mutually inconsistent claims. If one can defend the individual high plausibility and inconsistency, then one has to a significant extent defended the existence of the industry devoted to working out responses to the problem posed by the set of claims. (Presumably, there are no such sets of claims for chmess. And if there were, then by golly chmess would be interesting.) Naysayers will probably point to one of the individual claims and argue that it’s nowhere near highly plausible, and so the industry should be abandoned. But they’ll need an argument, an argument that will be part of the industry and without which the industry’s existence was justified.

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  7. Steve Marsh

    Of course I'm just a visitor to this area, but the practice of "pick a minute area of research and then milk it for all its analytical worth" is pretty wide spread in the hard sciences.

    The space program is a good example, as are all pure sciences. I don't understand why Philosophy should be different, or that it learns less from the process.

    Guess I need to check back in as this thread progresses, as I've been curious about the entire thought that Philosophy alone should not have pure research vs. applied. It is rather interesting to watch from the outside.

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  8. Brian Leiter

    Just a brief word in response to Ralph's question about why I linked Dennett and Lillehammer. I did not take Lillehammer's point to be that there is intractable disagreement in philosophy; I took his point to be that philosophers will devote enormous effort to articulating bizarre or implausible positions, indeed, every position in logical space will find a defender sooner or later. My thought was that this was similar to Dennett's worries about philosophers pursuing the truths of chmess, i.e., both are pointless intellectual exercises (though pointless, perhaps, for slightly different reasons).

    This is not a defense of their points, just a clarification about why I linked them.

    Thanks to Ralph and the others for their comments so far.

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  9. roger

    I think Vic Crome is right that the issue of the "relevance" of philosophy is misplaced. More than that, I think it is the symptom of a certain strain of servility in a society that wants to make the totality of thought relevant — or, to translate this into more silicon valley like terms, to "monetize" it. Surely this is the end-point of a malign dollar idealism, with exchange itself becoming an absolute value, and all that is solid vanishing into management course slogans.

    To my mind, philosophy is now too big a discipline to say that it suffers from some malaise. Some parts of philosophy have become more lively over the last ten years — especially in consciousness studies, and the question of the limits of the application of the evolution paradigm to social action — and some parts have become less interesting — philosophy of language is pretty dead at the moment. I myself am disappointed that the philosophy of history is pretty dead at the moment too, because history has encompassed such novel approaches in the past twenty years that we need, I think, some philosophic reflection on the meaning of it.

    I'm more interested in what is neglected in philosophy than where the traffic has become heavy and trivial.

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  10. Heath White

    Philosophy is closer to decay than vitality, in my opinion, for the following reason. It is sometimes alleged that philosophy is continuous with science, or similar to a science. Real sciences, however, have certain characteristics that philosophy as now practiced does not have. Most relevantly, certain paradigmatically solved problems in the discipline serve as models for the solution to other problems. Consequently, introductory classes (and textbooks) in e.g. physics center around introducing students to these paradigm solutions, and giving them practice in solving related problems using the same principles.

    I will have met someone who really believes that philosophy is making science-style progress when I have met someone who teaches their intro class by giving students philosophical problems which have paradigmatic solutions, asks them to solve other philosophical problems on related lines, and grades the students’ work as either objectively correct or incorrect. Needless to say, I know no one who does this other than in (formal) logic classes.

    There are some who (claim to) think that this kind of progress is right around the corner, any day now. I confess myself a skeptic. It is true, as Ralph says, that philosophers know better now the inferential relations in which various propositions stand. But no one cares about this intrinsically; it’s the substantive questions which fire the philosophical imagination. Late medieval scholasticism was pretty good at inferential relations too, but I don’t think anyone would say that was a flourishing time for philosophical thought.

    Nor do I agree that most philosophers have been “ivory tower” types. Ancient philosophy, as Pierre Hadot has emphasized, always centered around the choice of a way of life for individuals. Medieval philosophy was tied closely to the theoretical concerns of the Christian religion. Early modern philosophy kept one eye on social and political matters. It is only post-Kant, I think, that we get real genuine ivory tower philosophers, who are not concerned that their work be in some sense useful to a non-professional audience. And even then I think there are precious few of these, until perhaps the heyday of analytic philosophy. Maybe not even then.

    Given this state of affairs, there are, I think, two alternative visions one might have for the vitality of philosophy. One is to commit to substantive principles that are extra-philosophical, or at least not fully provable by “pure reason”, to foster a “research program” in philosophy. MacIntyre characterizes Thomism in something like these terms. Another is to reconceive the aim of philosophy not as the pursuit of truth, like science, but as the construction of a way of life, or a piece of conceptual art, or something like that. It may be (I wouldn’t want to say) that some continental philosophy consists of work along these lines.

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  11. seth edenbaum

    You can compare apples and oranges if you want, the only question is, why? You can argue in favor of intellectually rigorous activities being done for their own sake, but how rigorous is anything without boundaries? What is interesting about science is that in its search for knowledge it is bounded by what can be, or might be at some point, verifiable. That makes it practical but it also makes it a game with rules and limits. Intelligence is tested by an outside force. There are similar boundaries in athletics. You test yourself within a system of rules and regulations. There seems to be no outside force in analytic philosophy. I don't see how structures of pure logic can be applied to behavior, and even as a 'game' of skill philosophy seems limited.

    I went recently to the Met, to an exhibition of work by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam, and found myself asking how and why work which was so derivative, such an imitation of the French, could be also so obviously American. The works 'looked like' American paintings.
    What kind of intelligence perceives the clues that mark such a difference? What sort of intelligence says "I know" before it can say why, or how, it knows. I remember years ago commenting on the strangeness of a painting by Hassam when I assumed that it was by a French hand; things didn't fit, but I wasn't sure why. I'm not patting myself on the back. I had help. But this is the argument from "depth" that Timothy Williamson derides, and it has nothing to do with religion or any sort of fuzzy mysticism, but with the perceptual intelligence of the connoisseur. Our intuitions act often through a form of silent logic, with which we play a game of catch-up. Our awareness is trained in such a way that it works in shorthand, preceding understanding. In the same way, 'knowing' how to hit a backhand is not the same as 'being able' to do it. I was able to recognize the oddness of a painting that I supposed to be French. Sometimes such responses (assumptions) are mistaken -in which case there is still a 'logic' behind them- sometimes not. But analytic philosophy will never be able to understand 'imagination' because its unwilling to use it. I've read more than a few articles in which the questions asked, about the logic of certain social activities, could not be answered unless someone chose to look outside the internal logic of the article.
    And as a matter of intellectual rigor or skill, there are other forms of discourse more rigorous because there's more at stake.
    From an old post:

    In The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn writes this about Donald Davidson:

    "Davidson has also known for rejection of the idea of s conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate."

    So if it is impossible to translate the finer points in Mallarmé, then no finer points exist.

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  12. Carl Seaquist

    For a while now I've thought that contemporary philosophy was going through a scholastic period. I don't think it's in decline, because the field has proved remarkably resilient throughout the millenia, but I do think that we can look back at the history of philosophy and see periods of progress alternating with periods of scholasticism, i.e., times when previous advances are being digested and forward-looking people are trying to find the next big thing.

    I have developed a real love-hate relationship with philosophy, much like my first field of philology. I think there are a lot of very bright and capable philosophers out there, but most of the journal articles I read seem more like polls than contributions to scholarship: they list the various positions on a given topic with arguments for and against each, perhaps give a couple of "Wilamowitz footnotes", and then come down on one side or the other. I think there should be more to academic philosophy than staking a claim to an existing view.

    But, as Brian Leiter has pointed out in his blog, the path to success in the discipline is, as much as anything, to have the right pedigree: philosophical skill is the price of entry into the field, but no guarantee of success. And this approach encourages the best philosophers not to ask the really important questions. It's frustrating.

    I don't think I'm one of the best of my generation (I've known one or two who are), but I think I'm competent, and I want to do research that makes a contribution to knowledge. So I ended up in a Religious Studies department, where I earned my degree in May with what was basically a cognitive science dissertation. I think my dissertation was good and original, and I don't really care that it doesn't look like a traditional topic in philosophy, or religious studies, or any particular field.

    But most people, folks who quite frankly are a lot brighter than I am, end up writing highly unoriginal scholarship because they feel the need, imposed on them by the field itself, to stick to "safe" topics, i.e., the ones that hiring committees will find it easy to categorize and for which there are obvious journals for publication. That strikes me as a shame.

    But I don't think philosophy is in decline. One of these days, one of the new problems will stick to the wall, and it will draw a lot of deeply original work. Until then, however, scholasticism will prevail.

    Caveat: I've put this comment in stark terms. There is good and original work in philosophy going on right now. But there's a lot less than there should be, considering how much potential is out there.

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