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McMahan on the “Healthy” State of “Analytic” Philosophy

Brian Leiter

I was reading the Normative Ethics volume in the great "5 Questions" series from Automatic Press, and was struck by this passage from the conclusion of the interview with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers):

I am highly optimistic about the prospects in normative ethics.  It is evident to me that great progress has already been made since I entered the field in the early 1980s.  Unlike many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which in recent years were seduced by bad French philosophy into a lot of silly "post-modern" theorizing that exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance, analytic philosophy is flourishing.  Part of the reason why analytic philosophy generally is in such a healthy state is that, as Jerry Fodor observed in a recent book review, philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies.  We no longer devote our lives to developing comprehensive philospohical or ethical systems.  We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed.  The results is that philosophy has become more of a collective endeavour than it was in the past, in the sense that different people are focusing selectively on problems that are elements or aspects of larger problems.  When the results of the individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intracacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation.

Comments from readers?   What are the areas of progress since the 1980s?  Signed comments preferred, but, at a minimum, you must include an actual e-mail address (which will not appear).

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41 responses to “McMahan on the “Healthy” State of “Analytic” Philosophy”

  1. Thom Brooks

    I couldn't agree more with Jeff.

    Reply
  2. Patty Steck

    I think one great example of progress since the 1980s is McMahan's work itself. In many recent articles he focuses on the question of what constitutes a just cause for war. McMahan makes the argument that the just cause is the most important just war principle. His work allows others to focus on other topics, while incorporating his work as appropriate.

    Reply
  3. Matt Lister

    To my mind there has been a lot of progress in the last 25 years or so on egalitarianism- not, alas, on achieving it, but on becoming clearer on what's meant by it, different conceptions, and so on. I have in mind not so much the "equality of what?" debates, but more so work by people like Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler (among others) distinguishing "luck egalitarianism" from other ideas and exploring what's entailed by different accounts.

    We also seem to have made a lot of progress in discussions of global justice, in that the ways it differs from a domestic theory of justice are now much better understood, even if there is no consensus (or anything approaching it) as to what the right view is. Nowadays, though, few people think that merely ramping up Rawls's _Theory of Justice_ view to the global level (or something similar) would be plausible on its own. Seeing that the problems are more difficult than originally thought is, I think, already an important sort of progress.

    Reply
  4. Robert Johnson

    I was struck by the same paragraph. Well said.

    Reply
  5. David

    One thing that worries me is how much things are combined in philosophy over the long run. I mean, how many times have we all read an exchange where someone claims to have made a great discovery, only for someone working in a historical area to claim that actually you can find the same argument buried somewhere in a piece of Mill or Carnap that nobody reads today?
    I do worry that philosophy is still so contentious as well, that its hard to take on the work of anyone else as a given result, because half the other people working in that area will disagree vehemently with it.

    Reply
  6. Gualtiero Piccinini

    I agree as well. In the area in which I work — foundations of cognitive science — a lot of progress has been and is being made, along the lines described in the quote. In fact, there is now a whole new generations of philosophers who are technically more sophisticated and more careful about details than their predecessors.

    Reply
  7. Patrick Lee Miller

    "Philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies." Although I think this is an accurate description of philosophy nowadays, I was surprised to see it reported as a virtue. To my mind, there is a false analogy to science implicit in the argument that follows this report.

    In 'normal' science, scientists typically work individually on small problems and only together — in large research teams, or as a whole discipline — on big ones. Occasionally, in 'revolutionary' science, an individual tackles successfully a big problem. In these terms (Kuhn's), if the analogy to science is accurate, we are in a period of 'normal' philosophy, awaiting the next revolution. But the analogy is not wholly accurate.

    In art, by contrast, artists may use techniques from their contemporaries or their predecessors, but each uses these contributions ultimately to express something deeply personal. In these terms (Proust's, but more widely the Romantics'), artists struggle to express their particularlity, whereas in science there is every effort to efface it.

    Philosophy is neither art nor science, and the false dichotomy between continental and analytic philosophy stems, I believe, from squeezing it into one or the other narrow mold. Plato, for example, drew arguments and insights from his predecessors, and he produced new insights and arguments that others have used to this day, but his dialogues bear the stamp of his inimitable self. Aristotle worked with much the same material, after all, but produced something likewise personal as well as universal.

    Perhaps the best witness to this mixture of particular and universal in the best philosophy is the fact that we read original writings, rather than being satisfied, as scientists are, with textbook summaries. Why is that? "Every great philosophy," wrote Nietzsche, is "the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."

    Reply
  8. mark lance

    The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.
    …
    Now the subject-matter of this knowledge of truths which is presupposed by philosophical 'know-how', falls, in a sense, completely within the scope of the special disciplines. Philosophy in an important sense has no special subject-matter which stands to it as other subject matters stand to other special disciplines. If philosophers did have such a special subject-matter, they could turn it over to a new group of specialists as they have turned other special subject-matters to non-philosophers over the past 2500 years, first with mathematics, more recently psychology and sociology, and, currently, certain aspects of theoretical linguistics. What is characteristic of philosophy is not a special subject-matter, but the aim of knowing one's way around with respect to the subject-matters of all the special disciplines.
    …
    The multiplication of sciences and disciplines is a familiar feature of the intellectual scene. Scarcely less familiar is the unification of this manifold which is taking place by the building of scientific bridges between them. I shall have something to say about this unification later in this chapter. What is not so obvious to the layman is that the task of 'seeing all things together' has itself been (paradoxically) broken down into specialities. And there is a place for specialization in philosophy. For just as one cannot come to know one's way around in the highway system as a whole without knowing one's way around in the parts, so one can't hope to know one's way around in 'things in general, without knowing one's way around in the major groupings of things.

    It is therefore, the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise. Otherwise, there is little to distinguish the philosopher from the persistently reflective specialist; the philosopher of history from the persistently reflective historian. To the extent that a specialist is more concerned to reflect on how his work as a specialist joins up with other intellectual pursuits, than in asking and answering questions within his speciality, he is said, properly, to be philosophically-minded. And, indeed, one can 'have one's eye on the whole' without staring at it all the time. The latter would be a fruitless enterprise. Furthermore, like other specialists, the philosopher who specializes may derive much of his sense of the whole from the pre-reflective orientation which is our common heritage. On the other hand, a philosopher could scarcely be said to have his eye on the whole in the relevant sense, unless he has reflected on the nature of philosophical thinking. It is this reflection on the place of philosophy itself, in the scheme of things which is the distinctive trait of the philosopher as contrasted with the reflective specialist; and in the absence of this critical reflection on the philosophical enterprise, one is at best but a potential philosopher.

    Wilfrid Sellars: "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man"

    Reply
  9. Colin Farrelly

    McMahan says: “We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed”.

    But the fixation on narrow and minute things has many consequences (some good, some bad). We may have gained more rigour and detail, but at what cost? McMahan mentions the prospect of “the individual efforts being combined”, but who will have the capacity, let alone the desire, to do this when each individual is a narrow specialist preoccupied with getting the minute details detailed with as much rigour as possible?

    Cheers,
    Colin

    Reply
  10. Matt Brown

    The claim that "philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies" strikes me as utter nonsense.

    If the claim is that "philosophers no longer tend to work on the background of systematic philosophical assumptions, implicit or explicit," it is obviously false. Assumptions about epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and various descriptive (psychological, sociological) information necessarily figures in to meta-ethics. Philosophers who think otherwise are simply blind to their own assumptions, and worse off for not have any explicit recognition of them, and thus ability to critically reflect on their value.

    On the other hand, if the claim is that "philosophers used to, but no longer tend to have personal philosophies elaborated by them alone," it is historically naive; we tend to remember the great innovators of new philosophical systems, but of course there have been plenty of Platonists, Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, etc. throughout history working out more specialized issues in a certain framework, just as much as present-day Lewisian metaphysicians work out specialized issues in the framework originally elaborated by David Lewis. Analytic philosophy is no innovator here.

    Perhaps there is a small matter of emphasis that has shifted, in that system-building is relatively less valorized, and specialized work is relatively more valorized, than in previous periods of history. But I would hazard a guess that it was much the same for the Scholastics, perhaps even moreso in the direction that McMahan praises, so even here the sense of historical innovation is overblown.

    Reply
  11. Tom Feeney

    Why should having a philosophy be incompatible with careful and minute focus on individual problems? It is plausible that the great systems, at least the great rationalist and idealist systems, grew from minute focus on one or two principles, such as the PSR. Also, consider a philosopher like David Lewis, who was able to work on many different problems by applying just a few, very carefully thought out ideas to them. Perhaps this is just a graduate student's idealism, but I hope that well chosen focus will eventually open some fresh views on the whole.

    Reply
  12. Blake Taylor

    Further to Farrelly's comment I would imagine that narrow specialisation leads to a situation in which combining individual efforts is almost impossible. Isn't trying to combine different modes of thought a very large part of philosophy already (or at least dissertations)? Lacking anyone with the expertise, are we simply waiting for the next Nietzsche?

    Reply
  13. Eric Schliesser

    Some historical perspective may be useful here. In the debates over the reception of Newton's principia, which infamously appeared to have no rational foundation, Newton's followers (MacLaurin, Cotes) started to preach (besides the importance of empirical success) the virtues of self-limitation *within* philosophy and a specialist focus on problem-solving against the systematicizing tendencies of Leibniz and others. [This is not the debate between Empiricism and Rationalism; Berkeley is also their target.] This self-limitation of philosophy, I call 'Newton's Challenge.' I claim this episode was obscured by success of Kant's Critical philosophy.
    If we fast forward to the Vienna Circle (Schlick and Reichenbach, especially) and Russell, they apeal to science's success (and philosophy's lack of progress) to advocate division of labor within philosophy (orchestrated by Neurathian encyclopediast, if necessecary) and rejection of the great man model of philosophy. McMahan echoes the claims and arguments by Reichanbach et alia. Philosophy has become a vocation…

    Reply
  14. Kris McDaniel

    Since we are quoting the greats:

    "O. Kulpe says … of logic that it is ‘not only, without doubt, one of the best-developed philosophical disciplines, but also one of the surest and most complete.’ This may be true, but in view of my own estimate of logic’s scientific certainty and completeness, I must also regard it as a sign of the abysmal state of scientific philosophy of our day. To this I would add the question: Could one not gradually make an end to this sorry state of things, if all scientific energies of thought were devoted to solving the clearly formulable problems, soluble with almost exact certainty, no matter how limited, banal and perhaps even trivial these seem in themselves? …. The ‘exact sciences’ … plainly owe their greatness to this modesty which prefers small things, and, to adopt a well-known phrase,
    ‘concentrates its power on the smallest point’. Beginnings small from the point of view of the whole, but which are certain, repeatedly prove in such sciences to be springboards for immense advances."

    Husserl, Logical Investigations vol.I.

    Reply
  15. Sam Rickless

    Well, it depends on what you mean by "progress". If you mean that big problems that existed in the 80's have now been solved (at least according to the consensus of philosophers), the answer is no. We are still divided on the big questions: consequentialists vs. non consequentialists, internalists vs. externalists, identity theorists vs. functionalists vs. eliminativists vs. dualists vs. andsoon, Fregeans vs. Russellians/Millians, three-dimensionalists vs. four-dimensionalists, egalitarians vs. libertarians vs. communitarians, Platonists vs. structuralists vs. fictionalists vs. nominalists, and the list goes on. It is true that, on some narrower issues, progress has been made in the way that Jeff suggests. Bad arguments have been shown to be bad, and have been replaced with much more sophisticated positions and arguments. This is certainly progress in one sense, and that is no small achievement. However, it is unlikely that the big questions are going to go away anytime soon. There are good reasons for this. First, the big problems are HARD. Very very gifted philosophers have had a serious go at them, and we still have disagreement. This suggests that they are likely to remain with us. Second, increased specialization translates into more and more epicycles on standard positions, which results in more elaborate counterarguments, which result in more epicycles, and so on. To some the epicycles signal that we are approaching the (complex) truth. To others, they are signs of impending implosion. But consensus is unlikely. Third, every PhD student has a strong incentive to be original (either by producing a new set of epicycles, or by forging a completely new position in logical space). And originality translates into a proliferation of positions. In this way, disagreements multiply. So sociological mechanisms work to produce less consensus, rather than more. Fourth, there is always the urge to be sceptical, oftentimes in a radical way. For one thing, global scepticism, gets you noticed. It's also more interesting. And this urge produces influential naysayers who complain about the whole enterprise from the sidelines.

    A few examples. (1) For years, there was a position known as libertarianism. Epicycles were added, the position grew more sophisticated. And then, bam, libertarianism splits into left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. At first, people aren't sure. Aren't left-libertarians just liberal egalitarians in disguise? But no, they aren't. Left-libertarianism has legs, as it turns out. (Not that I'm a left-libertarian. But I think it's a good example of increasing sophistication leading away from consensus.) (2) For years, Fregeans and Russellians did battle. Russellians threw modal and epistemic arguments at Fregeans. Fregeans replied by pointing out that Russellians could not find a way of accounting for discourse about non-existents (say, Vulcan). And then, bam, Russellians come up with "gappy" propositions. A brilliant counter-move. And Fregeans suggest non-descriptive connotations as a way of avoiding the anti-descriptivist arguments of Donnellan and Kripke. So the battle continues. (3) For years, there was a stalemate in epistemology between those who took sceptical scenarios seriously and those who didn't. A modus tollens for one was a modus ponens for the other. Then, bam, a bunch of folks suggest a way out: the word "know" is an indexical, and what it picks out shifts from context to context. Some think this is progress, of course. They become contextualists. Others think that this is not progress. They produce a new battery of sophisticated arguments designed to show that contextualism is false. And the debate goes on, only now with a new and vigorous opponent. (4) For years, philosophers happily rely on their own intuitions about particular (often hypothetical) cases. Then, bam, a bunch of sceptics, with reams of psychological survey data in tow, attack the coherence/reliability of these intuitions. But do the traditional philosophers wave the white flag? No. They produce a battery of reasons for thinking that the sceptics have misinterpreted the survey results. So the debate continues.

    Reply
  16. Jussi Suikkanen

    I'm not sure. Seems like there are still a vast number of individuals who are developing comprehensive ethical systems and philosophies without sacrificing any of the rigour or detail of those who only work on smaller ethical problems -from ethics people like Derek Parfit, Frank Jackson, Allan Gibbard, Tim Scanlon, Mark Schroeder, and Ralph Wedgwood come to mind quite quickly and there are many, many others. The comprehensive work of these philosophers does not lack any of the depth, intracacy, or sophistication of any other work done by people or collectives who start from smaller problems. It is true though that these philosophers do not work in isolation so I guess the last point about the importance of the community for progress is right.

    Reply
  17. Matthew Smith

    What is the metric by which we measure progress and success in philosophy? McMahan mentions "depth, intracacy, and sophistication." But it is rather difficult to determine when progress has been achieved in depth and sophistication. Intricacy, on the other hand, is perhaps easier to measure, although by this measure the Derrideans and contemporary philosophers like Alain Badiou have produced work of great intricacy. But, I doubt McMahan would see the work of Derrideans or Badiou especially as hallmarks of progress.

    McMahan also mentions rigor and detail as possible marks of progress. Again, rigor, while it takes work, is a cheap measure of progress. Remember all those pointless JTB+ debates? They were rigorous but I cannot see how they were evidence of philosophical progress. The same point applies, of course, to detail.

    On the other hand, McMahan is writing only about normative ethics, so perhaps such intricacy, etc., is exactly what normative ethics looks like when it has progressed. I am not sure though. Maybe normative ethics should be maximally coherent when one views it from a step back, i.e., it *should* appear as systematic ideology and not as a series of postulates taped together, however artfully, with philosophical duct tape. I am not advocating this position – but it is clear that McMahan must reject it if he thinks that systematicity should take a back seat to intricacy (because he does not mention systematicity as a hallmark of progress).

    In general, it seems to me that it is rather difficult to make sense of what progress is in philosophy.

    My guess is that at any point in the history of philosophy, we will find that those at the top of the field will take the field to be progressing quite well. After all, they have been elevated as paragons of the field and so to say the field is in decline would be to implicate themselves in the decline. Who wants to do that to oneself?

    On the other hand, as we've seem in the recent rise of so-called experimental philosophy, there has been a frontal assault on certain methods in the field. Perhaps _that_ is a mark of progress in philosophy. But, if so, then McMahan's (and my) "progressive" brand of normative ethics turns out to be regressive, since it has not even begun to adjust itself fully to the ex-phi cynicism about intuitions, to name one methodological challenge.

    Here is one alternative line of thinking:

    I have no idea what the overall arc of historical relationships between philosophy and other disciplines have been, but I suspect that we have always enjoyed uniquely many and uniquely strong bonds with a surprisingly diverse number of highly serious intellectual and artistic pursuits. Perhaps the greatest measure of the 'success' and 'progress' of philosophy, then, is its capacity to remain relevant to the wider pursuit of wisdom. And here I am not talking about science fetishism where we measure only whether neuroscientists or social psychologists or physicists are reading philosophy. Rather, the question is whether anyone who is seriously committed to pursuing wisdom is reading philosophy: are novelists, are artists, are political activists (yep), are architects, are academic lawyers, and all the rest reading philosophy?

    That's just a thought – a countersuggestion to McMahan's metric of philosophical progress. Nothing I've said suggests that philosophy is not progressing as much as McMahan claims it is. I've just suggested that maybe there are other – better – ways to understand progress in philosophy.

    Finally, one additional overall comment: do we even want to go in for a notion of *progress* in philosophy? My guess is that this is not a philosophically insignificant question. We might also want to historicize it – when did philosophers start talking about progress in the discipline – where this is a meta-point about the practices of the discipline – as opposed to progress in the beliefs produced by the discipline, which might feedback into disciplinary methodology. I don't know – although I suspect that Patrick Miller who posted above can help to answer this question.

    I suppose the norms of academic (read: university-department-sanctioned) philosophy may themselves also be norms by which a coherent notion of progress in philosophy can be constructed, but that is not obvious. And, it is not obvious that the contingent demands of university departments should play _any_ role in determining what progress in philosophy is.

    Reply
  18. Spencer

    I think the revival of Virtue Ethics since Geach and Anscombe in the 50s (and the further exploration of the subject in the 80s) has been one of the greatest philosophical developments in the last century.For a long time the debate was a calcified back and forth between Kantianism and Utilitarianism (with a few assorted contractarians, subjectivists, etc). Now it looks like the two-party system is facing some serious competition. Three cheers for that!

    Reply
  19. Jon Lawhead

    While I agree to a point, I think there are also other issues at play here. Perhaps primarily–and this is, I think, in keeping with analytic philosophy's ability to avoid the clutch of "bad French philosophy"–while many other disciplines have recently moved toward being continuous with things like literature analysis and critical theory, many branches of analytic philosophy have moved toward being continuous with the natural sciences. The last 100 years (or so) have witnessed the rise of philosophy of physics, cognitive science, biology, mathematics, and science generally as rich and deep sub-disciplines in their own right. This desire to make contact with (and say something meaningful about) the empirical disciplines has perhaps driven many philosophers toward a more precise (and, perhaps, specialized) style of writing and thinking. Because the natural sciences discovered the "division of labor" approach quite a while back, a desire to integrate more tightly there has probably driven philosophy in a similar direction.

    Reply
  20. Heath White

    I think McMahan’s view relies on an analogy with the sciences that simply can’t be followed out. The way that specialization and distribution of labor is supposed to improve philosophical progress is if each inquirer makes small bits of progress on narrow questions. Then we join all these individual efforts into a synthetic vision. But if this is to work, it requires a basically uncritical reliance on the testimony of others: not working in epistemology myself, I have to turn to the Epistemological Establishment for the answers to epistemological questions. But (a) there is no such Establishment, and (b) every philosopher is socialized NOT to rely on other philosophers like this, but rather to understand and test arguments for themselves. The equivalent in science would be to perform all experiments for yourself.

    Moreover, the scientific model McMahan is appealing to has consequences for how students are taught. They are taught to solve small problems with correct answers, and not until graduate school are students actually exposed to problems the experts don’t know the answers to. This describes no philosophy course I ever heard of, with the exception of logic and possibly some history courses. Somebody above mentioned Scholasticism; it is no accident that nobody nowadays publishes textbooks like Aquinas’ _Summa_, with all the questions and answers laid out in easy-to-find format.

    In short, if you follow McMahan’s “scientific” model of philosophical research out to its logical conclusion, you would find nothing recognizable as philosophical practice today, at either the undergraduate or professional level. Since I agree with McMahan that we have a lot of narrow specialization today, but I also think that philosophers are pretty enamored with other aspects of present practice and unwilling to change them to make the synthetic vision part work, I suspect that what the system generates is simply a lack of synthetic vision.

    Reply
  21. Stephen Krogh

    I echo Patrick Miller's surprise regarding the virtue of narrower philosophy. Certainly the great philosophers were made great by their broad philosophical systems rather than in spite of them.

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  22. CJ

    I wonder if anybody would be willing to point out (a) examples of this seductive yet bad French philosophizing, (b) examples of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences infected by it and (c) examples of work from these disciplines which manifest this infection.

    It is important to note that anybody willing to take up this challenge should be willing to stand by (if not prove) the slightly less evaluative and more empirical claim that, within French philosophy and within the relevant disciplines, the examples are representative of that which is widely taken to be quality work (since, of course, if examples of bad work are not particularly respected within a field, we have no reason to take such work to be symbolic of that field's descent into silliness and irrelevance!).

    Reply
  23. Adam

    It is, of course, correct that the focus on small problems has been a source of success in the natural sciences. But that, it strikes me, is at least in part because the focus often needs to be on narrowly constrained problems in order to design revealing experiments that can discriminate between competing hypotheses. To the extent that philosophy, or some areas of philosophy, are not in the business of explicitly testing claims by experiment, it seems to me that the analogy with "progress in science by focusing on small problems" is somewhat misleading. (Note: 'to the extent'–in some areas, particular where there is a great deal of overlap between a given area of philosophy and cognate areas in the sciences, detail can make a huge difference by offering precise and eminently testable claims, Stich and Nichols' book on Mindreading being one excellent example of this, in my view).

    More generally, the "epicycle" analogy seems to me revealing–added detail and intricacy, taken simply by themselves, they are not freestanding measures of progress, in science or, so far as I can see, much else. Being as clear, direct, and detailed as you can in philosophy may help you avoid making obvious mistakes by forcing you to spell out the assumptions and implications of your own position and those of others. Yet, to the extent that competing theories are equally precise and detailed, it often does not help us to discriminate between them if we cannot devise agreed upon measures of testing or evaluating them. And although highly specialized areas in the empirical sciences can run into these problems, they are far, far less frequent. So, even if detail and focus matter in philosophy–and I think that they do–it cannot be for precisely the same reasons as in experimental science, and I think it is important to be clear on that difference.

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  24. Norm Jones

    First, it seems profoundly ironic that McMahan should find that the rest of the humanities and social sciences had sunken into "irrelevance," when most well-educated people who are not professional philosophers would say that it is really philosophy which has become irrelevant by embracing a blinkered scholasticism and losing touch with the other humanistic disciplines.

    Second, philosophy's scientific image of itself is a charade. In the natural sciences, specialization is justified by the epistemic progress in which it results: by conducting their research in narrow subfields, scientists can construct experiment designs that yield conclusive and reproducible answers to well-defined questions, and a critical mass of the scientific community can then converge on these discoveries as elements of a more or less coherent body of knowledge. In philosophy, this almost never happens. We are consumed by increasingly arcane disputes, and we add epicycles to our increasingly arcane theories in response to new and increasingly arcane objections, but convergence never comes. And it will not come, because our disagreements are animated by divergences at the level of our most basic orientations toward the world as human beings–divergences which are generally not susceptible to rational resolution– and in our recondite academic disputes we are only more or less unconsciously fiddling around on the edges of these elemental differences.

    What specialization gives philosophy is only the empty shell of scientificity, without the thrust toward consensus that could arguably justify our conceit that we are approaching truth. Recognizing this situation, we should de-specialize, return to our original vocation, and rededicate ourselves to contemplation of the broadest and deepest questions that vex and disquiet human life.

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  25. Josh May

    I generally agree with McMahan. He overstates some things, of course (probably only to be a bit sensational, I imagine). But there is progress in philosophy and specialization has helped.

    This brings up the important yet often ignored issue of progress in philosophy. I'm surprised to see so many philosophers characterize their discipline as lacking in progress—at least lacking in roughly the same sort of progress that is achieved in other successful disciplines (e.g. the sciences). I'd love to see more of a dialogue about that issue.

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  26. Marty

    This may seem rude, but–"We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed,"–could just as well read–"We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that _misses the forest for the trees_."

    Reply
  27. Justin Vlasits

    One area other than the sciences that has seen significant improvement in recent years apart from philosophy of science has been the history of philosophy. Especially in areas like Hellenistic philosophy, which was ignored for a long time, now has a lot of people doing interesting work. And I would definitely say that this development has much to do with "specialists" who spend a considerable amount of time working on individual thinkers and their intellectual environments.

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  28. Sherah Bloor

    Great! Philosophers are healthy (i.e. they get jobs and research grants) and philosophy is well and truly dead. But look this is a good thing! No more confusing difficult systems (gosh they were so convoluted they must all be wrong) – now we can concentrate on small details. Forget about the big picture! Like meta-philosophy we don’t have to concern ourselves with our own ambiguities. We hide them by appropriating a scientistic image and, if anyone asks we employ a naïve definition of analysis. Sure, this won’t convince most philosophers or scientists, but the general public will buy it. Who cares about the concerns of our own greatest thinkers? Yeah, we’re still friends with Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine…But we don’t read them – we’re specializing now.

    Specializing has its plusses; we work as a community (how nice!) Oh, except our community doesn’t include a huge portion of those who call themselves philosophers. Oh, no we wouldn’t include the continent! Long ago we sneakily pushed that ‘philosophy’ into other departments. And, as expected, look what happened: the other departments didn’t work on them philosophically (they aren’t philosophers after all) and we ignored them so when our philosophers now come to grapple with this other ‘philosophy’ it is incomprehensible to them. This isn’t their fault! Oh no that philosophy is obviously silly. How silly to assume knowledge of philosophy from philosophers.

    But philosophy is about making up your own mind so you can still go and study that other ‘philosophy’ (if you really want to)! To make it easier for you we’ve given a banner name to all alternatives to our view: we’ve played on prejudices and called it ‘French post-modern philosophy’. Strange, since the majority of so-called ‘French’ philosophers do not use the term ‘post-modern’ and none use it in the way we define it. We don’t care though. Maybe we will want to hide our prejudice to ourselves so much that we will rename it: ‘freedom’ philosophy, we are undecided!

    We give you a choice between a pre-packaged wholesale simplified version of that other philosophy or ours. Ours has the stamp of approval, ours is scientific, ours is progressive, and ours is bound to lead to results (you’re impressed by these words right!). But warning: if you chose our philosophy there’s no going back! If you’re so busy working on a little problem in your specialized field that you lose sight of your discipline it’s not our fault.

    But don’t get upset – after all philosophy is just a job, a little job, right! Even moral philosophers can get away with publishing prejudiced and opinionated bigotry – as long as this supports the mainstream!

    Look how healthy philosophy is.

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  29. Jean Kazez

    Other readers might like to know that McMahan's interview is available online–

    http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/mcmahan.html

    It's under "2007" and titled "Jeff McMahan."

    The interview's a great read–especially the bit about how McMahan doesn't know what modus ponens is, except that it involves p's and q's. In the passage quoted, he defends narrowness, etc., but it's got to be kept in mind that what he means by narrowness isn't quite what other people might mean. His huge study of the ethics of killing probably qualifies as narrow in his mind, because it's not a "philosophy of everything." "Narrow" doesn't mean trivial. The rest of the interview includes some very interesting points about the role of philosophy in public affairs.

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  30. Brendan

    Rickless writes:

    "We are still divided on the big questions: consequentialists vs. non consequentialists, internalists vs. externalists, identity theorists vs. functionalists vs. eliminativists vs. dualists vs. andsoon, Fregeans vs. Russellians/Millians, three-dimensionalists vs. four-dimensionalists, egalitarians vs. libertarians vs. communitarians, Platonists vs. structuralists vs. fictionalists vs. nominalists"

    Who you calling "we" kemo sabe? These are, of course, very big (and hard) questions, but they are not necessarily THE big questions for everyone, even within their respective fields of (analytic) ethics, philosophy of language, mind, metaphyics, and so forth.

    Examples: depending on one's metaethical views, one might think consequentialism vs. non-consequentialism is of far less consequence than some would believe; when it comes to internalism vs. externalism (about language), there is, as I understand it, a rather big divide between the research programs of most philosophers of language, and those who are strongly influenced by contemporary linguistics; eliminativism, functionalism, dualism–one might doubt the structure of the debate concerning the first (e.g. Stich's "Deconstructing the Mind), and think the second is falsely dichotomous with identity theory (e.g. some suggestions of Lycan in "Consciousness"), while the debate over dualism has almost exclusively been reduced to a debate about dualism concerning consciousness; Russellians, Millians and Fregeans? If we are talking about warring theories over reference as a word-world relation, then one might think this whole dispute is mistaken (if one doubts such a relation exists, and thinks that people, not words, refer); and so on and so forth. I am not trying to take sides, of course. I just want to point out that these debates are, from some perspectives "in house", and that house is not all of analytic philosophy.

    The (Kuhnian) point is: just as in science, there are competing research programs in philosophy, but some of the competitions are within the same research program. And what is one person's (really difficult) normal science is another's degenerative research program, which makes most questions of the "health" of a (sub)field almost worthlessly subjective.

    Be that as it may, I ditto everyone in thinking specialization has helped.

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  31. David

    Sherah Bloor-There's been a huge amount of discussion of metaphilosophy in 'analytic' philosophy lately. The number one powerhouse department is NYU, and it has two 'contintental' philosophers on the staff. And what on earth has any of this to do with publishing bigoted moral opinions? Quite apart from the fact that I wouldn't want posistions defined a priori as bigoted so that no article defending them should be published, no matter how good its arguments, what evidence do you have that most analytic ethicists are anything but progressive on feminims, gay rights, etc. etc. ?

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  32. Alex Leibowitz

    Progress is always progress towards something — progress in relation to a goal. Now I suppose that the goal of philosophy is wisdom and virtue, so if we're making progress in philosophy, then we must be on their verge. And if you've spent any time among philosophers, especially as a group, certainly you'll see this conclusion's vindication.

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  33. Colin Farrelly

    Alex, I agree with you that the goal of philosophy is (or rather ought to be) wisdom and virtue.

    But I couldn't help but giggle when you said "if you've spent any time among philosophers, especially as a group, *certainly* you'll see this conclusion's vindication".

    Having spent quite a lot of time among philosophers I would say that we, like everyone else, suffer from many vices, cronyism, limited knowledge, cognitive bias, pressures of conformity, etc.

    So I wouldn’t want to conflate the “analytical virtues” (e.g. precision and intricacy) mentioned in McMahan’s passage with practical wisdom and virtue. I am a lot less confident than you are that a random group of philosophers would possess more virtue and wisdom than a random group of the “laity”.

    Cheers,
    Colin

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  34. Sherah Bloor

    David, no my post was not an attack on analytic philosophy. I know there is a lot of work going on in meta-philosophy. It was simply a caricature of the McMahan quote, which (as other people mentioned) seemed to be ignorant of said work on meta-philosophy and employ an understanding of philosophy that I think the majority of analytic philosopher's who are well-read in analytic philosophy and are thinking about their own tradition would feel to be crude and naive.

    Again, no, I did not mean to make a wholesale attack on ethicists. Rather I found it ironic that a moral philosopher (McMahan) could write such a crude piece trading on prejudices. All these 'French postmodernists' – what postmodernists? Why French? I'm sure McMahan has some very ethical and progressive philosophical views, but my point is that when away from our 'jobs' do we feel entitled to hold views that are not self-critical, progressive or reflective?

    I wrote my post in a crude and prejudiced tone simply to mimic the McMahan quote. Just because I disagree with him does not mean that I fall on the 'other side of the camp' and am attacking analytic philosophy wholesale. No, I simply do not want such crude opinions representing a tradition I admire greatly. We need to get beyond this us-them mentality for the health of our tradition. And the first step is to become aware of our own prejudices.

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  35. Jeff H

    Colin, I think (or at least, I *hope*) your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning.

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  36. Howard Simmons

    When philosophers are asked to give examples of progress in their discipline one would expect them to choose cases which reflect their own philosphical views and this tends to be borne out in the comments so far. Take for example, Spencer's claim that the development of virtue ethics in the last century represents progress. Virtue ethicists may think that but what about the empirical work that appears to undermine the virtue ethics approach? You may say that this is contested but of course that is the whole point–there is no consensus. Spencer also says he wants an end to the two-party system of Kantianism and utilitarianism but I don't, as I'm a utilitarian and so are several philosphers of much greater distinction than me. I agree that philosophical methods have become much more sophisticated, to the extent that we can usually avoid the most basic errors of some pre-twentieth century philosophers. Sadly, however, I don't see this reducing the amount of disagreement within the discipline about substantive questions.

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  37. David

    Sherah: Ok, point taken i guess, I apologise.

    Howard: Seconded. I think what you say about avoiding basic errors is about right. We've become more sophisticated in argument (well, at least than the post-Cartesian early modern stuff that gets taught in undergrad history classes, and 19th century philosophy, I can't say I know enough about philosophy before that to judge), and so some very specific silly things are no longer said, but on the big issues we disagree as much as ever. Still, at least positions tend to be more well worked out these days.

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  38. Tamler Sommers

    I nominate Sam Rickless for comment of the year.

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  39. Michael Drake

    Yes, if there is one thing we can say about Joshua Knobe, Raymond Geuss, Derek Parfit, Phil Kitcher, Colin McGinn, Frank Jackson, Dan Dennett, David Chalmers, Derk Pereboom, Hilary Putnam, et al., it's that they're narrow and tend to have no philosophy.

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  40. Eric Schliesser

    A belated new comment on McMahan's position. In the absence of a Neurathian orchestrator, McMahan's assertion that "When the results of the individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intracacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation," seems to presuppose an invisible hand argument. [Division of labor –> more & better output.] Of course, the "collective product" is an imaginary construct because it is impossible to combine the individual efforts. What we are left with are many partial views that justify themselves in these mythical terms.

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  41. Carl Seaquist

    I picked up this volume on your suggestion, and it's very interesting. But what I want to know is why, with two Danish editors, they managed to alphabetize Tännsjö between Sumner and Temkin.

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