Jon Cogburn's Blog

There is no such thing as good history of philosophy, a derivation

This is absolutely clear from the following deduction.

1. Good historians realize that inconsistency in belief is the norm for humans, and that any writer who has written enough will have achieved inconsistency.
2. Good philosophers read anachronistically.
3. People who do history of philosophy try to discern consistent interpretations that are not anachronistic.
4. Therefore, the history of philosophy is neither good philosophy nor good history.
5. Thus, from 4. by logic, it follows that there is no such thing as good history of philosophy. Q.E.D.

I think I'm actually serious about this.*

[Note:

*This being said, the above deduction should make us appreciate all the more people like Frederick Beiser, Jonathan Bennett, Strawson, and Martha Nusbaum who manage to do good history and good philosophy, though the fact that Bennett, Strawson, and Nusbaum are routinely derided by other historians of philosophy for being anachronistic proves my point in the most chilling possible way. Beiser rocks so much that he is sui generis. If the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" means anything, then Beiser's picture is in the dictionary next to it.]

Excellence Schmexcellence. . . Feh!

One of the weirdest things about being an academic in a time where higher education is no longer envisioned as a public good (but rather as a private investment made by the student), is that the management-speak of administrators sometimes becomes more and more galling.

An ex provost at LSU always used to say that we were reaching for "the highest tiers of excellence" as if reaching for excellence wasn't good enough. They even had a huge banner across the thoroughfare that runs through campus that had some trademarked catchphrase with the word "Excellence" in it (if I remember right, something extra stupid like "LSU. Excellence in Motion.").

This always bothered me. Why not, "LSU. A Pretty Good Deal, All things Considered"? Or "LSU. Not Too Shabby. Seriously." Or something like "LSU. We're Basically Competent."

There is actually a bigger issue here. I don't think that excellence is something that non-specialist managers are very good at selecting for. In my experience, the best universities with the highest levels of excellence are the ones where the administrators just work very hard to help to establish competence across the board. Then in that atmosphere, areas of excellence emerge organically. This is what Texas A&M decided to do around twenty-five years or so ago, and the results have been dramatic.

But there are pretty severe selective pressures against the A&M model being implemented today. The opposing idea, vastly more common at second string schools, is the "build to strength" model, where administrators shift resources to programs they perceive as being the strongest.The reason it is selected for is that it centralizes more power (and money*) in the hands of administrators, even in times when resources are declining.

But it is actually severely dysfunctional for all sorts of reasons. (1) As I noted, it maintains a lot of the bad aspects of communism, with people at the top making decisions about resource allocations that can't possibly be sensitive to what's really going on. So a Peter department that would have risen to national prominence if it were funded at a level of competence does not, while the Paul department that got all the extra goodies doesn't utilize those effectively. (2) Even if the administrators had a perfect track record, at the very best you get increasing mediocrity in most of your programs. But one or two great programs surrounded by mediocrity doesn't make a competent, much less "excellent" university. (3) It's a huge waste of resources. The amount of money to get your five lowest performing programs to raise ten spaces on national rankings (just by funding them to a level of competence) is almost certainly far less than to get your best program to raise one space. But this is exactly what "build to strength" does. Again, consider the A&M model. What's the norm for funding department x (numbers of lines, graduate assistantships, etc.) at schools ranked better than us but with comparable budgets? Take that as the null hypothesis and then stay out of the way as much as possible, restricting your meddling to things like putting incompetent programs into receivership. If you can establish a base level of competence, far more excellence will out across the board for much, much less money.

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

Some things I like about students

Given that many recent posts have either mocked student foibles or openly contemplated how best to deal with those foibles, dharma demands some balance. I have the best job in the world and here are some of the main reasons. Please share yours that aren't on this list.

1. Some of my students have excellent taste in novels, better than any of my colleagues. I've read well over a hundred very good books that I would not have heard about otherwise.
2. Some of my students are very good barometers of what is good in pop culture, on the whole much better than my colleagues (with possibly one exception). I don't have a television and only watch stuff like that on DVDs. Without students I never would have gotten into: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Battlestar Galactica, Rome, The [British and American] Office, and Extras (I liked Xena before I started teaching). Likewise, I never would have discovered the great comic books Renaissance that we are undergoing, especially (for me) all things Gaimonesque. And my knowledge of video games and professional wrestling (which I think is as important an art form as opera, which is the closest genre) would be pretty poor as well. Musically, I would never have gotten into the White Stripes or AC/DC.
3. Many of my students have extremely good senses of humor, better than most of my colleagues. Class discussion is not only vastly better for this, but my life is brighter. I'm actually the faculty adviser for the L.S.U. student group Mustache Advocacy Network, perhaps my greatest distinction.
4. Many of my students are philosophically creative (two M.A. students have published in fairly decent journals) and can be taught to express this in a good way. It's work to get this out of them in a decent way. You have to spend a lot of class time talking with everyone about their paper plans (it helps the students to hear what others are doing), giving them detailed advice about how to narrow down the punch-line, and how to structure the paper to get to it. But if you do that, then at the end of the semester in upper level classes you always get at least two papers that just wow you. And this often happens in lower level classes too.
5. Tied to the previous point- In all of my classes the class discussions help my research immensely.
6. Many of my students are heroic. One works as a counselor at a summer camp for kids who suffer from severe burns. One helps take care of her sister with severe cerebral palsy. Some are returning war vets from Iraq. About a third of them were devastated to some degree (losing their homes at a minimum) by hurricanes Katrina or Rita (and devastated even more so by the Bush administration's sadistic response).
7. Most of my students are at a point in their life where they are experimenting with what kind of person they want to be. I strongly believe that learning (albeit perhaps not getting an academic job in) philosophy helps us do this better. More importantly, good-humored, free wheeling, open class discussions where we are not afraid to get lost on tangents present a model of fun collegiality and respect for people and ideas that I think help students recover from the baleful MTV and high school hegemony of cool that sucks the creativity and soul out of so many people. Amazingly, in college you see a different kind of "cool," where students excited about life and ideas and who are loving of others end up having more charisma than fratboy and other acolytes of the eternal James Dean inarticulate loutness lowest common denominator consumerist culture (as well as the women attracted to such louts). Good class discussion is like an insecticide exterminating brutishness; it is a balm for my troubled soul.
8. Many of my students care deeply about those around them, the stuff they are learning, and the fate of our Republic. I think this is much greater than when I was in school; perhaps because of the web students are both more informed and less cynical and pessimistic about the chances that they can do something meaningful for their own lives and for the lives of those around them. I hope that the Bush recession (and the economic mess he has left us in with his lack of investment in infrastructure, ruinous wars, massive corruption, deficit-causing tax cuts for the rich, and resulting horrendous monetary policy) does not beat this amazing sense of possibility out of Generation Y.
9. Students today are the least racist and homophobic demographic in American culture, and they are the least racist and homophobic group of students in American history.