The Institution of Philosophy (1)
Cohen, Avner; Dascal, Marcelo; eds. The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.
When I first surveyed this anthology four years ago, the name Marcelo Dascal, whose work is currently under review, was unknown to me. My assessment of this book was . . . er . . . quite harsh, but my polemic coincidentally relates to Dascal’s work on polemics, except that I have no interlocutor, hence my rant falls into the category of ‘critical reception’. Here’s a surviving commentary I wrote on 14 August 2004:
This collection of essays is not to my taste. In the wake of Rorty, American philosophy contemplates its identity crisis as analinguistic philosophy dries up and a new irrationalist pragmatism supplies the KY jelly for the penetration of incontinental philosophy. Who’s going to jump in the middle so that Heidegger and Quine can make a sandwich out of him? I haven’t been this bored since I was invited to a showing of Super 8 porn during the Blizzard of ’77.
In all fairness, I have three essays to go before closing the book. There is so far but one essay in this wasteland that I find interesting and meritorious:
David M. Rosenthal, “Philosophy and Its History”, 141-176.
Rosenthal’s point of departure is a refutation of Rorty’s reduction of philosophy to pointless perpetual conversation. For Rosenthal, all philosophy, including history of philosophy, is about problem-solving. Philosophy’s problems may be solved, go unsolved, be redefined, undergo mutation, but the essence of philosophy is that it is problem-oriented. How then, is philosophy’s history of ongoing interest to contemporary philosophy, if it is? Rosenthal reviews a number of arguments and finds them wanting. Most historical explorations of philosophy, which are written by philosophers rather than historians, end up being ahistorical. This is not surprising, as the understanding of why somebody thought something is extraneous to understanding the thought itself. Even when we want to answer the question why someone would have thought such things, our efforts are concentrated in making sense of the ideas themselves, which we do in light of our best rational arguments today. In this regard philosophy finds itself in the same boat as natural sciences and mathematics, but there is a difference; philosophy’s relation to its past as an ongoing concern resembles more the other humanities disciplines. [156-157] This dual character of philosophy is a traditional view with a long genealogy. But why is the history of philosophy so important to philosophical work? Are the works of the great philosophers of the past sources for the formulation and solution of current problems? Does the study of the past broaden our perspective? Does the high quality of the works of the past help us to maintain the highest possible standards? Does history of philosophy matter in ethics and aesthetics, where problems may assumed to be more intractable, than in other technical areas? Are contemporary philosophers obliged to explain the plausibility of past philosophies to them and their contemporaries? Can we understand contemporary problems only if we understand their historical background? Rosenthal finds good reason to question all these suppositions.
Rosenthal maintains that “interpretations of past philosophical texts depend on current philosophical discussion” in multiple ways. Here the application of the principle of charity is at issue. [163-4] Davidson, Skinner, and others are hauled in with examples in mind. The interpretations of past texts are all occasions for problem-solving. Rosenthal reinterprets Collingwood in order to make sense out of the latter’s assertions. [169-70] We are not really re-thinking past philosophers in the manner of duplicating their own thought processes, which involves the troubled the principle of charity; rather, we are trying to make sense of these positions for ourselves. We are really not so much invested in cloning the positions of the past as using them as raw material for problem-solving. Studying the history of philosophy as a source of ideas works more for philosophy than for other disciplines “because making philosophical sense of a text forces one to confront pivotal philosophical issues. [171] Philosophy connects with the other humanities and adds a further dimension: like other humanities, philosophy seeks to uncover the significance of historically important works, but adds the dimension of problem-solving which makes past philosophy of continuing relevance. Rorty then is wrong in contending that philosophy is not a search for truth but identical in character to other cultural pursuits.
This book is predicated on the fin-de-siècle identity crisis of Anglo-American philosophy and the contrived reconciliation of the contrived division between analytical and continental philosophy. The foul stench of Rorty hangs over the proceedings.
This time around I note that Rosenthal criticizes Rorty’s portrayal of the mind-body problem as a strictly modern problem initiated by Descartes (147-8) as well as Rorty’s argument against materialism (151), along with other lapses. Rosenthal argues that historical and ahistorical approaches to past philosophies are complementary (156). Philosophy’s relation to its past is qualitatively different than the relation of mathematics or the sciences to their histories. (157, 161) Still, what philosophy can gain from its past remains a question, because engagement with the “mistakes” of past philosophies do not generally yield positive results in the resolution of current philosophical problems. (158)
There is a subsequent discussion of Davidson’s principle of charity, various interpretations of Descartes. There are practical limitations to the applicability of ‘charity’. Quentin Skinner argues against both the absoluteness of context and the total autonomy of text. (167)
I find Dascal‘s work on controversies, Leibniz, and Enlightenment philosophy of language most stimulating, but his essay in this book is a real disappointment. Dascal notes that paradox does not cause postmodernists any embarrassment, but also that tu quoque arguments can be applied to their positions. Dascal goes on about the philosophy of language and holism. He summarizes others’s accusations of modernity’s arrogance of reason (for which there are historical precedents) But such negation disenables a dialectical supersession of modernity. Rorty’s own presuppositions are discussed. Finally, Dascal ponders: how should one explain philosophy’s alleged crisis, and how does it relate to the global sociopolitical situation? Dascal seems to be unhappy with deconstruction, and expects Reason to have the last word, but caught up in the insipid presumptions of his discipline, in the end, he really has nothing to say.
