Philosophy and Its Contemporary Readers

[Anonymous No.15391446]

Hey /lit/,
A while ago we had a few threads about Elizabeth Harman, a Princeton philosophy professor who defends abortion with convoluted arguments that I won't go into here. I bring her up because she, and ostensibly many other people who study philosophy, does not seem to have been significantly affected in her views by her work. She defends liberal views of abortion in her work, just like how Rawls and Nozick defended their own political views in their work, and does not seem at all troubled by the obvious problems with their arguments.
Here is my question: What attitude do professional philosophers and other contemporary readers of philosophy generally take to what they read? Do they regard them as living bodies of thought to be drawn upon and nourished by, or do they regard them as interesting, but ultimately useless pieces of paper written by dead men with dead ideas? Is there a general attitude that is encouraged in philosophy courses?

[Anonymous No.15391676]

>>15391446
Most of contemporary philosophy is an attempt to justify the political zeitgeist that urban intellectuals already find themselves in. Philosophy as a way of life holds no sway over them. Rather, it is the ivory tower as way of life.

[Anonymous No.15392010]

>>15391676
>Philosophy as a way of life holds no sway over them. Rather, it is the ivory tower as way of life.
I suspected as much. I'm in a more empirical field, so the dissonance is probably less intense here, but we have a similar problem. People look at the past and never stop to think, "If these systems all worked as intended, and if people believed in them just as passionately as we believe in ours, who is to say that what we have now is the only right way to organize society?" It's as if they deliberately refuse to learn from their sources, but treat their work like a game they play for fun before going home to their families. Maybe all disciplines are like that.
Has anyone come up with a critique of this situation? How do they justify it to themselves?

[Anonymous No.15392052]

>>15391446
Philosophy is the prime source of intellectual cope when it wasn't designed as intellectual cope in the first place. Nothing new here. See: the monk who convinced themselves Virgil was an early announcer of the coming of Christ and subsequently copied his thoroughly pagan works.

Whether you believed the monks just needed a good pretext to make a beloved author survive, or whether you think they were simply too caught in Christian metahistoric narrative to recognized a honest-to-Zeus pagan when they saw one, it's still a pretty telling example of what contemporaries always do with the older cultural figures they admire.

See also Martha Nussbaum for an example of a scholar of Ancient Greek who argues Aristotelian theory of virtue is not prima facie incompatible with some forms of feminism (and who does it in a way that actually makes sense).

[Anonymous No.15392089]

>>15392052
>See also Martha Nussbaum for an example of a scholar of Ancient Greek who argues Aristotelian theory of virtue is not prima facie incompatible with some forms of feminism (and who does it in a way that actually makes sense).
What on Earth? How does she do that?

[Anonymous No.15392136]

>>15391446
>does not seem at all troubled by the obvious problems with their arguments.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "obvious problems" but the entirety of academic anglophone philosophy works by scrutinizing and criticizing each others' arguments. I don't work in ethics so I can't speak to Liz Harman's work on abortion in particular, but she is a big name, so my hunch is that her arguments have been challenged in print, at colloquia, at conferences, etc. I'm sure she has defended them, and possibly even revised them. To that extent, I am sure she has been "troubled."

In the current "publish or perish" world there is a tremendous amount of pressure to maintain one's views. And even when you get tenure philosophers can be pretty arrogant. So it's very common to see people doubling down and not giving up or modifying views when they really ought to. So, that is definitely one way in which people can seem "not to be troubled" by problems with their arguments. But there are still a good number of philosophers who will just say: no, I was wrong for these reasons, here's what we learned.

> What attitude do professional philosophers and other contemporary readers of philosophy generally take to what they read? Do they regard them as living bodies of thought to be drawn upon and nourished by, or do they regard them as interesting, but ultimately useless pieces of paper written by dead men with dead ideas?

This question is sort of sprawling. Historians of philosophy are sort of a different case, but for everyone else in Anglophone academic philosophy, the enterprise is 100% seen as engaging a living body of thought. Everyone reads the great philosophers, but only because it's thought that they have something to contribute to the enterprise, which is now (as it was then) the production of philosophical knowledge, the clarification of concepts and questions, etc etc. Everyone thinks that there remain live questions about knowledge, reference, meaning, consciousness, blah blah blah. And, in all of the departments I have seen, that attitude is encouraged in philosophy courses. There really are these questions that you can make progress on by reflecting, discussing, arguing, learning, reading carefully, writing, etc.

Now, that doesn't mean that philosophers necessarily think the enterprise is /useful/. I think nowadays most ethicists for instance would concede that their work typically doesn't have (nor is it aimed at having) any immediate "practical" consequences. They know that the impact of their work (if any) on (e.g.) policymakers is extremely indirect, delayed, and attenuated. I think most people will be more tempered about whether the work is "ultimately" useless. For instance, lots of people working in philosophy of mind see themselves as engaged in a joint enterprise with empirical scientists of psychological theory construction. Their work now /might/ ultimately matter for a good psychological theory, but who can tell ahead of time?

[Anonymous No.15392143]

>>15392089
Through the most thoroughly academical of sports: mental gymnastics.

[Anonymous No.15392154]

>>15391446
Look at those kikes.

[Anonymous No.15392181]

>>15392089
Fundamental idea is as soon as you recognize that women are capable of reason (which is the big point of divergence with ancient greeks), then it makes sense to apply to them most of what Aristotles applies to men in his description of virtue.

As you see it's not as dishonest or outlandish as it would seem. It fits not only in our society but in many premodern societies where men and women weren't as separated as in ancient greece (so for instance a good part of medieval Europe, and most of Roman history).

You should never underestimate a comprehensive theory's capacity for escaping its creator. Nothing is less of a toy than a well-built theory.

[Anonymous No.15392239]

>>15391446
University positions are tribal power networks that have absolutely no relationship to their nominal fields of "study." The only people who study philosophy post right here or live in very quiet circumstances.

[Anonymous No.15392256]

>>15392136
>To that extent, I am sure she has been "troubled."
This is interesting. What are the standards that are used in the field to judge what is good and what is bad academic philosophy?
>Everyone reads the great philosophers, but only because it's thought that they have something to contribute to the enterprise, which is now (as it was then) the production of philosophical knowledge, the clarification of concepts and questions, etc etc. Everyone thinks that there remain live questions about knowledge, reference, meaning, consciousness, blah blah blah. And, in all of the departments I have seen, that attitude is encouraged in philosophy courses. There really are these questions that you can make progress on by reflecting, discussing, arguing, learning, reading carefully, writing, etc.
How do they then apply this to their own views about our contemporary world? How do they go home at night and continue to believe in not just theories of rights, but the particular rights that have been accumulated until now in the United States, and, as must be the case with some, argue for their extension into whatever "new civil rights frontier" happens to be sweeping the nation at the moment? What is their thought process, how do they justify it to themselves?

[Anonymous No.15392270]

Jews.

[Anonymous No.15392273]

>>15392181
Well said.

>>15392239
This is an overstatement. In any academic field, of course there are absolutely people who get tenure through networking, posturing, good marketing of trite/unoriginal/bad ideas, riding trends, etc. But there are also people who have authentic first-order commitments to the field of study. Philosophy is no different. I know tons of academic philosophers who take philosophy very seriously, as their reason for being. Whether their work counts as "philosophy" in your mind is a separate matter, but their engagement is authentic.

[Anonymous No.15392278]

>>15392181
Okay, but how do you get from accepting that women have reason to denying that their role is to bear children, or arguing that they should be free to become career women and not have any children at all? Feminism is not the idea that women are capable of reason, but a whole host of propositions about what our society should look like.

[Anonymous No.15392346]

>>15391446
>Book abortion is thought crime!

[Anonymous No.15392372]

>>15392278
The claim is that it's compatible with feminism, not that it entails feminism. So it's not incumbent on us to argue that one can "get from" one claim to the other. And I see no reason for thinking they're incompatible, as suggested above. Aristotle had a theory of women, but I don't see that his theory of virtues depends on it in any essential way.

[Anonymous No.15392395]

>>15392273
How could a first order commitment to philosophy ever lead someone into today's academy or allow them to stay inside it? I expect we'll just have to disagree on this. Whenever there's a conflict between truth and professional interest, you can know which side the academic will take, ninety nine times out of a hundred.

[Anonymous No.15392446]

>>15392372
Alright, well, I guess to go any deeper I'll have to read her books for myself.
Do you ever encounter reactionaries?

[Anonymous No.15392538]

>>15392256
The standards are something of a mixed bag, and depend substantially on the relevant sub-field. I should admit up-front that academic philosophy is absolutely susceptible to trends and to politics. So, if you aren't working on the trendy topic, or if your work goes against the political grain, it will be harder to get published/recognized. Not at all impossible, but harder (sometimes much harder). Like every other academic discipline, appraisal is not always a reflection of merit alone.

That said, the standards are what you'd expect. Clarity and rigor of argument are the main criteria. A lack of precision about the delineations of one's concepts is bad. (Since any one's use of a concept can be made more explicit, any paper is susceptible to this charge; but people are generally good at criticizing unclarities only if matter for the argument.) And the rigor of argument is key. How clearly has the argument's premises and background assumptions been articulated? Have they been adequately defended? (Judging "adequate defense" is itself complex. Have they been adequately defended, /given/ their initial implausibility? Or, /given/ the fact that they are in tension with some other widely-held claim? Or, /given/ how important they are for the argument to follow?) Have obvious objections been reasonably anticipated and convincingly replied to? Is the argument itself in fact convincing, in the way it moves from premises to conclusion?

Clarity, precision and rigor of argument are the main criteria for competence. If you fail here, you're doing bad philosophy. If you meet these criteria, you're at least doing competent philosophy. What counts as "good" philosophy is even messier. But, generally, good philosophy gets you to notice something you didn't see before, or by presenting a sharp puzzle that everyone will have to contend with, or by presenting a new and compelling argument for an unintuitive claim, or by clarifying a concept in an especially adept or satisfactory way, etc etc. Here the standards of the particular sub-field matter tremendously.

As for the second question, well...I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's just that a lot of them are convinced of some moral theory that, they think, entails that such and such things are rights. The intellectual understanding of ethics/politics and the first-order political beliefs are, to a fair extent, consistent with one another. Which is the cart and which is the horse? I'm sure it differs from person to person. I'm not optimistic enough to think that everyone is subjecting their kneejerk political views to intellectual scrutiny at all times. I'm not pessimistic enough to think that people's assent to a moral/political theory is always entirely determined by antecedent political/social commitments.

[Anonymous No.15392610]

>>15392538
Alright, so by the standards you mentioned, Harman is a good academic philosopher. She's good at her job, but I and other anons don't like her ideas. I feel like you've just clarified something very important for me. Thank you.
>As for the second question, well...I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's just that a lot of them are convinced of some moral theory that, they think, entails that such and such things are rights. The intellectual understanding of ethics/politics and the first-order political beliefs are, to a fair extent, consistent with one another. Which is the cart and which is the horse? I'm sure it differs from person to person. I'm not optimistic enough to think that everyone is subjecting their kneejerk political views to intellectual scrutiny at all times. I'm not pessimistic enough to think that people's assent to a moral/political theory is always entirely determined by antecedent political/social commitments.
This is also very interesting. This question has dominated by mind for the past year or so, because a similar phenomenon exists in my area. I study an Asian country that has undergone major shifts in language, culture, and politics since 1945. My seniors seem to support these shifts, and take great umbrage at the mere expression of a different position. I sometimes feel like I'll need to keep quiet and focus on something that doesn't push people's buttons for a decade or so before returning to these issues, but I'm not sure.

[Anonymous No.15392673]

>>15392278
Feminism is many things, if you accept that it's normal that women should vote then you're already an hyperfeminist by the standard of most people pre-20th century (and in some place, most people up to 1950). If you also accept that it's normal women shouldn't be barred from high responsibility jobs like CEO, judge or elected official then you're more feminism than most people until 1970. Yet both of those are reasonable in an Aristotelian framework if (and that's the big if) you accept women have reason comparably to men.

Aristotles probably would have not accepted that "if", medieval philosophers would have had varied responses ranging from "hell no" to "you're getting a bit to fat but the spirit is there", many thinkers in the 18th century onwards would have granted it.

The crux here is that Aristotles is the creator of a philosophy that survived him and whose logic can be applied in contexts he couldn't have foreseen. In a sense Nussbaum's work is a vindication of Aristotles insight (and at any rate is better than "screw that misogynist dead guy").

The posture of seeing your own works entail consequences that you don't accept is common among great thinkers, even in the comparably less controversial domain of the hard sciences.

[Anonymous No.15392675]

>>15392395
A couple of things to say to this. First of all, take people working on things outside of so-called "value theory" (i.e. not political philosophy or ethics). Suppose that you just naturally become fascinated with the Liar Paradox. You become convinced that it is a really fundamental puzzle to gaining deep philosophical understanding of the world. You go to university and you realize that there is a rich tradition of people who feel the same way about the Liar Paradox as you do, and have attacked the problem extremely carefully and rigorously, from different angles, all in conversation with one another. And then you talk to a graduate student, or a professor, or whomever, and you realize that there are people who are /still/ working on the topic; who /still/ take it seriously, and attack it carefully and rigorously, who are all supporting each other in their admittedly niche fascination with this question. Doesn't it make sense that /some/ people who are authentically interested in the truth would find this community appealing, and would like to find a way to stay in it?

You are skeptical that one could nevertheless "stay inside" academia and that is fair enough. God knows that there are tremendous market pressures to publish garbage. So either you alienate yourself from your first-order commitment to truth and publish stuff you know to be sub-par, or you don't and (unless you are able to publish excellent material straight out of grad school) suffer tremendous career set-backs (floating through post-docs for years, getting summarily rejected by the humanities faculty tenure committee, etc). For what it's worth, many people I know just accept that there's a tradeoff: I'll accept /some/ alienation in order to stay in a community that I find intellectually stimulating and that tackles problems I find important. I'll publish some sub-par work in mediocre journals, so that I have the time and opportunity to stay in the community and work on something actually good. So when you talk about the "conflict" between truth and professional interest, it needn't always be "taking a side." One can compromise. I don't think such compromise completely annihilates one's ability to authentically engage in philosophy.

I can't help but hear in "conflict between truth and professional interest" a worry about the liberal climate of universities. (Sorry, this is 4chan after all.) Like, someone who is /really/ committed to the truth would recognize that the truth might lead them to something politically unsavory, and that universities would not tolerate that. All I have to say in response is, I know many people who feel that their liberal moral/political views are well-supported and hard-earned by argument. They feel that they have reached such views /through/ committed philosophical thinking. Maybe you think they are deluded or cucks or whatever, but they are genuinely concerned with getting at the truth.

[Anonymous No.15392717]

>>15392610
Let me again emphasize that I don't work in ethics, and so I cannot say how (and how much) she is considered a "good" academic philosopher, in the sense I described. I will tell you that her name is recognizeable. And I can also tell you that people have become recognizeable in philosophy doing bad or merely competent work. It happens more than anyone would like to admit. Given her reputation, I am absolutely sure she does /competent/ philosophy in the sense I described above. ("Competent" was too negative a term, in retrospect.) I would bet that she does /good/ philosophy along /some/ metrics that matter to ethicists. But I have no idea what those metrics are, or which she excels at.

[Anonymous No.15392730]

>>15392673
>Feminism is many things, if you accept that it's normal that women should vote then you're already an hyperfeminist by the standard of most people pre-20th century (and in some place, most people up to 1950). If you also accept that it's normal women shouldn't be barred from high responsibility jobs like CEO, judge or elected official then you're more feminism than most people until 1970.
I'm not gonna lie to you, chief: I have no position on either of those questions. I haven't thought about it enough to have one.
But judging by your line of attack, it seems that Nussbaum speaks of feminism in the sense of allowing women to have authority and responsibility outside the home. Am I correct in thinking this?
>The crux here is that Aristotles is the creator of a philosophy that survived him and whose logic can be applied in contexts he couldn't have foreseen. In a sense Nussbaum's work is a vindication of Aristotles insight (and at any rate is better than "screw that misogynist dead guy").
Now what if we take Nussbaum together with Alasdair MacIntyre? Wouldn't that be interesting?

[Anonymous No.15392762]

>>15392446
By all means read her for yourself. And also take a look at the Aristotle secondary literature more broadly while you're at it. But I think >>15392673
expresses the basic idea here quite nicely. Unless you can argue that there's something intrinsic to Aristotle's virtue theory that entails (e.g.) that the "role" of women is childrearing, it'll be compatible with (some forms of) feminism. (N.B. that what you would need is something intrinsic to Aristotle's /theory of virtues/, not Aristotle's theories /in general/. I wouldn't be surprised if Aristotle's theory of biological functions entails that the telos of women is to raise children. The question, though, is whether his theory of virtue relies on the theory of biological function in any way.)

[Anonymous No.15392777]

>>15392010
>People look at the past and never stop to think, "If these systems all worked as intended, and if people believed in them just as passionately as we believe in ours, who is to say that what we have now is the only right way to organize society?"

This begs the question and that leads into their point. Justifying politics is that you believe there are multiple truths and that you must engage in politics to assure your view. I argue there is one correct view and we interpret it differently given external differences like technology.

[Anonymous No.15392823]

>>15392777
>I argue there is one correct view and we interpret it differently given external differences like technology.
And how are we to determine which view is correct?

[Anonymous No.15392963]

>>15392823
A correct metaphysics, use synthetic and analytic arguments to go up and down the hierarchy

[Anonymous No.15393060]

The vast, vast majority of professors are day jobbers. The most passionate ones are critical theory idiots whose preferred method of posturing (badly aping French postmodern jargon from the 1960s-70s) conveniently dovetails with their milquetoast astroturf pseudo-leftist politics, which is a treacly and watered down bourgeois humanism applied to freaks. This way they never have to strain their own behavior as a result of reading postmodern philosophy and criticism, because they only learn it as a jargon useful for expressing childish beliefs they already hold. They get to be part of the Marxist radical tradition while never giving a shit about actual structural class problems or poverty. The REAL frontline of the revolution is making sure nobody ever uses gendered language, while continuing to be a rich dandy.

Those people are the most insufferable because they're actually fucking deluded enough to think they're public intellectuals, as overdressed 30-to-40-year old glorified high school teachers with captive audiences.

But the vast vast majority of professors are just jobbers. They may love their little area of study, but more often than not even this has faded. For most of them, the "living body of thought" of philosophy is like an old mine that has seen too many miners and is mostly tapped out, but you can still find another paycheck if you go down there and really scrape some crap off the walls.

Once you see this, you can really notice how pathetic most academic books and theses are. It's always "Shakespeare and something," "The something turn as applied to Shakespeare," "Shakespeare and some other guy: Surely no one has done this pairing yet, right?" with no new information or engagement. What's really freaky is that sometimes one of these scholars will accidentally hit upon a good topic, or rather, a topic that would be good if they weren't the one writing it. So you get excited to read their book, with its promising title, and you're shocked to find that even when the topic was accidentally good, even when they've struck a new vein in the mine against all projections, their class of miner has forgotten what a real vein looks like, and they still only scrape it lazily and collect the scrapings.

[Anonymous No.15393386]

>>15393060
Is literature your area of specialty? That sounds like the kind of thing that would happen there.

[Anonymous No.15393664]

>>15393060
Ok, can you show me on the doll where the Postmodernists touched you?

[Anonymous No.15394057]

>>15392675
Not the anon your replying to but my impression has been that the fundamental criticism of "the liberal climate of universities" supposing for a moment that it exists, is not strictly that there is an overabundance of liberal professors, but that there is an overabundance of liberal administrators who are not intellectuals and have not done the footwork to reach their philosophical positions.

You certainly have your bottom-feeding neocons who occasionally shake their fist at the clouds and yell about the word feminism being used in a sociology class that specializes in 20th century modern movements, I won't discount that. But the problem as I see it, and I've seen discussed among the kind of people who can enter the room without flooring you with their BO, is not that there's necessarily too many "liberals" in academia, but that conservatives in academia are more likely to be the victim of censure or hostile work environments common when your administrative officials all tow the party line. The result is that liberal opinions on campus proliferate more or less freely, while conservatives either can't or don't share their opinions.

I know professors who are very liberal who are very open about their opinions and might face, at worst, an awkward silence from a class that doesn't really care. I also know a good number of professors who, when I talk to them, are definitely conservative or fall in that weird amorphous space between conservatism and being on a slow LSD drip, and who have to distill their actual positions down to nonexistence to even make it through a topic in a lecture.

[Anonymous No.15394428]

>>15392675
>I can't help but hear in "conflict between truth and professional interest" a worry about the liberal climate of universities. (Sorry, this is 4chan after all.) Like, someone who is /really/ committed to the truth would recognize that the truth might lead them to something politically unsavory, and that universities would not tolerate that. All I have to say in response is, I know many people who feel that their liberal moral/political views are well-supported and hard-earned by argument. They feel that they have reached such views /through/ committed philosophical thinking. Maybe you think they are deluded or cucks or whatever, but they are genuinely concerned with getting at the truth.

Stuff like political views is way higher order than what I was referring to with 'searching for truth.' But the preponderence of One Specific Worldview in academia (both professors and administrative gatekeepers) is certainly a consequence of this choosing professional expediency over actual truth-investigation. Again, anyone willing to even engage with a system that will force them to make this kind of decision, is not committed to philosophy in the first order, but rather to "being a philosopher," that is, on a payroll at an institution. Very different thing.

[Anonymous No.15394454]

>>15391446
Why did you not add that they are Jews. It is pretty relevant to understanding their deranged views

[Anonymous No.15394621]

>>15391676
The vast majority of philosophy has nothing to do with politics.

[Anonymous No.15394636]

>>15391446
>obvious problems with their arguments
Nobody has actually pointed out what those are. The /lit/ naysayers in these threads don't even know what she is arguing for.

[Anonymous No.15394643]

>>15391446
this is the biggest cope i have ever seen here lmao

[Anonymous No.15394645]

>>15393060
French-style postmodernists are not Philosophers. They are employed by inferior departments like English and 'Cultural Studies'.

[Anonymous No.15394653]

>>15394636
>>15394643
Go away.

[Anonymous No.15394662]

>>15394621
That's completely wrong, it's just considerations at different levels of scale. Epistemology and ethics are massively politically relevant and to think philosophers are some kind of immaterial floating ghosts pulling ideas from the aether is not the case. They are of their time and marinated in their politics

[Anonymous No.15394663]

>>15394653
t. assblasted whimpering brainlet

[Anonymous No.15394674]

>>15394662
Nonsense. That's like saying algebra is political since it's used in political science.

[Anonymous No.15394675]

>>15394663