Philosophy: An Assessment

Caws, Peter, Guest Editor, Philosophy: An Assessment , Social Research, 47:4 (1980: Winter) p.0 Sas , +. SARS introduction Two and a half millennia ago this month (give or take a decade vr so) someone addressed Pythagoras as sophos, or “wise one.’ ’ Pythagoras declined the compliment; he ought not, he said, to be called sophos, but rather philosophos, “one who cares about wisdom.” There was nothing remarkable in his use of the prefix phil-, which was extremely common in classical Greek—from the philaboulos who loved being inconsiderate to the philoreites who was fond of mountains, the lexicon contains pages full of terms formed in this way. The general idea is of something one likes, loves, is fond of, cares about, seeks for, is in the habit of doing, and so on—in short, a preoccupation, an enthusiasm, a passion. The sophia to which this enthusiasm attached was not only wisdom after the manner of the bearded sage but, as Liddell and Scott put it, “wisdom in common things,” skill, prudence, exact knowledge. Something of this preoccupation has remained with the profession ever since. It was already a joke at the time of Thales, who was said to have fallen into a ditch while watching the stars, that philosophers in their absorption with ideas neglected obvious practical necessities (the term sophos was also used ironically to mean “abstruse”). And it is true that from time to time philosophical attention has wandered far from problems of contemporary moment, too far, perhaps, on occasion—although it is probably good for the human race for some members of it to keep their eyes resolutely on the transcendent. For the most part, however, philosophers have been more or less acutely aware of the state of the real world, sometimes indeed taking refuge in philosophy to escape from it. The state of the world has always left something to be desired, never more so, as people have nearly always thought, than at the present moment. Pythagoras’s modesty indicates

Two and a half millennia ago this decade or so) someone addressed month (give or take a Pythagoras as sophos, “wise one.” Pythagoras declined the compliment; or he ought not, he said, to be called sophos, but rather philosophos, “one who cares about wisdom.” There was nothing remarkable in his use of the prefix phil-, which was extremely common in classical Greek—from the philaboulos who loved being inconsiderate to the philoreites who was fond of mountains, the lexicon contains pages full of terms formed in this way. The general idea is of something one likes, loves, is fond of, cares about, seeks for, is in the habit of doing, and so on—in short, a preoccupation, an enthusiasm, a passion. The sophia to which this enthusiasm attached was not only wisdom after the manner of the bearded sage but, as Liddell and Scott put it, “wisdom in common things,” skill, prudence, exact knowledge. Something of this profession ever since. preoccupation has remained with the It was already a joke at the time of ‘Thales, who was said to have fallen into a ditch while watching the stars, that philosophers in their absorption with ideas neglected obvious practical necessities (the term sophos was also used ironically to mean “abstruse”). And it is true that from time to time philosophical attention has wandered far from problems of contemporary moment, too far, perhaps, on occasion—although it is probably good for the human race for some members of it to keep their eyes resolutely on the transcendent. For the most part, however, philosophers have been more or less acutely aware of the state of the real world, sometimes indeed taking refuge in philosophy to escape from it. The state of the world has always left something to be desired, never more so, as people have nearly always thought, than at the present moment. Pythagoras’s modesty indicates

SOCIAL RESEARCH that he did not think wisdom, or prudence, or exact knowledge, were that easy to attain, although he was willing to be known as one to whom they mattered. The difference between the philosopher and everyone else who also recognizes our failures in these respects—who observes that we fall short in our grasp of the truth of things, that we fail to be as good as we ought or as intelligent as we need to be—is that the philosopher is content neither to observe merely, nor having observed to dismiss the phenomenon as an essential weakness of human nature about which there is nothing to be done, but persists in worrying away at one aspect or another of this endemic lack, trying to get things clearer, more consistent, closer to an adequate account of the nature of things, or of human subjectivity, or of language, or of society. The focus of this insistent and necessarily patient inquiry shifts—from philosopher to philosopher, from epoch to epoch, from country to country. Philosophy is not wisdom, it is precisely the human activity, embodied in persons, that takes as its object, if not wisdom, then at least some improvement of the understanding, as Spinoza put it. If we wish to get an idea of that activity, of its present concerns, its methods, its convictions, the obvious strategy is to ask the persons in whom it is embodied to step back for a moment from their immediate preoccupations and to reflect on their cwn work and that of their colleagues. The present issue of Social Research was conceived in just this spirit. Contributors were asked to prepare informal assessments of the state of affairs in various fairly obvious subdivisions of philosophy. I have in mind [the letter of invitation read] not exhaustive summaries of what is being done everywhere, with massive bibliographical attachments, but impressions of the fields by philosophers active in them, which would be illustrations, as well as reports, of what current work is like: what problems are dominant, who is breaking new ground in connection with them, how the writer of the article reacts to principal trends. Within these approximate constraints on length and content, contributors will have complete liberty of approach and emphasis. This will no doubt lead to some unevenness of treatment, but I take this to be a positive feature of

the arrangement, since I would wish the issue to reflect among other things a group of personalities representative (if not typical) of the profession. The responses to this invitation speak for themselves (and have been left, for the most part, as the contributors submitted them—bibliographical attachments included where these proved irresistible after all—in the spirit of diversity alluded to above), but a few general remarks are in order. First of all, due to pure contingencies and not at all by design, no essays will be found here on logic or the philosophy of science. They were solicited but did not materialize. In one sense this was a fortunate accident, if such an accident had to happen at all (fortunate in the sense that if other essays than these had not been forthcoming the unity of the issue would have been more seriously compromised), for there has come to be a kind of informal division between these domains and the rest, for example in the professional organization of the subject, both nationally and internationally. It might, in fact, be interesting to devote another issue to the very extensive work that is now being done in the philosophy not only of the physical sciences but of the biological and social sciences as well. Secondly, however, another kind of division that might have been expected—by people who have been exposed to popular prejudices about philosophy—to be in evidence hardly shows up at all. The time seems ripe to get rid of the cliché that there is a split in philosophy between “analytic” or “positivistic” or “linguistic” concerns on the one hand and “metaphysical” or “existential” ones on the other. Some philosophers, it is true, maintain a paranoid form of this distinction. But most would now agree that philosophy cannot help being analytic in the broad sense and has always been so; that it is inextricably tied up with language, and that all philosophy involves, implicitly or explicitly, a metaphysical commitment. Contemporary philosophy has, of course, inherited the distinction, due in its modern form to Descartes, between mind and body, matter and spirit. It has been infected with dualism

SOCIAL RESEARCH idealism, and with a resulting partisanship (materialism versus it has come empiricism versus rationalism). But in this centurythat between to be realized that the only inescapable dualism is s. On this consciousness and the content of consciousnes nomenology. It realization rests the philosophical school of phe osophhas also become clear that the languages in which phil in which ical arguments are expressed, and the social contexts and philosophizing is done, cut across the old dualisms arepose no problems of a new kind. The dominant themes now this longer mind and matter but language and society.upAnd in what last is a division which does, very roughly, show n so, since eve follows, although it cannot be said to dominate her side of it. there are several contributions which fall on neit The philosophical interest in language has shifted from thee formal syntax of Rudolf Carnap and the ordinary-languag philosophy of John L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein to the semantics of natural languages and the implications of modal logic. Syntax deals with what its tion is logically possible to say, but philosophically richer ques surround the constraints that language places on what we cand mean or believe. The crucial problems lie neither in the worl in nor in language as such but in the relation between them,een the attempt to understand how language mediates betw s man and the world. But the concern about society that mark contemporary philosophy is not directly related to this concern with language. It arises—in the English-speaking world at g least—from a different sensibility, formed by a long-standin iinterest in theories of law and government, especially Amer can and British, and sharpened by the race problem, the war in Vietnam, and so on. The shortcomings of contemporary l society in these last respects have jolted the awareness of mora h it philosophers down from the second-order level on whic had been operating for decades to a new engagement with immediate problems of injustice, violence, scarcity, repression, and the like.

result 599 of these shifts of attention, local and recent embodiments of the generally shifting focus of preoccupation in philosophy at large, has been, I believe, a reinvigoration of the discipline, which has also extended to branches of it not immediately involved with basic problems of language or society. These essays, spanning the field from aesthetics to the theory of knowledge, and connecting theoretically or practically ethics to to other domains—through politics, through anthropology to concern public affairs with history aesthetics hermeneutics and culture to social in to art, through and _ philosophical general, and legal through problems a of contemporary life—convey a lively sense of what philosophy presently is, how the preoccupation with wisdom that we inherit from Pythagoras translates itself into specific examples of professional work. They also provide, more or less transparently, a glimpse into the styles and personalities of a number of individual philosophers, for whose willing cooperation I here record my thanks. PETER Caws