Rigor’s just another name for nothing left to lose: Or, Refutation through accurate summary
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In the wake of Derrida’s death, Brian Leiter slandered Derrida as being a “bad man” who had had an entirely negative influence on the world and strongly implied that the rise of deconstruction in literature departments had something to do with the rise of Reaganism in American politics. Simon Critchley harshly denounced Leiter’s slander in print. At long last, Leiter has responded, with a lengthy preface slandering Critchley as a total intellectual lightweight with no grasp of philosophy, followed by what amounts to a “guilt by association” argument attempting to discredit Critchley–the “association” in this case being an association with Derrida. That is to say, having done scholarly work on Derrida is here taken as evidence that Critchley’s opinion of Derrida is worthless, since Derrida is intrinsically unworthy of such attention: to properly understand Derrida is to dismiss him. Along the way, we learn that continental philosophy does not exist and that Leiter is proud of his own work as editor of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, a volume full of rigorous, scholarly interventions into this non-existent field.
Obviously, Leiter has written a very bad post on virtually every level. My question here is whether it is structurally possible to respond to such a post (in the traditional sense of refuting claims and offering counterclaims). Or is the only possible response simply to repeat what is stated in the post and say something along the lines of “Obviously, Leiter has written a very bad post on virtually every level”?
Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I can’t comment on the substance of Leiter’s remarks at the moment, but I want to point this out: according to OUP, Leiter’s Handbook of Continental Philosophy is “the only accessible and authoritative guide to the continental traditions in philosophy.”
Yet, he claims that Critchley is a “philosophical used car salesmen.” As a future (crosses fingers) English lit. scholar, well, I would hope the irony is apparent. Alas, I fear it ain’t.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 1:43 am
He’s a pompous ass. That’s all. Read his stuff on Nietzsche — you’ll see exactly the calibre of thinker we’re dealing with here. He’s someone who has networked his ass off and become incredibly influential, but he’s also someone who has a pathetically narrow view of what constitutes ‘good philosophy.’ Perhaps his rabid, argumentative style has something to do with his legal training?
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 2:58 am
These sorts of people (nerds who have made good) cannot be argued with. The only thing they have to live for is their belief in their own intellectual superiority to everyone else. So we can say that he is really not serious about this stuff since he has no intention on changing tact. Everything, and this is so common among Anglo-analytic philosophers, is already decided ahead of time. So, to answer your question, no there is no true way to respond to someone of this kind except how you have. Even though he would say you’ve presented no argument and are yourself an idiot who has wasted half his life reading Derrida.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 4:16 am
Leiter should perhaps read a page from Anthony Kenny’s new series on the History of Philosphy. While it seems that the feud between Continetal and Analytic philosophy has bred many misunderstandings, Kenny admits in an interview that he found much more to Schopenhauer and Heidegger than he had when he started the series.
Kenny seems to have the honesty to recognize that he doesn’t “understand” Heidegger but he does see that the latter was saying important things. I wonder whether Leiter and Kenny might not be enlightened by a reading of Tugendhat’s attempt to bring Analytic and Heideggerian philosophy together in Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination?
In the context of your remarks, these comments assume that you can see Derrida as a radical descendant of Heidegger (taking his dekonstruktion to its logical limits) and Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche).
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 4:21 am
Sigh to high heaven.
Imagine this scenario. I am making an authority decision on Sam Kripke, no in merely his work, but on his life as a human individual. I’ve read some assessments that his work is great. I’ve read others that he severely misrepresents Wittgenstein, who is my favourite philosopher of all time. I’ve talked to some continental philosophers jokingly about just how analytic philosophy his book titles sound, but I have never read any of them. In fact, I think the term analytical philosophy is misguided - and if it includes philosophers as diverse as Rorty and Wittgenstein, thin. I can now apparently say he is shit, a bad person and be editor of a book on analytic philosophy. Well done me. Shabby stuff…
Its classic argument ad Derridium - Derrida was stupid, you read Derrida, you are stupid, a stupid, stupid face.
In part, the greatness of Analytical philosophy is always attempting to do its homework, logically or otherwise. This is not doing its homework. Even AC Grayling was a little more generous, and said he had actually read him, but thought it was nonsense, and offered a philosophical argument to why it was this way, which although a bad reading, at least hinted that he had engaged.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 7:36 am
Does anyone else get the feeling that the best way to win an argument these days is to just throw out some well-known but worthless epithet with no further explanation? “Oh, yeah, well you’re just nothin’ but a Scotist!” or “Well, perhaps if you stopped naturalizing the supernatural by way of your Ockhamist tendencies toward spatialization you wouldn’t end up with mere identity politics and liberalism.” These work well…the ones on the back row can snicker to themselves about how you’ve been one-upped by a superior thinker.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 9:22 am
I don’t much like Leiter’s style either, but can I just point out:
(In response to Adam) Leiter doesn’t claim that there is no such field of study as ‘continental philosophy’. He claims that it’s much more various than Critchley realises, hence the repeated use of ‘continental traditionS’. In particular, Leiter claims that: 1) Critchley’s characterisation of ‘the continental tradition’, as a series of attempts to overcome the dualisms of Kant’s third critique, is bollocks; and 2) Critchley is an ignorant, sloppy reader of texts in the various continental traditions. The first claim seems spot on to me; about the second, I have no view, having never read any of Critchley’s work. Have you?
(In response to cynic librarian) Leiter has no need to take Kenny’s lesson, since he’s a scholar of continental philosophy (there’s a reason why he’s co-editor of the Oxford Handbook). He doesn’t remotely think that continental thought is worthless; he thinks that bullshit should be called, and that facile, incoherent readings of that thought should be recognised for what they are. Whether or not you find Leiter’s work useful, you should recognise that it’s serious, high-quality stuff, and that he knows what he’s talking about.
(In general) For all his mouthiness, Leiter’s basic commitment is to intellectual seriousness and honest scholarship. He therefore gets irritated when people talk ignorant crap about things he knows about. I sympathise.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 9:53 am
Three cheers for the dissenting voice!
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:08 am
Sam C
I would like to think we are all committed to intellectual seriousness and honest scholarship. Scholars who consider themselves interested in continental philosophy (like me) even more so, since we need to cover our backs since we are consistently accused of being feeble minded and intellectual worthless. But it is because we get “when people talk ignorant crap about things he knows about” that we are bothered by Leiter’s statements. I am not a Derrida scholar but I do know a fair deal about him, but Adam is, so for him his problem is precisely this: making absurd statements regarding Derrida’s complicity in certain political events and events within the academy, as well as accusing him of being personally flawed. Considering he has not read Derrida where is precisely his commitment to serious scholarship? Critchley aside, surely this is the big problem?
Regarding Chitchley’s own work, I have had a brush with it, and it seemed to be part of the post-Derrida/Levinas industry, and not particularly interesting, or clever as the best scholar in this field in my view Christopher Norris.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:18 am
Sam C,
I met Critchley once, but haven’t read enough of his work to make a sweeping statement regarding its worth. Yet it does seem clear that he “knows about” Derrida, and so his riposte to Leiter reflects Critchley’s own irritation “when people talk ignorant crap about things he knows about.” Leiter is attempting to discredit Critchley indirectly as a scholar of “continental philosophy” (a field that Leiter rightly reminds us cannot be reduced to a unity), but what’s at issue is not “continental philosophy” in general, but Derrida! By Leiter’s own stated standards, it would be ridiculous to claim that a scholar of “continental philosophy” automatically knows Derrida, or automatically has a privileged ability to assess Derrida’s worth — a scholar of Derrida (which, as Leiter admits, Critchley is) is in a better position to assess Derrida than a scholar of Nietzsche is. And indeed, if Critchley’s statements about Kant and what followed are incorrect, then that’s just an example of him stepping outside his specialization — 20th Century French thought — just as Leiter’s remarks about Derrida are an example of Leiter stepping out of his own specialization. Those of us who know Derrida universally agree that Leiter’s remarks are uninformed and indeed slanderous.
Leiter’s treatment of the term “continental philosophy” in his post is duplicitous — it is regarded as an irreducible plurality when doing so will provide ammunition against Critchley, but it is treated as a singularity when doing so will provide Leiter with leverage against Critchley. Surely a basic respect for the principles of reasoned argument would lead anyone — even those convinced that Derrida is a bad philosopher — to reject Leiter’s tactics here.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:41 am
PS By he has not read Derrida above I meant it in the sense that (as he chides Critchley for lack of reading around Nietzsche), he hasn’t read him in any detail or the scholarship surrounding him.
Can’t edit these posts. Posting too fast = errors.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:50 am
What do you expect from someone who has consistently claimed that all the best work in Continental philosophy is done at institutions that are primarily Anglo-American in their orientation with only one or two continentally oriented faculty, and who doesn’t even include institutions such as Loyola, DePaul, Suny Stonebrook, Penn State, Villanova, etc., as leading programs in Continental philosophy in the Gourmet Report? Does Leiter himself really count as a Continental philosopher because he’s written a bit on Nietzsche?
Anyway, here’s some criticism of how Leiter has ranked Continental programs:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1575/report.html#leiter
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 12:54 pm
He doesn’t include Loyola? But they’re a pluralist school! Does their analytic side just suck too much in his opinion, or what?
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Critchley vs Leiter? A pox on both those houses.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 3:35 pm
But more of a pox on Leiter, surely! Perhaps smallpox, to Critchley’s chickenpox.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 4:46 pm
A scrappy post responding to various people, sorry (I’m busy catching up on Adam’s epic dust-up with John Holbo about Zizek):
Alex: I wasn’t defending Leiter’s views on Derrida, I was responding to Adam’s critique of Leiter’s response to Critchley. About Derrida, I don’t really have any view – what little I’ve read seems weak and pretentious to me, but I can easily believe I’m wrong.
Adam: Leiter’s assessment of Derrida is a moral assessment, so he’s as qualified as anyone else to call Derrida a shit. Again, I have no strong view about whether he’s right or not (when I saw Derrida speak he was charming and responsive, but not actually very interesting, and Tom Baldwin ran polite rings around him). Leiter’s assessment of Critchley, on the other hand, is scholarly and in his area of expertise, so I don’t see the inconsistency you’re trying to pin on him. I also don’t see the duplicity in Leiter’s use of ‘continental philosophy’ – he’s saying the same thing he says in the introduction to The Future for Philosophy and elsewhere: ‘The “Continental tradition”, then, is no tradition at all, but a series of partly overlapping philosophical developments that have in common primarily that they occurred mainly in Germany and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. This means that glib generalisations will likely be rubbish, as Critchley’s is (although to be fair, it could work as a central narrative for a nice undergraduate course, and maybe that was all Critchley intended).
larvalsubjects: On a fast reading, the linked ‘criticism’ amounts to ‘the Leiter report disagrees with these alternative rankings which I have just pulled out of my arse’. So what? ‘Does Leiter himself really count as a Continental philosopher because he’s written a bit on Nietzsche?’ – no, he counts as a scholar of continental philosophy, who’s written more than ‘a bit’ on his expertise.
The fundamental disagreement here seems to be between those who think that there are two completely different ways of doing philosophy, ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’; and those who – like Leiter – think that there is only one way of doing decent argument and scholarship, and that some people conspicuously fail to live up to it. As already noted, Leiter’s combative persona (which is consistent across his web posts and his academic writing) often irritates me, although he can be very funny. But I think he’s right that there’s an important difference between scholarship and bullshit, and right that we ought to mark the distinction.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Sam, There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I’m saying that Leiter is arguing poorly. In specific, he is equivocating on a central term. The overall goal of his post is to claim that Leiter is a much better scholar of continental philosophy than Critchley is — in order to do this, he must implicitly treat “continental philosophy” as a unified field, such that Critchley and Leiter’s expertise can be compared in an “apples with apples” fashion. The purpose of doing this is to establish that, despite the fact that Critchley is a Derrida scholar and Leiter is not, Leiter’s assessment of Derrida’s philosophical worth is more trustworthy. (If that’s not his goal, then he’s just gratuitously tearing down Critchley for the sheer hell of it — it seems a little over the top to me to assume that Leiter is acting out of complete unmotivated malice.) Yet one of the ways in which he bashes Critchley is precisely for treating continental philosophy as a unified field — despite the fact that the unity of the field of continental philosophy is a necessary (though unstated) premise of his attempt to discredit Critchley and legitimate himself as an assessor of Derrida.
(At this point, I have submitted Leiter’s post to a much closer reading than it deserves. Perhaps I’m getting drawn into the same blackhole that I jumped into on that Valve post. If anyone notices me positively defending Critchley’s statement about the specific influence of the third critique on subsequent generations, please hit me with a 2×4.)
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Sam C,
‘But I think he’s right that there’s an important difference between scholarship and bullshit, and right that we ought to mark the distinction.’
The problem is when that is decided by a committee vote. Sure, I think there are two distinct ways of doing philosophy in the Anglophone world, but by no means does that mean I think there are only two or that these two things delineate every possible philosophical position. My problem isn’t that Leiter is more analytic (and that defines more an attitude these days than a particular philosophy, just as Continental does the same), but that he thinks that analytic philosophy is scholarship.
‘although to be fair, it could work as a central narrative for a nice undergraduate course, and maybe that was all Critchley intended’
Yes, that is all he intended. Which is pretty clear when you read the damn thing. Alex may think he’s weak, but on the whole he was really the go to guy for deconstructive ethics for some time. Which, despite being able to have rings run around them, is no small thing.
It’s a bit of sophistry you’re defending Leiter’s clearly duplicitous definition of Continental philosophy of which he seems to me to be more of a commenter than a historian. In that way maybe he is more of a bad Continental philosopher than I’ve originally thought. All of that besides the whole ranking system is pure class warfare and anyone who can’t see that is an enemy of the people.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 5:09 pm
“There are two types of people: those who divide all people into two groups, and those who don’t. I’m one of the latter.”
The problem with identifying scholarship, rigor, etc., with one particular school of philosophy is that sooner or later, being a member of that school is itself taken as an automatic sign of scholarship, rigor, etc. (It’s the Hegelian problematic of “ground” — some of that good old obscurantist continental stuff.) And since members of this school are already qualitatively better simply by virtue of being in this school, you’re willing to apologize for Leiter’s poor argumentation in the service of his greater point — namely, that Leiter’s on the side of good argumentation! (I’m not faulting him for a combative persona — I mean, I have a combative persona. I’m faulting him for a faulty argument. And it’s not like Leiter is solely referring to Derrida’s character — he’s referring, in fact mainly referring, to his worth as a philosopher.)
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 5:10 pm
‘On a fast reading, the linked ‘criticism’ amounts to ‘the Leiter report disagrees with these alternative rankings which I have just pulled out of my arse’.’
Must have been quite a quick reading then. His main charge, it seems to me, is the very insular nature of the surveys sent out. Again, it is a class thing.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Actually Loyola barely makes it on the most recent rankings. Your UC figures at the very top:
http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown29.asp
Sam C, I think you need to read the link I sent a bit more carefully. There is more to the critique than simply a disagreement over the alternative ratings proposed. As the author points out:
The issue is one of Leiter’s methodology. Leiter ranks programs based on the publications of the faculty, yet he only acknowledges certain journals as relevant to these rankings. Consequently, because those that work primarily in the continental tradition do not publish in these journals, they are at an inherent disadvantage. How is this measure legitimate in evaluating philosophy programs? Leiter’s ranking system seems transparently designed to exclude continental philosophy on rather arbitrary grounds.
It is one thing for a philosopher to believe the positions of others are mistaken and to argue against those positions, it is quite another to treat this difference as being in all cases about poor scholarship. Here Leiter strikes me as hypocritical. In a post on his blog explaining his particular argumentative style, he writes:
Many would argue that Derrida is attempting to answer some of the “hard questions” and is therefore worth taking seriously. I have no dog in the fight one way or another, not being a Derridean, but I do wonder how Leiter is in a position to make these judgments about Derrida if he hasn’t carefully read his work or acquainted himself with his methodology.
I haven’t read the book by Critchley that Leiter attacks, but there is definitely some foundation for the importance he attributes to both Kant and the third Critique. The third Critique was a tremendous influence on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel… Not simply because of the way in which it attempted to bridge the divide between the ethical world and the natural world (one of Hegel’s central projects), but also because of its organic metaphors pertaining to living systems (again a big influence on Hegel and indirectly on Marx’s conception of society as a system), and its account of concept formation in the discussion of beauty that would indirectly influence thinkers like Nietzsche in their epistemological claims.
Clearly Hegel was a tremendous influence on Marx. And certainly Nietzsche was responding to a number of the thinkers that emerged in response to Kant and post-Kantian German idealism. Sure, one can point out that Nietzsche or Marx or Husserl, etc., were not directly grappling with Kant’s third Critique, the issues posed in the third Critique, and with Kant, but is that really what is proposed by an argument about historical influence proposes? Whitehead remarks that all Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. When Whitehead makes this claim, is he claiming that every subsequent philosopher was intimately working with Plato’s works and developing them in detail, or is he arguing that Plato had a formative effect on the subsequent direction that philosophy took such that even thinkers that had never read a page of Plato were still indirectly influenced by his thought? One can argue that such an account of the history of Continental history is reductive or overly simplistic, but certainly it can’t be denied that Kant and the third Critique played a highly significant role.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Whoops, here’s the link to Leiter’s blog entry on his style:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/on_rhetoric_civ.html
I want to emphasize that I am not unequivocally endorsing Critchley’s particular take on the history of Continental philosophy, but saying that I don’t think it’s transparently obvious, from the perspective of historiography, that his claims are the result of poor scholarship. Of course, this is what intellectual historians do: they provide differing accounts of historical influence and movements. I believe that these differing perspectives on the history of philosophy do more to illuminate than obscure, and can’t simply be reduced to “poor scholarship”.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 10:22 pm
It’s worth also checking out Leiter’s original post on Derrida (he links to it in the post under discussion). Reading that post, I think, gives a pretty clear indication of why Critchley might have thought that Leiter’s hasn’t read Derrida. It’s not that he doesn’t discuss the central points, but that he often seems to miss what they’re about. I’m not a fan of Derrida, but I admit that I don’t really understand him. If Leiter just admitted that he doesn’t understand him either, everyone would be much happier.
It is problematic that Leiter so enjoys the strategy (he’s used it before) of insisting that the people he disagrees with just don’t know anything about continental philosophy. Besides the fact that it makes the arguments entirely personal rather than philosophical, it’s just annoying that Leiter always backs these attacks with a restatement of his own credentials. Quite apart from his actual scholarly work (which I know very little about), he’s made remarks that make those credentials somewhat dubious. For example: he’s claimed that phenomenology is moribund, and that there are very few competent practitioners of critical theory. Both just seem false, at least insofar as either lends itself to some evaluation as to its truth value based on facts. I don’t think this means that Leiter can’t be considered a scholar of continental philosophy, but it does suggest that there is a good deal of current, and often excellent, continental work that his expertise doesn’t cover. And this means that intellectual honesty should prevent him from using his credentials to try hammering other people’s credentials into the ground.
As for Critchley’s comments: true, there is no one thing called “continental philosophy” (just as there is no one thing called “analytic philosophy”). But if you are asked to characterize continental philosophy in an interview, or commissioned to write a very short introduction to it, it makes sense to look for a simple and reasonable principle that unifies many, if not all, of the figures and movements covered by that name. Although there is no one analytic movement, any history of analytic philosophy is likely to talk about Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Similarly, a history of continental philosophy could reasonably start with Kant, and then mention Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Both of these are fine–so long as nobody maliciously misrepresents the authors as, respectively, claiming that all analytic philosophers are trying to ground arithmetic in logic or that all continental philosophers are obsessed with Hegel’s reply to Kant.
larvalsubjects: your claims about understanding references to Kant and Hegel as being about historical influence are right on. I’ve tried to work this out in a post on my site (the link should show up).
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 4:49 am
Adam, I get that you’re criticising Leiter’s argument: I was responding to that criticism, perhaps unclearly. You accuse Leiter of an equivocation on ‘continental philosophy’, such that it’s a unified field when it’s Leiter’s expertise, but a bundle of loosely-connected traditions when it’s Critchley’s. I think there’s no such equivocation: Leiter is comparing himself with Critchley, apples-to-apples, on scholarly rigour. His argument is that Critchley carelessly misreads both post-Kantian philosophy and Leiter’s post on Derrida, and that this is evidence of Critchley’s general superficiality and dishonesty as a scholar. As I’ve noted already, scholarship is Leiter’s central concern, and one of two things which fuel his aggression (the other being politics). He’s fond of quoting Nietzsche:
That’s what powers his attack on Derrida. Leiter thinks that Derrida was a dishonest scholar, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, and that his influence was pernicious in teaching others, including Critchley, to play the same game.
It’s also what powers the Leiter report: whether or not it succeeds, it’s an attempt to rank graduate programmes according to the scholarly virtues of their faculties. The methodological criticisms in larvalsubjects’s link may have applied in 2001, when they were written, but don’t have much purchase on the current methodology (see here): there is no list of ‘approved’ journals, no specification of which subject areas are worthwhile, no direction to the philosophers surveyed other than ‘Please evaluate the the following programs in terms of faculty quality, using the following scale: 5 – Distinguished; 4 – Strong; 3 – Good; 2 – Adequate; 1 – Marginal; 0 – Inadequate for a PhD program’. Leiter just asks a large group of professional philosophers to rank anonymised philosophy departments by lists of their staff. What better way of ranking departments is Leiter failing to use?
If the result of this ranking is that ‘analytic’ departments come out higher (assuming that ‘analytic department’ is a well-defined class, which I doubt), then maybe that’s because those departments are actually better at serious scholarship, in the judgement of the profession. At least, that conclusion isn’t a priori ridiculous: that a method produces results you don’t like or didn’t expect isn’t a criticism of that method.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 4:51 am
Sorry, link to Leiter’s methodology page doesn’t work: the URL is http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 4:52 am
Try again:
http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 7:22 am
C’mon Sam, this still doesn’t alleviate the problem. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if the people you consult with these surveys are primarily analytic, continental is going to be at an inherent disadvantage. A number of concerns have been expressed specifically about Leiter’s rankings of areas of specialization. Richard Heck of Brown does a good job outlining these problems:
http://frege.brown.edu/heck/philosophy/aboutpgr.php
As for this:
What qualifies Leiter to come to this conclusion? His conclusions read like hearsay, rather than well-informed positions. I have students that say much the same after reading Aristotle for the first time or just about any Medieval theologian… Not because they have an understanding of the material, but precisely because they don’t yet have the requisite reading skills to understand the material.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 7:41 am
This is strictly ancedotal, but might give way to further discussion of the issues at hand.
At the end of last year I went to dinner with the director of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, Rudolf Bernet, after he gave a paper on The Secret according to Heidegger and the “Purloined Letter” by Poe. He is editor of Husserl’s collected works, as well as being on the editorial board of Husserl Studies. He is a man of deep learning and philosophical seriousness, who has had a distinguished career, more distinguished probably that both the figures we are discussing today. In his essay, Derrida and his Master’s voice, he defends Derrida’s reading of Husserl against both that of Derridians and that of Husserlian’s who attempt to claim that Derrida simply got it wrong. And in conversation, he spoke warmly of Derrida’s understanding of Husserl and in a sense his phenomenological legacy.
One of Leiter’s key contentions seems to be that Derrida was a bad reader of the philosophical canon, which is a charge leveled at him by others, for example by AC Grayling. And this bad reading, and the habits that caused this bad reading, are passed onto his followers, for example Critchley. Let us refresh our memory:
a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on.
Now, and again I am not qualified to say other than ancedotally, was Derrida really that bad a reader of texts as Leiter makes out? Certainly, someone associated with the Husserl archives appears to think not. Indeed, there are many theologians who think that Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard is not too shabby at all.
So two questions: is one of the core contentions of Leiter’s accusation actually the case? Is Derrida a bad reader of the tradition?
And moreover, does Derrida suffer from something that has been discussed on this blog previously: that when someone makes a comment on philosopher X, the experts on philosopher X will almost always say that person is incorrect, that they have misunderstood, that this point is debated, that this is not a reasonable interpretation. See any person who tries to construct a long term historical genealogy, for example, Macintyre.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:04 am
To be fair, this question about Derrida’s quality level cannot get beyond the level of mere assertion in the context of a comment thread.
Suffice it to say, however, that the official position of this blog is that Derrida is a great philosopher — and that anyone who claims Derrida is a charlatan is himself a charlatan.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:08 am
Can’t resist dropping in the Philosophical Lexicon definition of ‘MacIntyre’:
There is a reason that MacIntyre gets criticised by people who know about his individual subjects: in his rush to make his big point, he often says things which are plainly wrong in detail. Rorty had the same problem. Grand narratives are hard to get right, but not impossible: Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self does a pretty good job, for instance; not that what he says is beyond criticism, just that it isn’t obviously wrong.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:22 am
Sam: that analytic departments come out higher doesn’t in any way imply that they are better at serious scholarship. Do I need to rehash the obvious retort? Since most philosophers in the US do not work on continental figures, they are not likely to be especially familiar with work by people who do. Thus, they are not likely to rank departments with those people highly. Of course, you might say that there are specialty rankings to deal with this issue, but those can also be weird. For example, NYU makes it into the specialty rankings for continental philosophy. But I can’t imagine a reason why NYU might even be on that specialty list: they have one person, John Richardson. He may be good, but can’t be a match for (just to take schools in Manhattan) a department like the New School (which ranks below it) or Fordham (which doesn’t even get on the list), which have actual continental faculties. Anecdotal evidence: Richardson actually wanted to teach a course on Heidegger a few years back, but there was no interest among grad students and the plan got nixed. In any case, imagine trying to apply to NYU, claiming continental philosophy as your major area of interest in your letter. It’s not likely to work. So the rankings can just yield intuitively nonsensical results. If the claim is “If you go to NYU and somehow end up studying Heidegger, you are likely to get a better job than if you went to New School or Fordham,” then this might be true. But if the claim is that NYU will get you a better overall education in continental philosophy, then, well, I refer you to Hume’s essay on miracles.
Alex: Do Husserlians actually claim that Derrida got Husserl wrong? My impression was that many thought that Derrida got the early Husserl right, but it isn’t a great criticism since Husserl himself says similar things in his later unpublished writings. That would suggest that Derrida is a very good reader, if maybe not the most thorough one. (Incidentally: Leiter says similar things about Leo Strauss. Strauss only wrote on one contemporary of his–Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, apparently, told people that Strauss saw through to the core of his work and recommended Strauss’s very critical commentary as the best thing written about him. That, I would think, is what one might reasonably consider a sign of a good reading…)
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:34 am
Sam C,
Some phenomenologists do think Derrida got Husserl wrong. Robert Sokolowski is the one I can think of off the top of my head. There are quite a few more as well, but they are pretty much old guard and passing (with their own passing).
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:35 am
Err, sorry, that was for Roman.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:45 am
There’s also an interesting double standard, I think. For example, there is a long and proud tradition in analytic ethics of getting Kant dead wrong (mainly because you have to read past the Groundwork to figure out his argument), but one doesn’t frequently see a call denouncing, for example, Bernard Williams as a bad scholar because of his Kant reading. The attitude seems to be that, if you have a substantive project going, it doesn’t matter all that much whether or not your comments on historical figures are spot on. So… why the double standard for poor JD?
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 8:58 am
Jean-Luc Marion also has a pretty trenchant criticism of Derrida in Reduction and Givenness, though it seems to me that he ignores Derrida’s arguments in Given Time, The Gift of Death, and Speech and Phenomenon altogether.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 10:20 am
Incidentally, it appears that Leiter has looked at this post through SiteMeter. Let’s all pray that he views us as beneath contempt, because a link from Leiter could very well destroy this humble site.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 10:26 am
In terms of hits? Or in term of his analytic death ray?
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 10:30 am
Well, I like big numbers as much as the next guy, but I was thinking in terms of a flood of commenters defending Leiter from my calumny. Thankfully, we have preemptive comment moderation for all first-time commenters, but I’d prefer not to reinforce the popular image of me as a censorious fascist by deploying that power en masse.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 11:14 am
The longer I’m online the more sympathetic I become towards limited dictatorship.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 11:38 am
Adam,
I’m fine with advertising quite widely that I am the moderator of this little website. So it is I, and not Adam Kotsko, who is the censorious fascist and will deploy said power with extreme prejudice if need be. I mean, come on, Leiter doesn’t even allow comments! Like I care if a bunch of whiny analytics are upset with us for not posting there whiny comments.
Though, for the record (is someone still keeping a record?), no one here has insulted Leiter on a personal level, as he did with both Derrida and Critchley. Hell, I’m even willing to guess he is alright at his job (Nietzsche, moral philosophy, and philosophy of law). Doesn’t excuse the rest of it.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 12:23 pm
That’s right. All the remarks about his wife’s bad poetry are limited to the Weblog thread.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 12:31 pm
It’s his brother, I think, not his wife.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 1:48 pm
I know this is quite aside from the main point of this thread, but:
‘Jean-Luc Marion also has a pretty trenchant criticism of Derrida in Reduction and Givenness, though it seems to me that he ignores Derrida’s arguments in Given Time, The Gift of Death, and Speech and Phenomenon altogether.’
I would grant Speech and Phenomena, but as Reduction and Givenness was originally written in the French in 1989, how could Marion be ignoring Given Time and Gift of Death, which were published in 1991, and 1992, respectively? Perhaps you’re thinking of the English publication of R&G which came out in 1998? Not a big point, really, I was just wondering if I missed something.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 1:49 pm
p.s. Derrida has a footnote about Reduction and Givenness in Given Time, which is why I ask.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Eric, no I was think of Being Given as well. It’s been a number of years since I read any Marion, so I’m no doubt running things together in my mind.
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Maybe this isn’t the place, but this is a critique of Derrida that I think Leiter references, though I wasn’t able to verify that.
http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/enseignants/km/doc/HowNotRead1.pdf
This struck me as a particularly uncharitable and irrelevant objection:
“Derrida returns again and again
to the link between his concept of structure and death:
The relationship with my death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this [Husserl’s] determination
of being as presence, ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this
relationship with death. The determination and elimination of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation
of this relationship with death, which yet produced signification. (VP, 60; SP, 54)
It is hard to see why death alone should enjoy this privilege. After all, one of the ways in
which death can occur is through the absence of oxygen or the presence of poison. So the
possibility of the sign is this relationship with oxygen and poison. And it seems likely that
signs can be used by human brains and by brains made of plastic. So the possibility of the sign
is also this relationship with plastic.”
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 2:54 am
I’m glad to see this thread still trhiving, though it looks like I’m about to add comments to its dog ends. BTAIM I wonder what leiter is thinking by something that he was mulling over several years ago re the historian Quentin Skinner’s avowed liking for Foucault. In that posting Leiter seems poo-pooh the idea that Skinner could “really” be in league with Foucault. It’s just an abstract relationship, nothing really essential, and all that. Skinner has reaffirmed his liking for Foucault in more recent writings, as have close associate of his; see James Tully’s remarks in “Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics.” I don’t have time right now to go into why it makles absolute sense for how Skinner can see parallels between his own work and that of Foucault; I’d only mention that they relate to what Tully calls politics and power.
What this has to do with Leiter is the following: it seems that Leiter is incredulous that Skinner might find deep affinities with Foucault. It also seems that Leiter has much respect for Skinner to believe this. No doubt this has to do with Skinner’s revolutionary use of analytic philosophy and speech act theory in historiography.
If this is true, then I wonder what Leiter makes of Skinner’s recent remarks (the last few years) that he also finds affinities with Derrida! This statement caused much stir among historians, both Skinner’s enemies and friends. Yet, he has never backed off (to my knowledge) from that acknowledgement. Skinner’s imprimatur on Derrida’s work is even more surprising if you look at it from this angle: it was John Searle (THE major theoretician of speech act theory) who circulated that infamous petition to ban Derrida from receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge.
All of this leads off in directions I do not have the time to deal with now. I wonder whether Leiter is even familiar with this history? Does it make a difference? Is it, perhaps, something else that’s bugging Leiter about Derrida than his Cheshire grin?
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 5:24 am
I think the big elephant in the room with this entire debate is that it seems to me that though I think Derrida is a decent philosopher, the debate in continental philosophy at least from my perspective has moved on. Surely Leiter knows that the big names now are Deleuze and Badiou, and of course, Zizek.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 7:12 am
OK: I suggested that it the Philosophical Gourmet Report’s ranking of philosophy departments isn’t a priori ridiculous, and asked what better survey method Leiter should be using. I’ve had what look like a couple of answers to that question.
The PGR is an anonymous, quantitative reputational survey of UK and US philosophy departments, by the staff of UK and US philosophy departments. It summarises what members of the profession think of their peers as scholars and graduate-level teachers. My view is that it does a good job at its stated task.
Larvalsubjects, if I’ve got this right, thinks that the survey is intrinsically biased: ‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if the people you consult with these surveys are primarily analytic, continental is going to be at an inherent disadvantage.’ I don’t buy this, because it begs the question against (what I’ve suggested is) Leiter’s central contention, that ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ are not distinct and incompatible ways of doing philosophy, with wholly different standards, and necessarily biased against one another. Leiter thinks there’s only one standard: scholarship. You can’t just assume that away, if you want to engage with what Leiter’s doing and arguing. And the ‘two worlds’ hypothesis is pretty implausible on its face: we’re managing to disagree productively, after all, as do the differently-focussed members of any number of philosophy departments, including mine.
Roman, on the other hand, thinks that the PGR can’t, in its nature, give an accurate report on the quality of scholarship on the continental traditions: ‘Since most philosophers in the US do not work on continental figures, they are not likely to be especially familiar with work by people who do.’ This claim strikes me as absurd. A glance down Leiter’s current advisory board offers Frederick Beiser, Michael Rosen, Allen Wood and Pierre Keller, just to pick out the names I, a non-expert in this field, recognise. For another instance, people who work on Kant’s ethics in US and UK departments include, off the top of my head, Onora O’Neill, Christine Korsgaard, Paul Guyer, Thomas Hill, Allen Wood, Henry Allison and Jens Timmerman.
So, I come back to my earlier comment: the fact that an investigative method gives results you dislike or find surprising is not a criticism of that method. That’s why we do surveys: because the results aren’t always obvious beforehand. One would be foolish to base her decision about graduate school on nothing but the PGR, as Leiter himself says, but it’s one useful tool among others. The idea that the PGR is a vanguard party in the class war between analytic and continental is a rather silly conspiracy theory.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 7:42 am
There are actually quite different standards. Many continentals would argue that Anglo-American standards of scholarship are quite low due to the notable absence of historically informed engagement with primary materials. For instance, it is not uncommon for Anglo-American scholars to engage with, say, Plato simply at the level of the text as if the text can be read without carefully acquainting oneself with the Greek language, Greek history, mythology, political events occurring at the time of writing, etc., etc., etc. It looks to me like Leiter himself approaches Nietzsche in this ahistorical way from the descriptions of his work on Nietzsche, though I cannot say for certain. These different conceptions of scholarship have a good deal to do with differing philosophical positions on the nature of language, texts, cognition, and so on.
The solution to the problem is very simple: 1) Leiter should step down from his role with the Gourmet report, handing it entirely over to a committee (too many of his own personal idiosyncrasies enter into the report, even with the improvements that have been made in recent years). 2) Include a greater number of continentalists on the committees in evaluating continental programs. The names listed are almost entirely weighted towards Kant and post-Kantian German idealism. Where are the phenomenologists? Where are the Heideggerians? Where are the experts on contemporary French philosophy? Where are the critical theorists? Moreover, given that Kant plays an equally important role in Anglo-American/Analytic thought (just think Brandom), simply doing research on Kant is not sufficient to qualify one as a continentalist.
Again, the issue isn’t that the results are disliked but that the methodology is deeply problematic. Leiter has been quite vocal as to what he thinks of continental philosophy in general. The fact that he was initially doing these rankings on his own and then later selecting those who make the rankings is deeply troubling. All of this goes back to a point Socrates was fond of making: If you want to do well in the Olympic games are you going to go to the trainer who has trained successful athletes in these games or the average man on the street? Clearly you’ll go to those persons that have expertise in the field. This is exactly what Leiter hasn’t done, thereby stacking the deck in advance.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 8:35 am
Alex: I’ll second most of what larvalsubjects has said above. I don’t think many people would think of Beiser, Wood, Korsgaard, or Allison as continental philosophers. All of them are, in my view, fine scholars, but even Leiter doesn’t seem to count Kant among the “continental” camp (he only includes the 19th and 20th centuries). I doubt (though I don’t know) that any of the people you listed are especially familiar with Deleuze or Gadamer, for example. So I am not really sure what you find absurd about my claim. It seems fairly obvious that the majority (though not all) of PGR respondents are not competent to judge the quality of scholarship on continental figures, nor do they have much interest in or knowledge of this scholarship, and therefore when they rank departments, they are likely to leave out those departments that focus on this work.
Aside from larvalsubjects’s note on two different standards (which, by the way, requires a few qualifications, since of course there are analytic-oriented philosophers who are quite thorough historical scholars–see Alex’s list of Kant scholars), there are also different subjects of study. So even if there were not different standards for analytic and continental philosophy, it would still be true that most PGR respondents would not be familiar with a good deal of continental scholarship even though they might consider this good scholarship if they read it. But there are different standards. Doing good phenomenology is different from doing good analytic philosophy.
I should add, though, that I am not especially opposed to the PGR. What I dislike is that it is taken as listing the best departments in terms of quality of scholarship rather than in terms of the mainstream visibility of department members. Nothing in the methodology (as far as I can see) could yield rankings based on quality. But that is precisely the reading Leiter encourages. For example, a few months ago somebody was quoted as saying that the PGR leaves out some good continental departments like Stony Brook and Penn State. Leiter’s response (aside from being typically condescending and acerbic) was to insist that SB and Penn are not good departments, but actually very weak departments. But what backs this claim? It can’t be the PGR itself, since (1) it can’t judge quality, and (2) since the criticism was specifically of the PGR’s methodology, Leiter can’t refer to PGR results in defending it without begging the question. So: it is his personal opinion that departments he doesn’t seem to know anything about are “weak.” He presents this opinion as objective fact that everyone should recognize in order to accept the PGR as valid. You don’t see a problem?
cynic librarian: Leiter doesn’t seem to have the same feelings about Foucault as about Derrida. He’s recently claimed that Foucaultian methodology is a genuine viable philosophical approach (although he immediately went on to say that there are few competent people doing it today).
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 8:49 am
I just had an epiphany. Sam C says that the standard is scholarship. Yet most analytic philosophy isn’t “scholarly” — it’s carrying forward the overall project by answering outstanding questions, pointing out new complications, etc. The parody view of analytic philosophy is that no one reads anything from before about ten years ago. There are historical scholars, of course, but they’re not the ones driving the field — the emphasis is on moving the project forward.
In continental philosophy, there is more emphasis on scholarship, but in turn, that scholarship is immediately part of doing philosophy in the continental style. Leiter thinks that Derrida is “unscholarly,” but that’s apples to oranges — in principle, he’s doing precisely what analytic philosophers do with their own near-contemporaries, reading them as philosophers, showing unintended consequences of their arguments, etc. He respects traditional scholarship as a way of keeping his work from totally going off the rails, but to let traditional scholarship have the last word is to consign the classics of philosophy to the past.
Critchley might not be much of a “scholar,” but it’s clear that his primary goal is to do philosophy in the present. Judging him solely as a scholar is, in effect, consigning the continental tradition(s) to the past — and under the analytic regime, that’s exactly what they are.
The overall irony is that Leiter’s self-proclaimed “continental” orientation gives him further leverage to help support a system that marginalizes contemporary continental work.
And Sam C, this isn’t a conspiracy in the traditional sense — more of a “Foucauldian” type of conspiracy, without some center organizing agent. Even Leiter isn’t the organizing agent here — his work simply reflects and reinforces institutional dynamics that were in place long before he came along.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 9:25 am
Roman, I presume you are talking to Sam C, not I? I didn’t list any Kant scholars, or if i did it was a slip of the keyboard.
I have to support what Adam said above. This seems to tally with my general thesis about the broad difference between continental and analytical philosophy: that analytical philosophy (since Russell onwards) uses hard science as its model, and continental philosophy in general uses the more human, soft sciences. This observation can be bourne out geneologically if we look at figures in the canon: Ayer, Frege et al, compared to, say, Marx and Freud et al. This is immediately evident when one reads a paper in an analytic journal, it reads much more like a scientific journal than a continental philosophy article. Broad brush stokes, mind you.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 9:47 am
Alex: Oops! Sorry, I was talking to Sam C. Your short message was right above his longer one, and I’m not a careful reader :) My bad.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 10:40 am
Roman—I wouldn’t really be surprised at all if Wood, at least, knows something about Gadamer or Deleuze. (If Dave Maier were here, he’d mention that bit at the end of Davidson’s (not that you’ve mentioned Davidson, but he is basically an analytic guy) essay on Gadamer that ends with a big quotation and the statement “I agree.”.) He knows a lot.
Friday, July 27, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Roman - Regarding Strauss: that he wrote on Schmitt is true, that Schmitt is the only contemporary that Strauss wrote on is un-true. All the same, this story gets passed around a lot. In addition to his “Note” on Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Strauss published work on both Heidegger and Kojeve while they were alive. He also wrote a book on Weber - a near contemporary.
Cynic - Regarding Skinner: even the most superficial reader of Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought and of Foucault’s work - especially the works of the mid- to late-seventies - can see, if not an “influence” of Foucault on Skinner, then, at least, a concern with nearly identical problematics. To prop up Skinner in an effort to attack Foucault is just nuts. Readers of footnotes will note that Skinner has an ongoing dialogue with his contemporaries in France - he even cites someone as little read in English as Castoriadis (on the imaginary) and Lefort (on the history of reading Machiavelli). At the same time, people who read Foucault on modern power and the state, but don’t read Skinner on the same are negligent.
As for the issue at hand, I couldn’t give a fuck. Leiter is a more popular but less verbose version of Holbo. And, of course, I’m a sociologist; not a philosopher!
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 1:20 am
Craig: apologies if I got it wrong! I trust those damn introductory essays to books more than I should. I’d love to read anything Strauss wrote on Heidegger (seriously, who DOESN’T want to read that?). References?
Ben: My goal was cerainly not to disparage Alan Wood’s breadth of scholarship. I’m a fan. But: would you be entirely happy with ratings of continental philosophy departments done by him? Frankly, I have deep respect for many of the people Leiter got to rank continental departments for the PGR, but I don’t buy the results for a second.
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 4:00 am
In the interest of being relevant to this thread, Davidson mentions that he hadn’t read Gadamer until late in his career. So I’m not sure that the passage from “Gadamer and Plato’s Philebus” is relevant, here.
(I’m forced to wonder if ben wolfson didn’t confuse me with Dave Maier, given that I’ve mentioned the Davidson/Gadamer passage repeatedly in Valve comment threads, and I can’t recall Duck having pointed it out. But perhaps I simply am overlooking something.)
I’d be rather surprised if Beiser hadn’t read Gadamer, given that he’s written on Hegel’s historicism, and I’ll be damned if Wood hasn’t. Deleuze I wouldn’t place bets on being read, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Wood has mentioned him somewhere. I can see why Deleuze fans are antsy about the rankings, though. For most of the areas of specialization on the PGR (philosophy of mind, metaphysics) it’s not too hard to feel that the people polled are among the top figures in the field. I’m not at all sure I’d say that the folk Leiter has reviewing departments for their strength in “continental” areas are similarly strong.
Strauss has an essay on Heidegger in “Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism”: “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”; it wasn’t as good as I expected, but it was alright. Actually wasn’t bad as an introduction to Heidegger, I’d think, and it makes clear how forceful Strauss felt the guy was. I’m sure there’s more than that one short essay, though. The essay on Strauss in History of Political Philosophy (the purple book) implies that Heidegger was quite important for Strauss, as I recall; I read an interview with Gadamer somewhere that echoed this claim. The basic idea was that Heidegger & Nietzsche had done a fine job of showing that modern thought ended in nihilism, and so the problem was to see what could be done despite this. (I may have some of the details a bit off; it’s been a while since I found reading Strauss to be a gripping experience.)
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 4:30 am
This has degenerated, but I’ll be glad to contribute. Strauss never wrote on Heidegger, the essay referred to above is pasted together from two different lectures that Strauss never intended to publish. He also wrote one chapter in Natural Right and History on Weber. He did write an essay on Husserl that appears at the beginning of Platonic Political Philosophy, and an essay on Hermann Cohen that appears at the end.
The internet’s premiere site for Straussiana is here.
http://nrh.blog-city.com/
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Alex:
Sam Kripke?
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Adam:
What do you mean by ’scholar’ and ’scholarly’? If someone does nothing but cutting-edge add-to-the-field research, is s/he not a scholar?
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 10:41 am
I’ve left it a bit long to reply to this (first sunny weekend in ages here, so no inclination to sit inside typing), and in any case I’ve probably said all I had to say on these topics. Just a few brief last remarks from me, then I’ll shut up:
1. As has already been pointed out, the claim that non-continental thinkers don’t pay attention to historical context is nonsense.
2. Adam and I were apparently using ’scholarship’ in different senses: I just meant it as careless shorthand for ‘whatever makes a good academic philosopher’.
3. The list of names on the PGR site is the advisory committee, not all of the people who fill in the surveys. The latter’s a much larger group, and Leiter doesn’t publish their names, so far as I know. Any claims about their expertises are speculative at best.
4. Sorry, but I still don’t believe in the conspiracy, Foucaultian or otherwise. Continental figures and continental styles of thought are influential and widely-discussed in the academy. Some people think (e.g.) Derrida is crap. Some people think that about Russell, too. No-one can give everything its due, or be sympathetic to everything worthwhile.
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 11:26 am
Shorter Sam C.: Nuh-uh!
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 11:41 am
Given the fact that analytic philosophy bases itself on the hard sciences (whether legitimately or not), it doesn’t make sense that someone pushing the field forward is the same as a “scholar.” Was Einstein a great scholar of physics, for instance? Or is a contemporary mathematician who discovers a new proof a “scholar” of math?
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 11:51 am
Interestingly enough, apparently it is possible to say “Bakhtin was a great scientist” in Russian.
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 1:35 pm
This was too much work, but here is the list of Leiter’s raters for continental philosophy:
Maudemarie Clark, Niezsche
David Dudrick, Nietzsche?
Paul Franks, - German idealism
http://philosophy.utoronto.ca/people/profile.html?id=344
Charles Guignon, - early Heidegger, psychotherapy
http://www.cas.usf.edu/philosophy/guignonstatementuv.htm
Pierre Keller, - Kant, early phenomenology
http://www.philosophy.ucr.edu/people/keller_p.html
Sean Kelly, - early phenomenology
Michelle Kosch, German idealism
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/phil/faculty/kosch.html
Brian Leiter, - Nietzsche
Rudolf Makkreel,- Kant and Dilthey
Stephen Mulhall,- Wittgenstein, early Heidegger
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~newc0929/
Beatrice Han-Pile, Foucault
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Ebeatrice/
Peter Poellner - Nietzsche
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/staff/poellner/
Michael Rosen - Hegel
Mark Sacks, Kant
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Emsacks/
Richard Schacht - Nietzsche
Julian Young.- Nietzsche
It’s mostly Nietzsche, early phenomenology, and German idealism. No French phenomenology, one Foucault, no Derrida or Deleuze. IN what sense is this 20th or 21st century continental? It’s certainly a weird definition that leaves out most of what happened after 1935.
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Daniel: maybe I am. I know that Maier’s referred to Gadamer at least on his own site, and I just might have a tendency to attribute references to Davidson to him, since he’s always on about Davidson.
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Also note that Leiter has separate rankings for “Kant and German Idealism,” and for the somewhat odd category of “19th Century Continental Philosophy After Hegel” (the evaluators are mostly the same, which in itself seems problematic). So quite apart from the question of whether these figures properly belong to “continental philosophy,” the rankings for 20th C. Continental philosophy (obviously) cannot include Nietzsche or German Idealism. Many of the evaluators here are excellent scholars and well informed about contemporary work; their interests are (at least in some cases) fairly broad. For example: Julian Young has written more books on Heidegger than Nietzsche (including later Heidegger), and Sean Kelly doesn’t just do early phenomenology: he is one of the people who use phenomenology in contemporary work, which I think is one of the most vibrant areas of continental philosophy today. But contemporary phenomenology is still underrepresented on this list. So is almost everything French (psychoanalysis? Feminism?). And where, oh where, is the whole tradition of Marxim and Critical Theory, still one of the bastions of contemporary continental work?
Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Adam, Before–like Leiter–failing you, I’d ask you to substantiate the view that analytic philosophy bases itself on science. Perhaps you are thinking of Russel’s later thought? (Okay that was a softball.) But …. I await your answer.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 4:11 am
I knew that about Julian Young. Just wanted to see if anybody’s paying attention. And to point out how Nietzsche heavy the evaluators are. Notice that Leiter’s own department makes it into in the third group in continental philosophy, even though the UT website has no listing for CP and one of the two continentalists is Leiter, who says CP doesn’t exist.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 7:31 am
Adam: “Given the fact that analytic philosophy bases itself on the hard sciences (whether legitimately or not), it doesn’t make sense that someone pushing the field forward is the same as a “scholar.”
Sweet Sam Kripke on a stick, who gave you THAT fact, may I ask? (You need to get yourself a better class of fact to get given. Is what I’m saying.)
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 7:58 am
I got the idea from John Emerson.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:06 am
Is Holbo drunk?
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:37 am
No. I’m sitting here studying the major works of Elwood Husserl and Melvin Heidegger. (Your mileage may vary.)
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:43 am
Yeah, I remember one of these threads where someone accidently called him GFW Hegel. We ragged on that guy for months.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:44 am
Come on, analytical philosophy takes it model of practice far more from hard science than from sociology et al. I can see Adam’s point, there are scientists who work at the cutting edge of research and there are writers who might be better called ’scholars of science’ working on the history of science.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:45 am
Are you now suggesting, in your drunken stupor, that phenomenology bases itself on blues? Cause I don’t get it and I know how you just love to teach me. Let’s skip the Socratic part though and just jump to the end.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 9:22 am
For the record, Holbo’s referring to a mistake made by Alex above — it’s Saul Kripke, not Sam. Dave2 corrected Alex on this. Apparently, it’s now “funny” for him to screw up the first names of great continental philosophers. Overall, it’s part of a Holbonic two-pronged attack — on my broad characterization of analytic philosophy and on petty details that are symptomatic of our general ignorance of analytic philosophy.
Personally, I think there should be more philosophers named Saul — more people named Saul, in fact. It’s an underused name. Other than Saul Bellow, I can’t think of another famous Saul in modern times.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 9:32 am
What a poorly constructed joke!
Saul Williams is a poet/hip-hop musician.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 9:42 am
Yeh its a good Holbonic tactic, real rigorous and suchlike. Sorry about my error, should have picked it up earlier.
Just to defend myself on account of a general ignorance of analytical philosophy, I was taught philosophy at undergraduate level at an very much analytic department, and my training at this time in philosophical theology was by two tutors who have feet in both camps, one is a trained mathematician (!?! etc). And one of my interests is Wittgenstein. So there.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 9:53 am
I once read a short monograph on Hegel which referred to him throughout as “Georg Hegel”. It also cited the Bailee translations of the Phenomenology, for some Goddamn reason; the book was written in the past ten years.
Suffice to say, it was not a very good book.
Apparently Heidegger’s brother looked a lot like him. They’d get confused for each other at parties and such. Rudiger Safranksi’s biography recounts one such incident: After a public lecture Martin had just delivered, as everyone was leaving, someone asked his brother a question which he couldn’t make heads nor tail of. He responded “It is the ’stell’ of the ‘Gestell.’” This was taken to be a quite satisfactory response.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:02 am
Apparently Hegel’s wife called him ‘Herr Doktor Professor Hegel’. Or possibly, in an intimate moment, ‘Professor Hegel’. Very impertinent to call him what his own wife could not.
As to the rigor of my joke: if you can think of a more rigorous joke about Husserl being named Elwood, I’m all ears. No wait, it has come to me - in an epiphany in every was as rigorous as Kotsko’s own (see above): “It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re performing the epoche.”
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:10 am
“Driving forward,” etc. — yes, a good connection. Doubtless this is your backhanded way of saying that I’m grossly mischaracterizing analytic philosophy in my epiphany as well.
Perhaps you need to set aside some time and tell yourself, “For the next X weeks, I am going to say things in as straightforward and concise a manner as possible.” Just as an exercise. I would of course never ask you to abandon your Holbonic style altogether, but taking a break might well bring about — well, an epiphany.
The other strategy would be for you to “go through the fantasy,” identify with your symptom, and just plain become Derrida.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:21 am
But Holbo! Is there really ‘the’ epoche?!
That was a better joke. So one point to Holbo. Two points to Kotsko for the ‘become Derrida’ line.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:24 am
For the record the bad joke I referred to was the one where you tried to zing Alex for getting Kripke’s name wrong. It was only bad because the context was all off. The Blues Brothers thing, well, I just thought you were kind of high.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:43 am
No. ‘Sweet Sam Kripke on a stick’ does NOT require a specific context to be funny. Bob’s your uncle, in all possible worlds, so far as this joke goes. (You cannot fail, that is. And I am also, you appreciate, nodding to Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, by way of emblematizing my solid procedure. Names are things of power.)
I do think the level of discussion of analytic philosophy has been … insufficient in point of scholarly rigor, given that the point was to upbraid lack of such. But perhaps we can take this up another time.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:00 am
You think I was saying that analytic philosophy is bad because it’s not “scholarly”? I was just saying that to me, it seems like “scholarly” is not the appropriate word to use for the work that drives the field in analytic philosophy — just as it seems to me to be inappropriate to use the word “scholarly” to characterize mathematicians or logicians who work on present outstanding problems. I wasn’t saying that all analytic philosophers are hacks or something.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:04 am
Maybe in some non-space that doesn’t require context, but in the real world it does. I really don’t want to argue about something so silly though, so in the interest of your ego, ‘Oh, right, of course.’
The discussion wasn’t really so much about analytic philosophy, so of course it wasn’t very rigorous.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:09 am
I think the point of the debate was that what is “scholarly” is not necessarily the same in two separate traditions of philosophy. For example, it might be said that while it is more than acceptable for a continental philosopher to write a work concentrating almost wholly on commentating on another figure of the canon and bringing others into discussion with them (eg Derrida plus some other figure, possibly one you would not have put Derrida with), this kind of thing is less common in analytic circles. Also, at least seemingly, like science, Analytic philosophy seems to be more about recent papers and the arguments therein, than whole book exegesis. Hence, in part, the scientistic style.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:29 am
I object to the inference that runs: since analytic philosophy is ‘based on the hard sciences’, therefore it is not scholarly (but some other sort of thing). It’s the old Calvin writing his report problem: you’ve only got one fact, and you made it up. Bats, the big bug scourge of the skies. (And stepping back to the effect that bats may be very nice bugs, in their buggy way, doesn’t fix the problem.)
Suppose I said: ‘this fellow, Jerry Derrida, his stuff is all based on poetry. Therefore it isn’t scholarly.’
How impressed would you be?
Do you really think that Anglo-American philosophy, as it is practiced today in the academy, is mostly math and logic? No. You don’t think that. So why act like you think so?
I’m not being snarky. I’m being reasonable AND snarky.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:34 am
No, I think it’s mostly math and logic and brain science.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 11:35 am
John, As frequently happens in our discussions, I’m willing to be proven wrong, but your objections seem to me to be so mixed up with strange misunderstandings that I don’t know how to assess your claims. Specifically, you seem to be unclear about the nature of an analogy.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Would anyone be happier if the word “hard science” was replaced with “technological”? It seems to me that the areas in which analytic philosophy excels (philosophy of mind, language and applied ethics) are amenable to “technological” solutions. Figuring out the differing functions of the definite and indefinite articles, along with the ways in which they refer to objects, is a technological rather than a scientific question. And it is the sort of question the Deleuze or Foucault was not about to ask. However, you can imagine legions of junior analytic philosophers doing that. Likewise, the continental tradition remains - and this is quite ironic given Holbo’s “Holbocrates” pose [that tends to resemble Meno or Gorgias or Thrasymachus more so than the Philosopher himself for what it is worth] - the only place in which the nature and meaning of Justice itself can be asked (or Law or the Good or what have you]. Analytic philosophy, however, is ready to ask - and more than willing to answer - whether or not it is okay to eat meat, wear fur, and clone organs.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 1:54 pm
‘Likewise, the continental tradition remains … the only place in which the nature and meaning of Justice itself can be asked (or Law or the Good or what have you).’
Sorry, can’t let this fantastical claim pass. The ‘nature and meaning of justice itself’ is one of the main topics of contemporary political philosophy in UK and US departments, and much of that work isn’t ‘continental’ in style, traditions or focus. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is the founding text for an enormous literature on justice. Similarly, there is a vast amount of not-obviously-continental work on the law and the good. Good grief, man, do you have even the first idea of the work you’re traducing?
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I (and I think Adam too) aren’t saying that analytical philosophy is based on the hard sciences, in the sense that it grew out of them etc.
Lets get down to brass tacks on this, rather than share rather pointless to and fro jokes.
What I am saying is that in style and in the sources it borrows from (for example, the brain sciences), it tends more generally to adopt a style and occasionally method linked to the hard sciences, rather than to social sciences such as psychoanalysis, critical theory et al. I think that it would not be hugely uncontentious to say, at least in the pop conception, that it is at least percieved as being far more friendly to the natural sciences than its continental cousin. And in general terms, it tends to dialogue far more with them, and generally toward the harder end.
This, I think, can be bourne out genealogically. As a historical mode, analytical philosophy broadly began with Russell and Moore in the 1890s, rejecting the idealism and synthesis of the dominant Hegelian school, for realism and analysis. Russell’s writings, particularly later on tended towards a form of scientism, which restricted the role of philosophy to ironing out logical or epistemological problems with its basis. Post-Wittgenstein, the logical positivists attempted an even stronger claim regarding what is true, a radical empiricism and the infamous “verification principle” - restricting philosophy mainly to “the logic of scientific language”. Later, Quine, although rejected the two famous dogmas of empiricism, believes that philosophy is continuous with science in aims and methods, yet has a wider scope, though it essentially attempts to study the same thing, the human subject, a naturalised epistemology. I doubt you could see this genealogy as particularly problematic.
With reference to the philosophy of mind, this is far clearer. Considering Dennett, Searle, The Churchlands, Searle and almost any figure you would care to mention is concerned with advances in computer science, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology et al and the importance it has for philosophical questions.
I think that an analytical philosopher, defending analytical philosophy, would often say that one of the great aims of it is not an attempt to make philosophy science, or make it a super-science, but to adopt the very best elements of science, being clarity and rigour and small piecemeal statements rather than overarching systems.
There are many more ways that I could argue that this is the case. For example, a question largely of style. Picking up a copy of an analytical philosophy journal it is far more like a science journal than one in the humanities. It gives little historical perspective, but gets straight to analysing the arguments at hand, who stated them and proposing corrections. Take this start of a paper, from Desire as belief, Lewis notwithstanding by Ruth Weintraub.
I am sure I don’t need to quote a similar continental paper getting underway too show the difference.
I did laugh at Jerry Derrida though.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Rawls presents a technological solution to the problem of justice (”veil of ignorance,” “the best off can only increase their fortunes if it renders the worst off better,” and so on) and not an inquiry into the Just itself. Rawls falls within the purview of my comments. The positivist and post-positivist origin of contemporary analytic philosophy puts it directly in the tradition of technological solutions to solvable problems. It’s no wonder that liberalism is the official ideology of analytic philosophy! These are Nietzsche’s last men!
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Sam C.,
I’m not sure you understand what Craig is saying, and with whom I provisionally agree with regard to this technological thing. He isn’t saying the word ‘justice’ or the study of something we can call justice doesn’t go on in analytic philosophy. But rarely are the big texts into this realm ‘justice-in-itself’ like you get in some of Derrida’s texts. Or Henry’s texts where he examines Life as it manifests itself. These kind of high metaphysical questions tend to be deployed at a lower level in analytic philosophy. Which is fine; in many ways I think English language Continental philosophy needs to deal more explicitly with ‘problems’ rather than commentary. Though commentary is often a way of doing just that, a great deal of Continental dissertations tend to be ‘Three Guys and Why I Like Them’ (that’s Adam’s joke).
But, hey, aside from scholarship how do you define the two tendencies (and I like to think of them more as tendencies than a real divide).
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I’d note, as an aside, that I fully agree with Strauss’ tactic of closely reading and commenting on the classics as a means of retrieving the essential questions. And, yes, APS correctly glosses my position. But I’m glad to see that Sam thinks I’m a complete dolt who hasn’t had the misfortune of reading Rawls, Nozick, Cohen, Kymlicka, and so on and so forth. My technological position, by the way, also speaks to why Anglo-Americans are far more comfortable with Habermas and Honneth than with Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Almost 100 comments — go team!
In the spirit of comity, let me clarify what I meant with my shorthand phrase that analytic philosophy is more based on science. What I mean is that analytic philosophy is part of a broader movement — that includes the human sciences — that attempted to replicate the successes of the hard sciences in “softer” fields such as psychology, sociology, etc.
Although I understand that logical positivism (properly so called) was but a particular moment in the development of analytic philosophy, the general form of what can broadly be called positivism — dividing up the field into individual plots to cultivate exhaustively, the sense that genuine “progress” can be made through the consistent application of particular methods (e.g., particular forms of argumentation), etc. — still seem to me to characterize the analytic approach to philosophy.
Obviously historical scholarship is done in analytic settings, and obviously one must know the field in order to contribute to the broader analytic project, but it still seems to me that the leading analytic philosophers are not primarily scholars — they are directly writing “primary sources” in a way that even the most creative “continental” philosophers are not doing.
Even though I am not familiar in detail with analytic philosophy, I am willing to grant that, by their own standards, they genuinely are making progress, etc., and more brodaly that what they are doing is worthwhile. I never intended to call the value of analytic philosophy into question, but only to challenge its hegemony and the ways Leiter’s rankings reinforce said hegemony.
Relatedly, John Holbo, an analytically trained philosopher, seems to advocate a form of positivism as the normative approach for all academic disciplines, most notably literature. The problem with Theory in English departments isn’t so much that it’s “romantic” as that it amounts to a kind of compulsory romanticism — only a few people can genuinely pull off romanticism, and so everyone else’s energies would be better directed in a more or less positivist direction (Moretti, etc.). As it stands, Holbo argues that compulsory romanticism has resulted in work that is pretty bad as romanticism and that isn’t very useful in other ways — that is, there is no shared project to which it is contributing.
Why Holbo so strenuously objects to the characterization of analytic philosophy as broadly positivistic is, therefore, mystifying to me. But you know what they say: Worauf man nicht sprechen kann…
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Craig: “Would anyone be happier if the word “hard science” was replaced with “technological”?”
Yes. This just goes to show how overrated happiness is, as an intellectual virtue. (Such a sorry spectacle it presents, in a case like this one.)
Adam: “Why Holbo so strenuously objects to the characterization of analytic philosophy as broadly positivistic is, therefore, mystifying to me.”
Because it isn’t, broadly, positivistic? I think you may be confusing ‘positivistic’ and ‘piecemeal’. But that, too, would be still in serious need of qualification.
Look, the basic problem here, as I see it, is that the following chain of reasoning is problematic: ‘I don’t know what analytic philosophy is like. I haven’t read much, but here’s what’s wrong with it’. The problem comes with the third step. How can you know what’s wrong with analytic philosophy if you don’t know what it is. (Not to sound like Socrates, twitting Meno - who is notoriously slow to pick up on the sorts of considerations I’m always emphasizing - but there you have it.)
Alex: “I think that an analytical philosopher, defending analytical philosophy, would often say that one of the great aims of it is not an attempt to make philosophy science, or make it a super-science, but to adopt the very best elements of science, being clarity and rigour and small piecemeal statements rather than overarching systems.”
I’ll buy that.
You would have to add that lots of people within the Anglo-American tradition would disagree with the idea that philosophy can take the natural sciences as a model. But at least Alex is trying to get the history right. That’s important in this case.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 5:58 pm
John, I’m not critiquing analytic philosophy. If you’re taking “something other than ’scholarly’ in the strict sense” as an insult, you are reading in something that I am absolutely, totally not intending.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 6:02 pm
As a courtesy to us, John, can you please either supply us with an idea of what you think analytic philosophy is or point us toward an article that you consider reliable? (I’ve already read Scott Soames’ history of analytic philosophy in America.)
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:04 pm
‘Three Guys and Why I Like Them’ (that’s Adam’s joke).
I read a dissertation recently that was basically exactly this. Really frustrating since it was more like “Three Guys and Why I Like Each of Them, But I Won’t Tell You What They Have to Do with Each Other”.
Later, Quine, although rejected the two famous dogmas of empiricism, believes that philosophy is continuous with science in aims and methods, yet has a wider scope, though it essentially attempts to study the same thing, the human subject, a naturalised epistemology.
This isn’t really to the point, but there was a colloquium talk at Stanford last year given by a historian of analytic philosophy about Quine (which was very interesting). During the Q&A session afterwards, one of the professors (who studies phil. of physics and, I think, Husserl) remarked that some of the quotations given from Quine were the kind of things that the village atheist could have produced.
Monday, July 30, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Adam, as with ‘bats, the big bug scourge of the skies’, the problem isn’t so much the scourge part as the bug part. That is, the problem isn’t (so much) that your view of what goes on in Anglo-American philosophy departments is insulting; rather, it doesn’t fit what goes on in Anglo-American philosophy departments.
You are taking a technical slice and construing it is an adequate paradigm for the whole. And then you reproach these folks for mistaking a technical slice for the whole. As Wittgenstein says, we predicate of the subject matter what lies in the mode of presentation. You have a narrow view of analytic philosophy. So analytic philosophy looks to you like a narrow view.
I’m not going to tell you what article to read, since no one article could qualify you to advance what looks to me like a strong false consciousness theory about what is going on in Anglo-American philosophy. You are saying that Anglo-American philosophers don’t themselves understand what they are up to. (The time for asking for a decent intro article is long past, by the time you are making such claims.) It’s good that you have read the Soames, which is a good text to start with, but you pretty clearly disagree with Soames’ assessment of the character of Anglo-American philosophy. I would say Soames view is rather narrow, but you seem to think that really what is going on is a lot narrower than he thinks. So you might start by suggesting what it is that gives you a better handle on it than Soames has (or I have got). He would never say, for example, that philosophy is ‘based on natural science’. He would say something more like what Alex said, which is much weaker, and (this is crucial) acknowledgment of which has the effect of making analytic philosophy less distinct from, say, the post-Cartesian line of modern philosophy. Not to mention the post-Platonic line in ancient philosophy. Analytic philosophers admire science. Well, that is actually pretty traditional in philosophy. So what is it that makes analytic philosophy distinctive?
You write:
“Although I understand that logical positivism (properly so called) was but a particular moment in the development of analytic philosophy, the general fo