Philosophy 391: Metaphilosophy: History of the Concept of Philosophy

Spring 2012, CRN 27495 Meets 3-4:20 Thursdays in HGH 225
John W. Powell; office 502c Behavioral and Social Sciences;
Office hours 12:30-1:30 MW (not F); 12:30-2:30 Thurs; and by appt.
Phone 5753, but e-mail is preferred; jwp2@humboldt.edu

This is a continuation of a series of one-credit reading groups on metaphilosophy and philosophical methods. Topics have been all over the map. Recent topics have been on origins of and stakes involved in philosophical problems, on Wittgenstein's methods of questioning questions and referring philosophical uses of language to ordinary or nonphilosophical examples, and examination of basic assumptions behind contemporary schools of philosophy (such as constructionism, pragmatism, postmodernism and other attacks on philosophy), applicability problems for ethical theories, and so on. Last semester's was on the justifiability of religious belief. An archive of syllabi from the series and from my seminars is accessible here.
              A basic idea behind these reading groups is that they serve faculty working on problems of interest to them in a setting in which students can come along for the ride and engage in doing philosophy as well as finding out what philosophers have said. The department has agreed that students may use three of these reading groups, if passed with a letter grade of C or better, to meet one of the two three-credit elective requirements for the major.

              Description: Math, religion, music, and philosophy are among the oldest intellectual disciplines. We are going to look at how those who have done philosophy have thought about their work. We will not confine ourselves to Western (meaning Western-Civilization-type traditions) philosophy, but I am less fluent in other traditions, so the course is going to be lopsided, leaning West. I will bring in some slight materials from some other traditions (Buddhism, Navajo, Taoism, Iroquois league) and may occasionally pull some of my colleagues who know those traditions better than I into our discussions.
              Sometimes we can tell how philosophers think about their work by drawing implications from the work itself, but sometimes philosophers have articulated explicit views of philosophy. Though we have to stay aware of the possibility that they are mistaken about what they do, we will take those pronouncements seriously. K.T. Fann, in Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, remarks that many of the main developments in philosophy have been accompanied by changes in how the discipline is conceived. Tracking what has endured and what has changed, then, will be a main concern.
              I don't know what all we will find out, but I can share some inklings.
              The Presocratic philosophers Thales and Heraclitus, along with others of the ancient Greek philosophers, show philosophy being shaped by a tension with religion, and show a willingness to question beliefs which have been traditionally taken for granted by surrounding societies. Those two also take reflection and questioning as crucial to doing philosophy. A result is tensions between authority and consensus views which cast philosophers as subversive and dangerous. Of course, many throughout history have taken the abstract, living-in-the-head concerns for ideas and reflections on beliefs as evidence that philosophers make no difference in the practical worlds of politics, wars, and making a difference, much less sex, drugs, and rock and roll. As part of what we investigate we will look at what has been, and what still is, at stake in doing philosophy. One possibility is that philosophy is a deeply subversive discipline on several different levels--if that is true, then philosophers might have good reason to do as the Pythagoreans did, keep their activities secret. (To many it may seem as though we have.)
              Science is another huge part of the intellectual landscape in which we do this work, and we will work to disentangle some confusions about the relations between science and philosophy. Philosophy is not a kind of science and science is not a way of doing philosophy. We will do some work to say why. This turns out to be difficult for many philosophers (you could look up the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge) and for many scientists (you could look up Bertrand Russell's set theory, or Sam Harris), and so it may be for us as well. If this task threatens to overwhelm our other work, we may declare victory and pull out, putting off those issues for a future reading group. We will do that, if we have to, because we are after bigger game than these basic confusions.
              The notion of what an argument is takes form in Socrates' work (and he has some good lines about arguments), but philosophers have thought about arguments and about the study and theory of argument (you could look up logic) in quite different ways through the ages. Philosophers have at times thought of their work as being everything from a religion of arguments conceived in a quite rigid and formal way, to waging war against that conception with a claim that all arguments are only expressions of ideologies. I think both of these are about as wrong as wrong can be, but we will have to look at the arguments, won't we? Part of our investigation will be to clarify what are the criteria for good arguments. Another part will be taking a look at the surrounding contexts which make arguments relevant--that is, arguments are generally offered in order to help us make progress in thinking about issues or questions, and so we will need to think about how we come up with the questions. Ernst Mach tells us regarding modern physics that a great deal of progress has been due, not to our coming up with new answers but instead our coming up with new questions. R.G. Collingwood remarks that the answers we get (he's speaking of history and philosophy of history but also philosophy generally) are functions of the questions we ask and so are also functions of the questions we do not ask. These are comments about what philosophy involves that is not captured by thinking of it as consisting of arguments.
              In the last hundred years, roughly, philosophers have turned their attention more and more to the idea that philosophical progress and problems are crucially bound up in language. We will read some of their thoughts on this and investigate.
              Also in the last hundred years, a group of philosophers including J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their followers have articulated a concept of philosophy dominated by doubts about the legitimacy of many of the standard problems in the discipline. Those problems are thought to rest on various mistakes (e.g., being guided by overextended metaphors; thinking that abstract nouns must name substantial things which require investigation; supposing that language must be either conventional or not; assuming Cartesian dualism's accounts of perception and knowledge; working toward goals of perfect generality; and so on). Some have thought that steering clear of those error-based standard problems might herald a new Copernican revolution in philosophy. This has prompted massive negative responses on the part of many more-traditional philosophers. We will use K.T. Fann's tiny book cited above to help us on these topics.
              Another feature of philosophy which has drawn quite a lot of overt attention in the last century seems to have been a characteristic of it from the beginning. That is its use of and relation to paradox. Philosophers say (1) things which are built on what seem reasonable arguments to conclude things which seem that they cannot be true; (2) things which seem transparently false but which hint at deeper truths; (3) things which toy with our ideas of what is true and false. Paradox is often used to try to get us to reconsider whether there might be other possibilities we have not considered. Some paradoxes were crucial to the development of modern logic and set theory; some have been challenges to modern or modernist lines of thought; some have been attacks against traditional methods in philosophical thinking; some have been attempts to reframe the categories within which philosophical problems have been conceived.

Texts and Materials:               All texts will be posted on Moodle or will be handed out in class; there's nothing you need to buy. We will generally read the equivalent of an article or two chapters for each class. Student essays will also be posted on Moodle and students are expected to read everyone else's work and to respond to it in class or on Moodle. Texts may include the following works and others as well:
Writing Assignments and Grading:               Attendance is required; Students who miss more than three of our fifteen classes will not receive a grade higher than a C+. Writing is also required, specifically seven pages or 1750 words. All student essays will be shared with the class via the Moodle forum. Essays need not develop views; articulating or clarifying problems or pointing out relationships with other thinkers, for example, are appropriate tasks for course writing. There will be quite a lot of leeway regarding topics and whether students write many short essays or a long one, though some suggestions will be made in class and posted on Moodle. A default set of grading criteria keyed to a three part essay structure is posted on Moodle. Students who do not meet the writing requirement will not pass the course. I do not give Incompletes.

Schedule:               We will begin with the top of the reading list but our pace and selection will depend on our interests. There will in general be a new reading assignment for each class meeting, and some of them will require hours of work. Students will be encouraged to present particular essays to the class to start discussions.