Speaking of music, you should all listen to me tomorrow.
Here is my question: why should one go to graduate school in philosophy?
this particular person is one someone who did think there was a meaningful distinction would definitely peg as continentally-inclined
I'm going to diagram this, just for fun.
Here is my question: why should one go to graduate school in philosophy?
To find out if one wants to go to graduate school in philosophy.
2: To get chicks. And because "Philosopher" looks really cool on a business card.
4: Well? Does one?
5: Aren't philosophy departments mostly guys? Seems like getting chicks would be easier in, say, Women's Studies.
No, they all hate men in Women's Studies.
And because "Philosopher" looks really cool on a business card.
Y'know, for less than $20 at Staples, you can buy sheets of blank business cards that work with most home printers.
7: Well, you know, if you were a masochist, that might be cool. But okay, assuming not, why not sociology or education?
A good reason to choose philostomy is here nice floaty feeling hey now HANDS OFF.
No, no, no. One goes into a Master's program in Philosophy to find out if one wants to go into a Doctorate program in Philosophy. By the PhD level, you're already in a pre-professional (if not a full-blown professional) program. No doubts at the PhD level! Doubts are deadly!
What's the thing with the two squares? Philosopher code for "two squares" or did I miss another Unfoggedeologism?
They appear as two asterisks on the main page, at least in my browser. At the top of the this page, they are squares though.
You should be seeing two stars. What browser are you using?
You want no progress? Historians were studying the past over 2500 years ago. And they're still studying the past. Do something else already!
I also disagree with 11. Especially if funding for an MA is questionable, but a multi-year package is available for the Ph. D.
Doubt + debt = danger, though.
McCumber also showed up at JB&B back when ogged was posting about him. I mean literally showed up, in comments.
15. I'm against paying for grad school, in general.
I'm against paying for grad school, in general.
Me too, although I'm not above downloading free pictures of grad school.
... he's thinking of going to grad school in … anthropology.
What have you against anthropology?
I was under the impression, gained from a total of two conversations with two different people, that those interested in continental philosophy and not wishing to go to grad school in philosophy most often chose comparative literature as an alternative field.
comparative literature as an alternative field
Arrrgh, that's my field! It's cut-throat already!
If'n you're think'n of 't as a fall-back position, it's n'er ye're goin' t' be findin' a satisfactor' tenur' track job, or e'en finishin' out yer PhD.
(Please forgive me; something came over me.)
re: 6
No, in my program (at Oxford) the balance between male and female students is about 50/50. If philosophy at graduate level was once mostly male that period is long gone.
What browser are you using?
Evil Empire Explorer 6.0
I also like the links at the very bottom of the review: "Graduate School at Amazon & Insound". At first I though it was another fuzzy-haired indie band I missed, but it turns out there's no band of that name yet. A clear oversight in fuzzy-haired indie rock world.
Neither of them chose comp lit as a fallback, exactly. One was still in philosophy but wanted to study a specific person X (I can't remember who) and had been looking around and noticed that more comp lit depts had people studying X than philosophy depts. The other was similarly inclined but noticed that the comp lit departments seemed a better fit for him before applying and went directly to comp lit without ever doing philosophy grad school.
Also, in a german class I took one summer there was a guy, in his mid-30s, a lawyer who'd also done some screen/scriptwriting, who'd done a combined JD/Ph.D in comp lit. He seemed to have done quite a bit of continental philosophy at some point.
I was in his group for a skit we all had to write. Other people in the group: a classics Ph.D student and an engineering grad student. (This was before I went to grad school, but after I'd been accepted so I was the only non-grad student in the group.) We decided to model our skit after the Wizard of Oz except instead of meeting the scarecrow, tin man, and lion, Dorothy met figures from German intellectual history.
I don't remember it entirely but I think the major scenes were Luther and Faust meeting, Hegel gets pissed off at Marx and tries literally to stand him on his head (or maybe the other way around), a one man act with Heisenberg and Einstein, Schroedinger learns the unfortunate truth about what had happened to his cat, and it was all capped by a really long concluding section that follows Nietzsche's revelation that the wizard is dead.
In between there were Freudian slips and, the whole point of this anecdote, a song about Heidegger, written according to the tune of Die Moritat von Mackie Masser by the lawyer/comp lit guy and making reference not just to Heidegger but Husserl. (In fact, though we divided the skit up into sections, he did most of the writing since his section was the longest and he did the transitions and conclusion.)
If it weren't for certain countervailing influences it could have been a totally incomprehensible performance: references to specific scenes and characters from Thomas Mann stories were suggested, but vetoed for being not likely to be recognized by too much of the rest of the class, for example. (I'd give the specifics but I have no idea what he was talking about.) As it was, during discussion afterward, the comp lit guy answered one of the questions: "That was actually an Adorno reference, from..." At which point it became necessary to point out that not all of us in the skit got that, or various other things. (Apparently had I read Faust I'd have understood why one of the instructors began laughing at the mention of Auerbach's Keller.)
In the end turned out to be a pretty funny skit (just a bit too long), but in an Unfogged sort of way, with some jokes being laughed at by only a few people in different parts of the room at various times during the performance.
This may be the longest pretentious comment ever posted here.
Can I just say, having now read the chap's review, that he doesn't seem to have a clue about analytic philosophy, btw, and his historical analysis of the domination of analytic philosophy also seems entirely sans clue?
Analytic philosophy became dominant because it was politically unthreatening and its practitioners politically neutral? Analytic philosophy as a result of McCarthyism? Is he (and McCumber) taking the piss?
He writes:
"The terms of the argument have changed a little, but the basic underlying principles haven't – there is a thing called truth (heck, Truth) and philosophy is supposed to analyze reality to get to the Truth."
Apart from all the philosophers who don't believe in 'Truth' (in the capital letter/scare-quote sense) or an epistemically accessible objective reality, or... I could go on.
Indeed, the root -- in logical positivism -- of much of 20th c. anglo-american philosophy in the analytic tradition is precisely that the business of philosophy is *not* analyzing reality to get to the 'Truth'.
If philosophy at graduate level was once mostly male that period is long gone.
Not true in the US, I'm afraid. My PhD program was mostly male (although it seemed to be making a little progress when I left), so is the MA here, the MA last place I taught was I think a bit more balanced but not 50/50, and the other toppish departments whose grad school rosters I've had occasion to look at also seem to be more than half male by a pretty big margin. Even MIT, which I've seen held up as particularly good on this, seems to be under 50% (I may have misclassified some names though).
I'd echo McGrattan (btw, googleproofing doesn't work if you don't do it on every comment) that this guy's criticisms of the lack of progress in philosophy are assy. The only way to make him right at all is to turn his complaint into "Philosophers, 2500 years later, haven't given up philosophy and started doing other things. That goes for natural philosophers as well." cf. eb on history in 15.
Still, w-lfs-n seems right that analytic philosophy (whatever that is, but I know it when I see it) is hegemonic in US departments. I'd need to see, um, more argument about McCarthyism here. IIRC the Logical Positivists all had to flee the Nazis because they were socialists, and Hilary Putnam to name one prominent analytic philosopher wasn't exactly McCarthy-friendly.
And what Jackm. said: Don't pay for grad school (except for ones that get you jobs, like law school etc.).
In the end turned out to be a pretty funny skit (just a bit too long), but in an Unfogged sort of way, with some jokes being laughed at by only a few people in different parts of the room at various times during the performance.
Pwesome. You're my hero, eb.
I see, btw, that I'm currently winning the previous two threads, even though after I sent in my paper (take that!) I took an 11-hour BBQ-and-beer-and-collapse-in-exhaustion break. I'm going to believe that all y'all decided that it just wasn't worth commenting without me, until you resurrected the blog as a philosophy discussion in celebration of the Occasion.
re: the google proofing -- yeah, I'm stupidly conflicted about it and forget 90% of the time -- either I go pseudonymous or just accept that if I want to make bitchy remarks about people then there's always the possibility that google will return them one day.
Re: the hegemony of analytic philosophy. It's certainly dominant in the UK, at least outside of a few departments with reputations for doing 'contintental' philosophy. However, there's no way that what look to me like nonsensical points re: McCarthyism could possibly explain this dominance in the UK.
Furthermore, analytic philosophy in the sense that it can be said to be dominant at all is a pretty broad church and would have to include Kantians, medieval scholars, people working on ancient philosophy, aestheticians, theologians, etc
Indeed, one could argue it would anachronistic to describe anyone interested in the work of scholars who wrote pre-Frege as specifically 'analytic' (or pre-Kant/Hegel depending on how you draw these kinds of distinctions).
The list of research interests for Oxford is here:
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/faculty/faculty_members_categ.shtml
There's more than a handful of people on that list working on post-Kantian stuff including people working on all the usual 'contintental' people.
That sort of distribution quite heavily slanted towards people working in stereotypically 'analytic' areas -- philosophy of science, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, etc -- but not exclusively populated by them is fairly typical, I'd think, of the make-up of most UK departments.
"Generally analytic philosophers are philosophical fuckwits."
But everybody knows that.
I've been told that the best Phil programs have very good placement records. Much better than history, English, or cultural studies.
Someone who's sharp at phil of mind or phil of language can do stuff in AI, which is a technical field. People sharp at math logic can switch to computer science.
At least some departments fudge their stats by encouraging people to leave before they get their PhD's, though. I don't know if it was a one-time thing, but that happened to a friend at Texas.
I'll be looking for the McCumber book.
During the fifties and early sixties there was an enormous push in many areas the American university against politically-engaged scholarship. The target was more Dewey-type pragmatism than Marxism. Analytic philosophers could be as left as they wanted, but their work itself was apolitical. Even when an analytic philosopher did write about politics, the style of argumentation was not persuasive and unlikely to persuade many non-pros. (I think of Singer e.g. as following along behind animal rights, not as a driving force).
Russell had already defined technical philosophy in such a way as to make political discourse impossible. (He then continued political discourse independently, as a type of pop lit). Karl Popper did write about politics, but in the US his influence dwindled (in England he was quite influential in the moderate left).
At least some departments fudge their stats by encouraging people to leave before they get their PhD's
In fairness, encouraging people to leave the program at the right time can be an essential if unfortunate part of graduate education, not just stat-fudging.
Violin! Cymbalom? I think there should be a special Ben's-show thread each week.
I don't know whether Ben realized that he was mentioning one of my obsessions, but I've been through this argument on my own already.
McCumber and I think from the vantage of the turning point, when hegemony was gained -- ca. 1950 -- 1965. I came in at the tail end of that. Logical positivism, Bertrand Russell, and early Wittgenstein were the first wave, and later Wittgenstein was the second. In terms of what we're talking about, the homogeneity of the winning group is not important, just its hegemony visavis specific other tendencies. Likewise, logical positivism and Russellism faded early, but were was replaced by others of their lineage.
I happen to be reading about the triumph of neo-classical economics right now, and it was a similiar story. ("What's wrong with economics" is the negative story, and "The changing face of economics" claims there's no problem).
Another: if someone says that analytic philosophers are "trying to ground knowledge beyond a doubt" be even more suspicious, for that is so not what this enterprise is about. (And this was true well before "Epistemology Naturalized," which means it was true a long time ago.)
I'll add that even among epistemologists, like me, who think "Epistemology Naturalized" is wrong wrong wrong, this is so not true.
I did, Emerson.
Honestly, Ben, is there something interesting or significant in that linked essay?
Well, no. Mostly I was just surprised to see it in the given context.
38: By and large. People are dealing with skepticism in various ways, and a few might be described that way, but most aren't.
Right, I didn't mean to be endorsing EN. My point is that at the time Quine wrote it, epistemologists by and large weren't as devoted to the conceptual and doctrinal claims as he seems to think. That is, even at the time, it was a bad characterization of what epistemologists were up to.
I really need to get that Robert Wyatt album, don't I? Is there any Wyatt album I don't need to get?
I'm told that The End of an Ear isn't very good, and I'm not too enamored of some of his recent stuff—Shleep, eg.
41: Goodo. Just piling on to your point: even among the segment of philosophy where that might be true, it's generally not.
I really like Shleep. I remember Old Rottenhat being kind of eh. What's the recently released old live set like?
Poor-recording-quality-y. It's good, though. I can't characterize it in any greater detail since I only listened to it once, and not very attentively.
There's also a relatively recent album by Annie Whitehead called "Soupsongs" that's a bunch of Wyatt arrangements.
Speaking of which, the word "Superkoranic" always makes me think of the beginning of the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic":
Superkoranic Gayatollah Gayatollah Superkoranic Superkoranic Gayatollah Gayatolah Superkoranic another fellatio another fellation another fellatio another fellatio
etc.
The guy can't have it that philosophy has been taken over by a narrow hegemonic clique and at the same time claim that the methods of that clique have failed for 2500 years.
If the whole 2500 year tradition of philosophy is broadly analytic then the 'domination' of philosophy by people within that tradition is hardly the hegemony of some minority school.
Instead, his claim ends up looking like "this particular narrow group of post-structuralist philosophers writing in a particularly literary style that fits with my own interests and preferred working style ... aren't sufficiently powerful" which is <understatement> a much less substantial critique</understatement>.
And, as in 34, 38 and 41, he really doesn't know what he's talking about.
Like McCumber, I've been criticized for attacking the earlier forms of analytic philosophy (up to ~1980) without taking later developments into account. I lost touch at that time, but periodic trips to the journals section in the library reassure me that there's been little improvement from my point of view.
When I was young phenomenology was the "Workers and Peasants Party" for those uncomfortable with the analytic Gulag. (Vivid writing, no?) Now it's still continental philosophy, but what I regret is the loss of pragmatism (except in a formalistic version), process philosophy, and social thought outside Rawls and Nozick. There's been a terrible narrowing of scope in my opinion.
Around 1980 Rorty proposed a change. His proposal was rejected, and he's been in the doghouse since. "Rorty's more respected outside philosophy than inside" said someone (Velleman? Leiter?) recently, as though that were a serious point against him. He's a renegade, that's why, but he already had tenure so they can't get rid of him.
Rorty pointed to professionalization as the culprit. Professions are monopolies of a sort, and are always susceptible to declaring autonomy and disavowing the existence of the outside. (Derrida and Lacan do that too). Philosophy's relationships to non-philosophy (its context) are important for philosophy.
Rorty called analytic philosophers something like "technicians of argument". The game seems to be to take some sort of OK idea, and revise and refine and quibble about it for 20 years until it becomes boring even for the philosophers. Usually this involves analysis, and movement toward sub-ideas and sub-sub-ideas, and comments on comments on alternative formulations of ideas preliminary to components of a main idea which was already rather nitpicky. The more expansive ot constructive movement can also be philosophical, but analytic philosophy does not favor it.
You forget that Bertrand Russell has the power to travel in time!
Well, Matt McG, I was going to say something like that, but I don't think that's really fair—he isn't blaming analytic philosophy for 2500 years of failure, so much as saying that its program for getting out of failure (such as he understands it) doesn't look so promising.
In fairness, there are a number of people who think that Rorty is simply not a very good philosopher. You make it sound like he's banned for having unpopular opinions, and maybe that's the deep explanation for what's going on, but it's not the most initially plausible one. (I read a couple of his books early in grad school, and I have some sympathy for that view, though it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to dig them up again and provide a serious argument for this.)
What would count as social thought beyond Rawls and Nozick? The communitarians? Leftist and feminist critiques of Rawls?
Disambiguation: I have some sympathy for the view that Rorty is not such a good philosopher.
What would count as social thought beyond Rawls and Nozick? The communitarians? Leftist and feminist critiques of Rawls?
Jeez, Arendt and Adorno leap to mind.
Honestly, I think the author of that piece may be better suited in a comparative literature department, since he seems to be defining 'analytic philosophy' as 'anything more precise than Derrida.'
I'm looking at the history of philosophy papers I have been reading, and I'm not finding them in obscure journals. And if I take a peek at the c.v.'s of a lot of the top analytic philosophers, I'm seeing a fair amount of grounding in Kant, the Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, Reid, Leibniz, Aristotle. I even recall a dialogue! Something about the identity of indiscernibles, but I must have imagined it. Dialogues are too creative for we Seekers After Truth.®
The only intelligible force of his complaint seems to be that philosophy is a discipline with some standards for discourse, and those standards come at the expense of flamboyant rhetoric.
Well, maybe. But I'm going to take a page from Leiter here; if philosophy is a discipline, our goal can't be to train the next Nietzsche. Nietzches just happen. And if we try to get everybody to be flamboyant and soooo deep, well, most people aren't as smart as Nietzsche, so it's just going to be a lot of crappy navel-gazing.
For us seekers after truth, Cala.
I don't think that's what John's claiming -- I think he's claiming that the things that have been lost (eg social thought outside Rawls and Nozick) have been lost because of the dominance of analytic philosophy, which causes things that are not analytic philosophy to be lost.
This discussion is way over my head, and I'm quite embarassed by my ignorance of philosophy. I'd like to do something to remedy that a bit. Can anyone tell me where I might find a good reading list. MM--Do you know where I could get my hands on the reading lists for the first year papers in philosophy at Oxford?
Ideally, I'd like to take a semi-historical approach, because I like to see how ideas unfold over time. So, I guess that I'd start with Plato and Aristotle (or even the pre-Socratcs) and then move on from there. I may wear myself out with philosophy of mathematics, e.g., Russell, and I'd probably have to take a formal course, if I wanted to understand logic, but I'd appreciate any suggestions that you philosophes could make. Along with links or suggestions to where I could find a basic reading list of primary sources, I'd also appreciate helpful commentaries and introductions aimed at undergraduates.
Throwing in a little analytic-philosophy red meat to juice up a moribund website dedicated to cock jokes is really cheap, BTW. I suppose we'll be seeing Jessica Simpson pr0n next.
I'm sorry if I angried up your blood, Emerson.
I couldn't help but chuckle at the author's earnest claim that analytic philosophy has been proven useless after 2000 years, and the accompanying implication that continental philosophy has somehow proven more useful or illuminating.
Of course, I don't think either of them are particularly illuminating or useful. Philosophy really seems to be a very expensive form of art, which only a small number of people take the time to learn to appreciate.
You do love to troll, don't you Andrew?
I read a lot of general science (non-technical, but not "popularization"), and a lot of what they do seems to be philosophical stuff. For example, around 1950 Popper, Hayek, Whitehead, and others were writing a lot about temporality, indeterminacy, and historicity (culminating somewhat in Donald Campbell). To me this is eminently philosophical but the more recent stuff I see on the topic does not come from philosophy, and analytic philosophy seems uninterested in the distinction between historical / path dependent events and events governed by universal law. I thought that Davidson's "events as particulars" might be relevant to that questions, but I spent some time looking at the literature and the discussion didn't seem to develop in that direction at all.
Let's drop the guy's "2500 years of stagnation" argument. Pretty weak, and irrelevant to his main point.
Social thought outside Rawls and Nozick continues, but not usually within philosophy departments. The so-called "ordinary language" heirs of Austen and later Wittgenstein moved in that direction, but they tended to leave philosophy.
Stephen Toulmin is my contemporary hero, BTW. He writes both about social and historical questions, and "cosmology" which is what I called "general science" above. He has testified that the philosophy profession was never at any time friendly to him, and he spent much of his career in other departments.
58: Grammar critiques are the blogging equivalent of dismissing someone's argument by remarking that her clothes are out of fashion.
Can I ask that if you think my comments are a waste of time, that you just ignore them? I'm sorry this is a pet peeve of mine, but if I wanted my grammar corrected in casual conversation, I'd speak to my father.
I'm finding ZU too mathrocky for my taste. The Mats/Morgan band was awesome, though, and I liked the NDIO too.
This has got to be Vandermark, right?
Cala, wow, I didn't realize. I think of grammar correction as an in-joke here, but if I've ever done it to you I apologize.
Well, 69 sure came out of left field.
In earlier debates of this type I checked with people in AI and verified that analytic philosophy does indeed contribute to that field. So it's not a purely formalistic, useless field.
I just define philosophy by comprehensiveness, and am not excited by the fact that philosophy can be narrowed down until it can contribute to a technical field.
I would guess most people who feel the way this guy does end up baling. I certainly did, and I liked what I was doing and believed in its value a lot more than he does. Succeeding in grad school depends on having a clear idea of what you want to do (even if it isn't what you end up doing), a stubborn determination to do it, and a measure of luck, in your associations, in your choices, in whether the other parts of your life permit you to do your work. That I was deficient in all these doesn't bother me now; I'd have dug myself in deeper had I been more stubborn. Many are called and few are chosen.
I'm sure many people who end up succeeding have moments of cluelessness and self-doubt, but I don't expect this guy to make it.
Weiner: yes, it's Zu & Spaceways, Inc..
Cala, I meant nothing by it. It's just, like, what I do, y'know? As Weiner said: an in-joke.
Whoops, I think it was Aleucha Testa that was too mathrocky.
Bostoniangirl:
The syllabus/reading list for the introductory philosophy course at oxford is here:
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/misc/undergrad/general_syllabus.shtml
I think all the other syllabi and reading lists for the other undergraduate courses that one would take after than one are restricted by IP to .ox.ac.uk addresses.
However, I will email some other stuff to you via the address linked below you comments above.
Can't we all just get along? Burning down LA is not the solution!
Actually, let's burn down LA and quit quibbling about grammar and analytic philosophy. We're not really accomplishing much here. There's work to be done and cities to be burned.
I find it dismissive. It reminds me of my father hitting me, and of friends yelling at other friends "than I! THAN I!" in the middle of a discussion about something else. I wish it didn't bother me, but it pisses me off.
I believe proper grammar is important, mind you. It doth irk, however, about as much as it would if in casual conversation I constantly corrected someone's Southern accent as improper English, ignored what they had to say (go on, call me on the improper use of the third person plural) and then turned to talk to someone else.
Sorry for being insufficiently sportsmanlike. Too many students. Is it possible to mail one's undergrads to Siberia?
It's Ahleuchatistas, though I doubt you'll be seeking them out.
just back to the top of the thread:
Matt: having gotten through a 20 person graduate seminar in philosophy where i was 1 of only 2 women, and the other woman from time to time wouldn't show up so at times I got to be the only woman in the crowded room -- I'd say your Oxford experience isn't typical for the US.
I also had the very strange experience of saying to this famous & renowned professor: "But I don't understand why you keep talking about Wittgenstein's Augustinian picture of language as being typical or something that most people hold, just dumbed down. Lots of people don't - people were reading Saussure even when Wittgenstein wrote--"
and I didn't get any farther because the professor gave me this look of death and said, "who?" in a tone that made it clear he didn't *want* to know, so I didn't say Saussure was, oh, the founder of modern linguistics, and basically ran away instead of having what could probably have been an actual exchange of some kind.
He also claimed in class once, when talking about about how different people or different disciplines might respond to a the question of the nature of memory, that I, as a person from a humanities discipline no longer pretending to be a science, would "go write a poem about it" as my critical response.
(And I hadn't said anything to prompt this, or handed a paper in at that point - once I did hand in a paper, I admit that things got better).
Since this guy is a leading light in analytical phil circles, I think this explains a lot of my feelings about the culture of analytic philosophy as an incredibly insular and uncurious discipline dying a death of irrelevance as it tries vainly to imitate being a science. But I would really love to be told these (and other experiences with this guy) are atypical, because I still do like reading actual philosophers quite a lot and would like to think this incredible arrogance and lack of curiosity about other approaches to texts was anomalous. I'm serious.
#69
I feel the opposite; grammar corrections mean somebody actually read my comment.
Burning down LA is probably a solution to something.
"Someone" as the antecedent of "they" is increasingly accepted. It's attested in Jane Austen.
I so did not read the link, b/c I honestly don't care, but based on the comments in this thread I wish to state my objection to folks wishing some pretentious know-nothing wanker on lit departments. There are enough of them in there already, thanks.
In other news, my university is closed today b/c of snow. We only had about 3 inches of the stuff, and god knows we've had much, much worse days when I've hauled my ass into class, so who the fuck knows what's up.
Not that I'm complaining, mind. Plus, if I'm not teaching, I can listen to Ben's radio show. Win-win!
Fair point John.
I wasn't denigrating philosophy by likening it to art, Matt. Imho, good philosophy illuminates and stimulates thought in the same manner as good artwork; it reflects, touches upon, and connects aspects of experience in a way we might otherwise not have seen.
Even analytic philosophers like singular 'they'!
mmf!, that thing about Saussure annoyed me, but I'm hardly a leading light. Probably a lot of leading lights will be arrogant to those in other disciplines; OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised to find some leading lights in other disciplines browning off philosophers with "I guess you'll go do a formal proof about it" or some such. Leading lights can be arrogant.
Analytic philosophy can be very open to interaction with, say, linguistics and cognitive science, but that might not be exactly reassuring about its aspriation to be a science. I too regret that some of the stuff Emerson talks about isn't done as much in philosophy departments anymore, though it's not for the most part what I want to do myself.
MMF, we'd all love to know the name of the guy, degoogleize to be sure.
Lack of curiosity about the past and about other disciplines is a defining trait of much of analytic philosophy. In a recent thing on CT or somewhere about "The Greatest Philosophers of All Time" someone listed Davidson as the greatest philosopher of all time. That's madness. To many on the thread, philosophy began with Frege. That's incredibly provincial tunnel-vision, and to me diagnostic of a toxic monopoly.
John Holbo finds my attitude annoying. What I say is not true of him personally, AFAIK, but he isn't very typical of the field as I know it. (I also think that since hegemony was achieved, AP has gradually been reabsorbing, on its own terms, selected bits of the stuff they excluded. To me that's not good enough.)
w-lfs-n is a sly demagogue, no? Or maybe provocateur.
Andrew, fair enough; I took your statement that you didn't find philosophy useful or illuminating as provocative.
BP, how about some pretentious, know-nothing, hard-bodied, well-hung studs?
The wanker thing is a red herring.
I'd settle for mailing them to Mongolia. Can I get book-rate if I include the texts they're supposed to be reading?
I'm actually thinking of going to Mongolia. A very dramatic landscape and way of life. I could bring an undergrad with me I suppose.
re: 88 "Lack of curiosity about the past and about other disciplines is a defining trait of much of analytic philosophy."
Just seems, from personal experience, to be completely untrue. Lots of analytic philosophy engages directly with debates in other disciplines - particularly the physical sciences but also linguistics, biology, psychology, cognitive science, mathematics, etc. Lots of the post-Fregean tradition involves philosophers engaging with and being affected by new work in the sciences.
Also, I've never come across anyone at graduate level who wouldn't have had a substantial grounding in the history of philosophy. At both my undergraduate institution (Glasgow) and during the Oxford B.Phil it was a requirement that your examined work include historical as well as contemporary papers.
Incidentally, I hope I don't sound like some unreflecting cheerleader for all of contemporary analytic philosohy post-'linguistic turn'.
Inept communication on my part, Matt.
I don't know John. If one eschews sociological or political explanations for the rise of analytic philosophy, and views it as an outgrowth of intellectual interaction with the philosophical canon, perhaps it's not so crazy after all to say that Davidson, by our own lights, is the greatest philosopher of all time (as much as such valuations can be taken seriously). It requires assuming that the perspective of analytic philosophy supercedes and is superior to earlier traditions or types of philosophy, though, and in that sense could be myopic.
My statement was too broad. It seems that the historical, social and cultural disciplines are the ones ignored. There seems to be a tendency to try to understand humankind ahistorically and asocially, as mind + body (psychology + biology).
It's not so much that AP is always completely ahistorical, but that it tolerates and encourages ahistorical thinking. I recently read a book called "How History Made the Mind" which tried to bring history into philosophy of mind. It was well-intentioned but pretty poor, and the fact that he was representing the historical side led me to believe that the people he was arguing with were well-established professionals who didn't have any historical clue whatsoever.
Davidson as "The Greatest Philosopher of All Time" is to me a reductio ad absurdum.
It was only one guy, but still.
FL, when I read something interesting about social, historical, or political questions, it's almost never from a philosophy department. I cast my net pretty wide, and if there was great stuff being done, I think that I'd find out about it. I'm open to suggestions. By and large, what I usually see coming from AP is tight arguments for some unexceptional, already-existing point of view, rather than illuminating examinations of the subject matter.
"Comprehensive" to me doesn't mean "having specialists in lots of topics" but "Having an overall point of view". The analytic movement is, as I've said, toward division.
The AP belief is that it was an unmixed good thing when philosophers stopped writing like Dewey and Popper and Whitehead and Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche and even John Stuart Mill. I don't agree.
Popper looks both ways -- he was a proto-analytic, but his own work is not analytic. I feel the same way about Wittgenstein and Austen, to a degree. Even the things I like about early analytic philosophy seems to be being removed from the field.
#100
But what kind of guns does Davidson treasure?
No one should hit anyone over grammar. People can be mailed to Mongolia over grammar, however. Sympathies, Cala.
As I've said, I'm out of touch, and at the moment I'm not even near a good library. I have read things coming from important analytic philosophers which seemed astonishingly and bogglingly ahistorical and acontextual. These may not dominate the field, but they seem to be a big part of it. In some cases people have cherry-picked individual exceptions to what I say and allege it as typical (someone even threw Toulmin in my face once.)
Glenn Reynolds, FL?
I do do flame wars, but not here so far.
Toulmin in the face belongs on that other thread from yesterday.
Mmmm... but "interesting" is such a messy adjective----or predicate adjective, for that matter. Perhaps you're expecting philosophy to do something that it's not really trying to do? Could you give an example of interesting work in history/sociology/polisci and contrast it with uninteresting work on the same question in philosophy?
I'm also sympathetic with 95 on ignoring the social, cultural, and historical disciplines, at least in some philosophy. To give an example, it seems to me that the philosophy-of-language types who discuss truth in fiction act as though English departments haven't been studying fiction, and that they really should pay attention to some of the things that have been said in the study of actual literature. OTOH people who do analytic aesthetics seem much better about this, at least in that they discuss particular works of art and movements and thus pay attention to criticism as it pertains to those movements.
Now I really have to finish grading all in a rush before class.
Andrew, philosophy today is not trying any more to do things which it used to try to do. That is my point. I understand that AP's weaknesses, from my point of view, are essential to the AP version of professionalism, but that's what I disagree with.
Really, Anglophone philosophy was redefined between 1950 and about 1965 and I don't like what happened. Certain sorts of things were excluded, and other sorts of things were favored. Most analytic philosopher think that the excluded stuff is just crap, but I disagree. I regard the narrowing as unfortunate.
An argument can be made that the narrowing was a good thing, but what I seem to be encountering is an unawareness, or denial, that it happened at all.
There really were winners and losers, but the winners seem to want to forget that the battle happened.
Feel the fury! Labs is going to need to do some tai chi just to calm himself down.
Wouldn't the probe just be an occlusion? What you want is a hollow tube or some such.
w-lfs-n:
Labs knows my massive size, and rightly assumes that my probe of his backside will aerate his front side.
re: 95
Yes, sometimes. I certainly wouldn't defend contemporary philosophy to the hilt on this issue there's more ignorance than I would like.
My doctoral work is in the philosophy of medicine and biology and it's not uncommon to go to graduate seminars and hear arguments being made by metaphysicians, for example, about natural kinds that are completely ignorant of the work in biology and philosophy of biology on species. In fact, ignorance of basic reproductive and developmental biology and/or evolutionary theory is unfortunately pretty common even among those attempt to provide naturalistic arguments about some phenomena or other.
However, the very best work on these kinds of topics *is* informed by the science.
Yes, as opposed to a non-hollow tube. A dowel is tubular—dare you say it is not a tube, though not hollow?
re: 101
For what it's worth, Mill is one of only three required papers for 1st year undergraduates here at Oxford and the other philosophers you've mentioned all feature in finals papers for undergraduates.
It's simply not true that that stuff has been excluded and like FL in 110 I think this is something of a straw man.
You can attack analytic philosophy departments for excluding certian materal, but the attack has less force if, as a matter of fact, those things aren't excluded in the first place.
shite at spelling mistakes in 118
117: Is that seriously the argument you want to make, w-lfs-n? I guess your professors don't know about your blog, huh?
FL, are you willing to say that there aren't any? Are the ahistorical asocial philosophers who think that philosophy began with Frege, and that philosophy talks only about timeless natural universals -- are they non-existent? I'm not in a position to research this at the moment, but I've read things by people who think that philosophy began with Frege. The book I cited was arguing with philosophers of mind who took The Mind (of contemporary people) to be a timeless universal uninfluenced by society or history.
Writing about Mill or Nietzsche is not the same thing as doing the kind of thing Mill or Nietzsche did. "On Liberty" was a sort of liberal political manifesto, and it's one of Mill's main works. It was meant for a general audience and was readable and spoke to ordinary concerns. Yet it is not an exception to Mill's philosophical work, the way Bertrand Russell's politics was, but central to it. It wasn't a popularization, but a work of general educated interest.
One thing I've learned since I started arguing this point is that philosophy has loosened up somewhat since my last contact. However, it still seems to be an insular discipline and my trips to libraries to look at the journals confirm my prejudices. There seems to be an autonomous philosophical discussion of many topics, but it doesn't engage discussions from other fields and tendencies, with a few exceptions like Charles Taylor. As mmf said above, philosophers seem to feel justified in ignoring extra-philosophical discourse, or to and by now I think that this insularity has had a stunting effect.
Frankly, FL, the criticisms I'm making aren't new or unusual. They're outside criticisms (by now) that AP people feel justified in ignoring or rejecting, but they're not original with me. You seem to be saying that the AP takeover did not happen, or that if it did, nothing was left out, and it seems that you have never heard any of this before and it angers you that anyone should say these things.
What you really need to say is that the AP takeover was a good thing and that the stuff that was excluded was crap.
117 -- OED thinks otherwise. Defines TUBE as "A hollow body, usually cylindrical..." -- hollowness is more vital to something's being a tube, than is cylindricality.
PS.
We are the hollow tubes
We are the stuffed men...
The OED was compiled by a bunch of amateurs in their spare time. What do they know? I introspected and divined the true nature of the tube.
BP, how about some pretentious, know-nothing, hard-bodied, well-hung studs?
No, because they're always really wankers who just think they're studs, and they try my patience. Which as we all know isn't all that well-developed to begin with.
re 116: I think there's an important point that's implicit in what McG says, namely, that while individuals might be ignorant of the relevant science, the discipline itself recognizes that the scientific knowledge is important. That is, if someone makes an argument about natural kinds that ignores real biology, he's often called on it, and, if so, it's not considered an adequate response to say that the science is not important. It's not as if the very enterprise of philosophy has discarded scientific knowledge, even when individual practitioners fall short.
What about a tube that's closed on either end? That would be hollow, but it would do nothing to relieve the pressure inside Labs' ass.
john, as much as I would like to expose him as a bad teacher, it would be too stupid of me to name names.
The class was a very strange experience, though. All these philosophy grad students struggling with all their might to argue against Wittgenstein's arguments (in PI), me sitting there enjoying having the arguments boiled down like this and interested in their resistance and their experience of being shocked, but basically feeling what Wittgenstein had to say had already been absorbed into the intellectual culture and was fascinating and probably right and not terribly unfamiliar, and by the way why can't we discuss the way he presented his arguments, his form of writing, which is so peculiar and interesting and often intimately connected to the argument he makes? Much as I want to do things by the local disciplinary rules when I am in a philosophy seminar, why is that such a wrong suggestion to make? It was an odd class.
To the professor's credit, once I realized his style was confrontational and you always were going to be confronted by him and had better just confront back, we got on much better.
while I am telling stories...one that of course reflects on him alone not the field...
He was a horrible prick. It was just laughable. I once brought my mother to his 100 person undergrad lecture. Afterwards during his office hours he said, "Who was that person you brought?" and then said, "but why did you bring your mother? She couldn't have understood anything that we were saying," at which point I was very amused since my mother had pointed out some logical problems in his lecture earlier that afternoon. She has read Wittgenstein. He was her favorite author in the 1960s when she nearly did a PhD in philosophy, having been offered a full ride at the University of Chicago, but deciding at the very last minute she didn't want to go to grad school in philosophy. Making my comment vaguely relevant to the thread and also showing that prejudging people based on appearance and without talking to them really doesn't help you in life. Gah.
The tube that can be closed on either end is not the true tube.
See, this is what annoys me about philosophers. It may not be the ur-tube, but it is, nonetheless, a tube.
Mill was an afterthought, as the word "even" indicates. I still doubt that anyone would be encouraged to write general-reader works of the "On Liberty" type, but maybe I'm wrong.
An attempt to formalize Mill's argument on this or that and make it rigorous ("about" Mill) would not count as doing philosophy like Mill's. While I think that there's been a narrowing of topics, the methodological imperatives have been more constricting.
Mine is an outsider criticism and I'm not going to be precise in my knowledge about something I decided not to study. What I'm saying is not unique to me, and it seems to me that it's something people within the field should know about and understand.
122 and 123: ha, and if you want to read about tube people, go here
(that was to Amelie Northomb's good novel about a character who is simply The Tube for the first two chapters or so, in case my link doesn't work)
re: 121
You can keep saying that philosophy excluded these things and ask for justifications but it
*really* didn't exclude those things.
That isn't to say that philosophy since 1950, say, is without flaw or that there aren't elements of philosophical methodology that I am uncomfortable with. However, the 'state of philosophy' that you are attacking is a straw man, it isn't like that.
"Are the ahistorical asocial philosophers who think that philosophy began with Frege, and that philosophy talks only about timeless natural universals -- are they non-existent?"
If those people exist I've never met one.
94: shouldn't it be "supersedes"?
I just feel like being a little bitch, okay?
126: Biology, probably yes. Political, social, and cultural history, no.
133: Matt, I would like to think that is true, but if it is, why can't I find academics in philosophy besides Stanley Cavell who are willing to seriously discuss Derrida and Heidegger?
(Let alone recognize Cixous or Lacoue-Labarthes or Deleuze or others, who, much as they are not my favorite authors or probably yours either, are important).
MMF, what a weenie you are.
I've more or less said my piece. I regret the narrowing of philosophy that took place during the 50s and 60s. While it was happening, the victors were pretty clear about what they were doing and pretty contemptuous of the losers. Philosophy may have broadened since 1985, but I don't see much sign of that.
There are people better than I am at arguing the case I'm making -- Toulmin and sometimes Rorty. Agree or disagree, but people are saying these things and people in the biz really should be more aware of them.
I have no trouble finding stuff to read, and it's almost never from philosophy. What I read is often about topics which used to be part of philosophy, but which aren't any more. Same for my writing.
With my interests, which are what once was called "philosophical interests", I would never think of studying in a philosophy department. No one here has convinced me that I'm wrong about this, though some may be muttering under their breathes that it's a goddamn good thing and that they'd never want me in their department.
132: once more, let me give you a reference to the novel with a living tube in it, because you should read it.
Amelie Nothomb, Metaphysique des tubes, translated as The Character of Rain.
there seems to be some problem with line breaks interfering with my linking and destroying all hopes of being neat or witty, so here:
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nothomba/mdtubes.htm
dude, your amusement vs. my rep?
it's bad enough that i've given you umpty-umpty-ump clues.
Seriously, FL, this is an outside critique. I imagine it's inaccurate; I haven't been involved since 1985 or so, though I do check back occasionally. I've never felt that I was missing out on anything.
There were CT / Majikthese threads on relativism awhile back. I found it appalling. These threads dealt very neatly and tidily with various kinds of relativism, things that seemed like relativism which weren't, and refuted various of the relativistic arguments.
All with no attention to context whatsoever. None. When and where does relativism arise? Why do some people want to be relativists? What happens when relativism increases? These questions are why relativism is an important question for us (compared to Monothetism, for example). But they were systematically ignored and my attempts to introduce them were not responded to, IIRC.
I wrote up my thing about relativism and it's at my URL to this post. To me it's more illuminating than that whole philosophical thread was, which treated relativism as though it were a subtle epistemological doctrine. As I understand, what I wrote is not philosophical and would not be accepted in philosophy departments. Am I wrong?
In the big picture, my amusement is far more important than your rep, mmf.
For more on The Tube, see here, and following.
Well I'm late on this, but if you want support for what I think JE is arguing, sit in on a law school criminal law or legal philosophy course. If you have ever read any of Stanely Fish's stuff on the essentially pointlessness of philosophy, that's his target, because the use of anglo-american philosophy in this case is radically ahistorical. Every conversation seems to start with untested intuitions. Read H L A Hart and (off the top of my head...) Pierre Bourdeiu on the foundations of law, and you can see a difference.
There is also a big difference in terms of style in AP and continental; am I the only one who thinks that arguments between analytic p. grad students are often all male, and often degenerate into swordfights? That was my experience at penn; at bc and villanova the conversations were totally different in style, people were much more accommodating, I think because there is less focus on an "answer" in the world continental philosophy.
Thanks, Mmf! -- looks interesting.
Incidentally, w-lfs-n belong in the ninth chasm of the eighte circle of Hell.
All with no attention to context whatsoever. None. When and where does relativism arise? Why do some people want to be relativists? What happens when relativism increases? These questions are why relativism is an important question for us (compared to Monothetism, for example). But they were systematically ignored and my attempts to introduce them were not responded to, IIRC.
As a pragmatist, I'm sympathetic towards this view. But I don't see anything wrong with some being especially interested in playing out the analytic moves of the game, and subjecting the results of each line of play to a rigorous critique. Isn't this what a rational appraisal of an idea is all about? Eventually they become distinctions without differences, or the line of play extends far beyond the realm of significance for all but the club-players, and at that point I fully share your irritation.
It seems to me that you want something beyond a rational appraisal, a historico-therapeutic diagnosis of our interest in the idea in the first place, and the role it plays in our lives. I want that too, but there are some very good intellectual historians--within philosophy too--who do just that. Surely you're not saying that every philosopher should be doing that too, though. Armchair obsessives need to make a living too!
I want that too, but there are some very good intellectual historians--within philosophy too--who do just that.
I shouldn't be weighing in on this, because I don't know anything about philosophy, but are there really? I'm a moderately educated dilettante who reads at least semi-academic stuff when I come across it, and I just don't seem to come across anything interesting written at my level by philosophers, outside of blogging where they mostly appear to write about politics and such. (Peter Singer, maybe? I can't come up with another public intellectual/philosopher.)
Heck, lots of you guys reading this are philosophers, and I don't have the faintest idea what you work on at a lay level. Friends who are doing molecular genetics research can explain their work fairly easily, but philosophers don't seem to.
On those two threads, people seemed to think that once the logical analysis was done, relativism had been taken care of. And the thread was supposed to be politically relevant and engaged (it might have been on Left2Right or a spinoff from it).
Since my bitch is about the analytic monopoly and its exclusion of other approaches, your pluralism argument has not force. I'm not saying that no one ever should do AP stuff. I'm protesting their monopoly and, in this case, self-satisfaction and lack of curiosity.
AP, seemingly, almost never puts things in context, and almost never moves constructively to larger wholes. What I always see is the analysis of a big question into parts, the choice of one part to deal with, and then perhaps the analysis of the new question into parts and so on.
I am fully aware that purely analitic methods have had their triumphs, but I don't think that they're the only method, and especially shouldn't be in philosophy, which I think should be constructive.
The critics of economics I cited far about tended to believe that the scientization, mathematization, and formalism of economics was an imitative fetish not justified by the actual scientific results. I think that the attempt to make philosophy into a science was a similiar error.
re: 136
You seem to making some wierd connection on the one hand between denial of i) belief in the reality of timeless universals (and the various other supposed features of AP) and ii) paying attention to Derrida and Cixous and claiming that if one denies i) then one must necessarily adopt position ii).
One can think both that analytic philosophy as characterised (inaccurately I've argued) as sterile ahistorical seeking after timeless universal Truth is a lot of crap and ALSO think that the work of Derrida and Cixous is also a lot of crap.
It's not an either/or position. There's a vast range of philosophical work to fill the wide open spaces between 'AP' [as characterised by John Emerson above] and Derrida. Most philosophers, from my experience, work somewhere in the vast middle range.
You can't just construct a straw-man version of analytic philosophy and then say "well, you say you don't believe in THAT but if you don't why aren't you all reading Derrida?"
re: 148
I can explain the subject matter of my doctoral thesis in a couple of sentences.
Basically, I work on what 'normal' means in biology and medicine. That is, how do we distinguish between the normal and the abnormal and specifically how do we distinguish disease from health.
[For those who worry about analytic philosophy ignoring other things, while I'm pretty much a straight analytic philosopher in style and a lot of the stuff I do on this topic comes straight from the philosophy of biology, I also look at arguments surrounding health norms as made by sociologists and medical anthropologists. Questions around the social construction of disease, the literature dealing with the connection between the sociology of deviance and disease norms, some of the feminist literature on these topics, etc. etc.]
Well, I suppose this all boils down to an empirical question. Perhaps someone has done a survey of the number of articles published relating to ahistorical analytic topics, and compared that number to the amount of articles published relating to a more historically engaged philosophy. We could complicate matters by reviewing how many tenured positions are offered to philosophers doing broader work, and compare it to the number of positions offered to philosophers doing very narrow analytic work.
You might be right, John. Still, there are philosophers in the recent past who have written on a broad and interesting range of issues, including Nelson Goodman, Nussbaum, Danto, Charles Taylor, MacIntyre, Alan Ryan, Ronald Dworkin, HLA Hart, and so on. That doesn't help us much with the question of overall dominance in philosophy, I know. But if the argument is about the field of philosophy generally, and not a somewhat circular one about analytic philosophy as you're defining it, then the presence of those writings at least indicate some measure of variety and reach.
That is, how do we distinguish between the normal and the abnormal and specifically how do we distinguish disease from health.
Hm. That sounds both interesting, and the sort of thing that I'd sort of expect to see written about at a semi-popular level, but haven't. (Which doesn't mean that it's not out there, just that I haven't seen it, of course.)
Isn't a lot of the work on citizenship and multiculturalism ananlytic political philosophy outside of Rawls and Nozick?
John, you don't mean this CT thread, do you?
re: 154
I've read semi-popular articles about specific controversial disease diagnoses that touch on these topics -- ADHD, Asperger's and so on -- and some of the 'anti-psychiatric' literature from the 60s and 70s touches on it too. People like Szasz and R.D. Laing.
However, as far as I know there are no popular or semi-popular level things that take a broader look at this issue and certainly none that address both the biological and the more value-centred perspectives that can be brought to bear on the problem.
Maybe I should write one... :)
Or do you mean this one? I'm an analytic philosopher, and I thought that was misguided (unless narrowly targeted at Baude, whose post I didn't read). Imperialistic expansion by philosophers of language attempting to colonize ethics and lay waste the local culture, to no good end. (That may be a bit overwrought.)
That was one of several, but not the one I was specifically thinking about.
I didn't see Harry B's final response to me, but I'm skeptical of the idea that an acontextual discussion of justice might be useful at some future time.
I used to like Laing and Szasz when I was on drugs, but they're sort of like the movie "Easy Rider" in that respect.
LB, my cocktail-party summary of my dissertation is this: It's about the kind of reasons we have to believe what other people tell us, and the kind of responsibility we take on when we tell other people things.
The kind of responsibility: I argue that you're responsible for what you say in that you stake your credibility on it. If you tell people falsehoods, other things being equal you should not be believed in the future. I said more about that here.
The paper I was working on yesterday, I would describe as arguing that any epistemology of testimony has to take the teller's agency seriously. That is, your account of how what other people say gives us reason for belief had better talk about the speakers' freedom to choose what they say, because you can't typically get a reason for belief from what someone says without being aware of that freedom.
I wouldn't mind getting the chance to turn some of this into semi-popular stuff about the media, but it wouldn't be a good career move right now. And that's one of the things to be regretted about the professionalization of academe, maybe (though you might all be happy to be spared it).
What Matt just said is a sort of sad testimony to part of what I've been saying. In economics, popular writing apparently also works against you -- certainly not for you.
Matt, why should agency, rather than reliability, be the criterion? Can't I regard you as a well-functioning detection device?
Oh, don't bother. You've heard that point a bazillion times, I'm sure, and I need to get to work.
re: 162
It's been a while since I read either of them but Szasz always seemed more interesting to me -- certainly easier reading.
There's Ivan Illich too writing stuff in a quasi-popular vein.
The whole question of "popular" connects to another pet issue of mine, closely-related to the rest of what I've been saying.
"Popular" is usually taken to mean "simplistic stuff smart people write for dumb people to read".
"General" is a better word. "Stuff smart people write about their specialty for equally-smart people in other specialties."
In science there's actually a system of that, called applications. Engineering physics, for example. It's as good as is needed for the job at hand.
All pure science depends on the work of other scientists in other fields. If a materials-science guy studies crystallography, for example, he'll learn as much crystallography as he needs, without mastering the whole field.
Philosophy seems resistent to the outside -- either communicating to it, or learning from it. It's a bad kind of autonomy, in my opinion. (Economics is a similiar case, and there's a furious battle raging at the moment -- though I expect the insurgents to be soundly defeated.)
Weiner's statement was evidence for my point in one direction, and the relativism threads were evidence in the other direction.
I love Illich's stuff, but it's about as far as you can get from AP -- a freelancing nonacademic Jesuit.
Yeah, Labs, that's pretty much the point of the paper. If I can use an analogy, someone who treated other people as reliable devices but not as agents would be as weird as someone who treated his senses as reliable indicators of what was going on somewhere without realizing that it was going on around him -- that's just not understanding how testimony/perception works. In some limited cases you can treat people as reliable detection devices, but those will be sort of freak cases, and your theory should treat them as exceptional.
Oh yeah, popular doesn't have to mean dumbed down or lacking in subtlety.
I'd love to see more philosophical stuff aimed at a popular audience being produced as the little that is produced is pretty poor.
I also think that a lot of the problems philosophers discuss are intrinsically interesting to most people if explained properly.
There's Ivan Illich too writing stuff in a quasi-popular vein.
Isn't he long dead?
I can't think of any good Szasz for dummies discussion off the top of my head but I'll check my reading -- it's been at least 4 years since I read any of his stuff or commentary on him -- and if I get a chance later I'll post a reference.
My own take on Szasz isn't favourable to his point of view, either, for what it's worth.
Szasz was a hard-core libertarian, and he had a special concern for legal responsibility -- he thought that mental illness was an illicit plea at law. A mentally ill person committing crime X was as culpable as a non-mentally-ill person committing the same crime. He was moving away from the notion of responsibility most people have toward one just saying that people who end up doing bad things, for whatever reason, must be dealt with. Sort of a utilitarian point of view I guess.
Didn't Bentham argue for culpability exceptions to punishment? Hazy recollection. Anyway, I thought Szasz (god, that's hard to type) was dispensing with a broad notion of mental illness-- like, there is no such thing-- though the law is pretty narrow about what counts as sufficient for an insanity plea.
I, for one, would be interested to see continental philosophy people leave English/comp lit departments, because I'd like to see what would be produced there without them. And really I'm imagining this historically, wondering what English departments would look like now if this hegemony or split hadn't occurred. I may wonder about this every day.
#176
I'd be interested in your fleshing that out a bit. Not that I disagree, I'd just like to see what you have in mind.
177- It seems to me that the people fleeing the analytic philosophy hegemony hid out in comp lit departments and established a hegemony of sorts there, which is only now being challenged.
You want to hear about flight -- I know of classics majors who are presently in Sarawak, Singapore, and the Australian outback. There ain't no place in this world for them folk nohow.
I've sold Pindar in Sarawak, Singapore, and Australia, and it sure put them on the map!
#178 So these people did continental and other non-a kinds of philosophy instead of comparing literature?
Yes, because these interlopers were spending all their time fucking with objet petit-a, etc., a lot of literature ended up sitting around forever without being compared.
It piled up year after year, and for a lot of that stuff, it's too late now.
I'm just waiting until people in the humanities stop messing around with half-measures and rename themselves Superlative Literature departments.
That's petit objet a to you, Emerson!
I'd look that up to make sure, but all of my Lacan books are currently propping up heavy furniture.
My complaint mirrors your own, Emerson, so if you have a problem with it, look within.
I don't have any Lacan books, but Emerson's formulation looks a lot more familiar.
FL: re Szasz.
The responsibility thing John Emerson talks about above isn't something I have a big problem with. The so-called 'Swedish' model -- the view that mental illness isn't excuplatory -- is a view I have some sympathy for.
Szasz's general view, iirc, is that physical illnesses are the paradigm instances of illness and that mental illnesses are only legitimately diseases if they share some of the appropriate features of physical illnesses.
However, as a matter of empirical fact they do not, so there are no genuine mental illnesses. Mental illnesses lack a clearly defined pathology and etiology -- which enable us, for example, to identify a particular token putative disease instance as a member of a clearly defined disease type -- and amount to little more than lists of symptoms created by doctors.
[Interestingly, as an aside, the DSM looks a lot like the old 'symptomatic' nosologies of the early 18th century -- before people like Bichat got really into cutting up the bodies of the diseased and trying to do pathology. In these old manuals disease descriptions are little more than clusters of symptoms assumed to go together.]
However, if we were to find neurophysiological correlates for some mental illness, combined with a detailed physical pathology and an explanation for why these brain lesions lead to the symptoms they do then it would cease to be non-genuine mental illness and, according to Szasz, instead become the real physical thing.
On Szasz's view, iirc, diagnoses of mental illness are just a way of stigmatising those who are different and play much the same social role -- that of singling out and scapegoating 'wierdos' and of enforcing certain norms of acceptable behaviour -- as the notion of witchcraft did in the late Middle Ages. Indeed, Szasz explicits compares modern psychiatry with the Inquisition.
Take that all with a pinch of salt though -- I working from half-remembered stuff.
FWIW, the wikipedia entry on Szasz seems more or less in line with my reading of him a while back.
A more interesting critique of psychiatric medicine is "Madness Explained" by Richard Bentall which is a much more robust critique.
Oh good. I half-remember Szasz too! Everyone does! So nobody's going to go all "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about!" on me this time around.
I first knew Szasz from patients-rights type sources, but as I learned more about him he seemed more in the direction of "no excuses for crazy people". I don't actually disagree with the Swedish model -- someone who does harm needs to be dealt with; the way they're treated should be based on their condition.
In 1970, when people were still being locked up in nuthouses for things like smoking weed and attempting promiscuity, Szasz had a point, because mental illness was sometimes used as a way to incarcerate people before they had broken any laws.
At the same time, Szaszian thinking prevented people from being taken into custody whose repeated bizarre behaviors eventually turned out to have been symptoms of massive problems which ultimately resulted in death or similiar problems.
By now I think that the "there is no such thing as mental illness" idea has been refuted. At the same time, people I know working in therapy are frighteningly sloppy in their use of disease terminology.
" At the same time, people I know working in therapy are frighteningly sloppy in their use of disease terminology. "
To say the least. The whole DSM is, from my point of view, deeply flawed and while I disagree with Szasz's absolutist general claim with respect to mental illness, nevertheless, a lot of specific diagnoses -- particularly among the personality disorders -- look to me a lot like elaborate ways of saying "won't do what they are told" or "is deeply unpleasant", etc.
At the same time, people I know working in therapy are frighteningly sloppy in their use of disease terminology.
Ain't it the truth. My boyfriend the ex-therapist is quite fond of diagnosing people I describe to him with personality disorders, an especially problematic group of "illnesses" to begin with because it's damn unclear why the people who suffer from them are not just assholes, or neurotics, or some other non-disease model kind of dysfunction. To soften the impression I'm giving of my boyfriend's irresponsibility, I'll say that I think he's subscribing to some object relations theorist's view that everyone has the dymanic of one of a few personality disorders at the core of their psyche, but neither my boyfriend nor the object relations theorist really mean everyone's diseased. (He says I'm borderline, and he's schizoid.)
I've looked at the DSM-IV, and its meticulous distinctions look highly scholastic to me. To some degree I think that they're driven by the categories of insurance remuneration, though people tell me I exaggerate this. They don't seem to be terribly linked to etiology or physical diagnosis of any kind, and only weakly linked to treatment.
I've known two people who were medicated for depression whose bad judgement, in my ignorant opinion, was increased by their medication, since they were always cheerful and no longer noticed bad things.
Now you can't comment until I say your name, oh writer of #192.
Matt McGrattan
Matt McGrattan
Matt McGrattan
Nuts but compassionate.
I see you're putting your newfound ability to comment to incisive use, young Matt.
He says I'm borderline, and he's schizoid.
Mixed marriages can be difficult. Which way would you raise the children?
But see, here's the other thing. My feeling is that there are a lot of things that are rightly conceived of as disease, at least in that they need modification, that are nevertheless on a continuum with normal, like ADHD and depression. So then you have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere.
re: 200
It is now officially past midnight -- my incisiveness has turned into a pumpkin.
re: "it's damn unclear why the people who suffer from them are not just assholes, or neurotics, or some other non-disease model kind of dysfunction"
Damn right. We need to strike a decive blow for the right to call an arsehole an arsehole.
[Exits, to slumber]
So then you have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere.
Why not let them self-select? If they'd rather be a happy person with poor judgment than a sad person with poor judgment, I'd let 'em go for it. [I feel that someone here should be promoting the crazy old man agenda]
You mean, someone other than Emerson.
I hate to attack a fellow democrat crazy old man, but he has really sold out to the moderate wing of the party.
I don't think that anyone is going to argue that the DSM should be applied as a kind of checklist. There are no DSM fundamentalists, to my knowledge. The DSM simply provides a convenient shorthand for talking about common types of dysfunctional characteristics. Hard to imagine any therapist interviewing a patient, running off to the DSM, checking off boxes, and then prescribing/treating accordingly.
You wonder what the purpose is of all those precisely-defined categories and subcategories, though. It's several hundred pages thick and provides hundreds of distinct pigeonholes.
Alphabetically, the first DSM-IV diagnosis is "academic problem". Just sayin.
Do you suffer from an "Academic Problem"?
Current work performance deficiencies or behavior aberrations
Sleep and appetite difficulties related to current disciplinary stress or job stress
Concerns regarding lack of or ineffective communication with manager or co-workers
Productivity loss stemming from fear and doubt about job security
Unusually short-tempered and angry with manager, coworkers, and company or physical and/or verbal aggression towards others or property
Concerns regarding lack of career development
Worry and fear about disclosing situation to spouse and family
Concerns about potential loss of income and status
Uncertainty and frustration about the solution to situation
Confusion about the progressive disciplinary process used by employer
Feeling overwhelmed or unable to manage work load responsibilities
The link JE provided in 211 answers the question from 208. It's put up by Value Options, an insurance company, for use by their providers. The service provider (shrink) must use those diagnostic categories, and be able to provide supporting evidence that the client meets the requirement of that diagnosis, in order to get paid.
It's my impression that clinical studies also use the DSM checklists to define populations for studies.
Yes, you can certainly use the categories to describe a patient's problem or set of problems. That doesn't mean the assessment will rely upon fine distinctions, or that the diagnosis is made using, literally, a check-box approach. The categories are somewhat vague and malleable quite purposively, and the DSM includes catch-all categories as well.
The ValueOptions site is interesting though. I wonder just how confining insurance companies can be when it comes to the provision of mental health treatment.
I'm not a provider, but I have spoken with providers, and I'm told that some (many? most?) insurance companies can be quite confining. Including medicaid. I'm told they want one of their diagnostic codes (which I think are DSM categories) and they want documentation to support the assignment of that code - usually meaning whatever minimum number of syptoms from the DSM list the DSM specifies. In other words, a check box approach. That's my impression, anyway.
re: 136
You seem to making some wierd connection on the one hand between denial of i) belief in the reality of timeless universals (and the various other supposed features of AP) and ii) paying attention to Derrida and Cixous and claiming that if one denies i) then one must necessarily adopt position ii).
Matt, *you* seem to be ascribing positions to me that I haven't taken.
I never made any comment about AP requiring belief in the reality of timeless universals. Nor did I connect disputing that to reading specific authors. What I DID comment on was the desirability of being open to contributions from authors outside rigidly defined academic boundaries who may be dealing with the same subject but taking a very different approach from the set of approaches in AP -- something I see very rarely in AP outside of Stanley Cavell.
However, if you do want to connect my comments to specific authors, then fine. Derrida is an enlightening and beautiful writer for the reader who is already familiar with the sources he draws on -- particularly his texts on hospitality and the famous Plato's Pharmacy. Go read them before you call him "crap," and if you still call him "crap" after that then at least I know what to think of your judgment.
And don't turn *me* into your straw man.
mmf!
Perhaps I misunderstood what you wrote.
However, I wasn't saying that Derrida *was* crap but rather that a possible explanation for the lack of attention paid to him by philosophers of a particular stripe is that *they* think he's crap -- and not because of some general exclusionary principle.
For what it's worth, I have no specific opinions on Derrida I haven't read enough of his stuff to venture a strong opinion.
Interestingly, the name-calling vis a vis the alleged narrowness and exclusivity of analytic philosophy apparently only seems to go one way. I don't see any continental philosophers addressing, say, the work of Quine or Kripke in detail.
The fact that philosophers interested in different problems or who adopt very different methodologies from each other don't necessarily read the work of philosophers from other schools as often as they really should is, if it is a problem, a general problem rather than one specific to anglo-american philosophy in the analytic tradition.
Now that I've diagnosed all y'all with V 62.3, perhaps the treatment can get underway.
During my medical bookstore career some of out biggest sellers were coding books: CPT, ICD-9, HCPCS, DSM-IV, and one other whose acronym I've fogotten. Some of these were primarily or entirely used for filing insurance forms. Coding a disease wrongly or forgetting to chart a distinguishing sympton could cost someone hundreds of dollars. Coding is a pretty well-paid trade for non-college grads ($70 k seems top) and can often be done part-time or at home.
Well, I've done a certain amount of reading od both continental and analytic philosophy, and I bitch about both. I did quit both of them, pretty much, during the late 80's, so my bitches are dated by now.
As I said, when I left the ruling party I did not join the Workers and Peasants official opposition party.
215: My impression is that it's not difficult for a therapist to choose between different categories, to check certain boxes if need be, with a substantial amount of discretion, based upon whatever treatment or diagnosis the therapist believes would be most useful for the patient.
I'll try to ask around today. Given that insurance companies would need some reasonably bright lines to limit their mental health coverage, though, it sounds like you could be right.
My guess is that MDs and therapists working with HMOs are trained in the most remunerative coding, and that their work is vetted by a coder before it's sent off. (Coding for insurance is a factor in medical diagnosis too. I used to know some specific examples, but I've forgotten them.)
This kind of coding problem is one of the things driving MDs out of private practice.
I worked my way through college as a secretary at a mental health care HMO (I was the best effing secretary in the world, I must say, and that is still probably my favorite job to date) and was eventually promoted to claims investigator. We primarily used DSM codes for meting out managed care – providers had to submit a diagnosis code and essentially the "checkbox criteria" to back up that diagnosis and were allotted a certain number of visits covered by insurance based on the code. My job was reconciling the number of preauthorized visits with the number of actual visits and flagging irregularities.
(While I loved that job for the environment, I totally felt like The Man, even more so than my current job in government.)
Becks, if you'd stayed in coding would you be making more money now? The best ones ar4e supposed to make $70 k, though I don't know if that's for 40 hrs/wk.
I don't quite feel comfortable giving out that information, Emerson, but I will say that the best insurance claims analysts where I worked were making at most $40K and more like low 30s. I don't know of anyone making close to that 70K figure. (I was making about $8 an hour.) We had therapists who reviewed our work to make sure the DSM codes were right and I'm sure they did OK but that required a Masters degree at least.
I think that 70K figure, which I've heard from people other than you, is tossed around more by companies who try to train people in medical transcription and billing than people who actually work in the industry. A lot of people try to make money selling courses and books to teach people how to do it and I'd bet those are more profitable than the actual work. I just learned it all on the job. Then again, my parents are both psychologists so I could pretty much recite the backwards and forwards DSM going into it.
Shame no one picked up "My bitches are dated."
A plea: On a thread where more than one person named "Matt" is posted, could people addressing a Matt disambiguate? I suppose the default is that anyone talking to me will say "Weiner," but I still get that feeling like when someone says my name to someone standing next to me.
Addressing Matthews as "Matt" is strictly forbidden.
They done went and died, I mean.
There are a surfeit of Matts posting here.
Ironically, I was 16 before I met another Matt/Matthew -- it can't have been a common name in central Scotland in the early 70s/80s -- and now I can't avoid the buggers.
interesting. matts are very common in the US. i once dated 3 in a row, leading me to ask probing questions why men have one-syllable names like grunts with only a very few variations.
now i have moved on to roberts. "robert"s? robertses?
john emerson, i think your karma is starting to pickle.
I go by my middle name, but my first name is Robert. People seem to find it terribly amusing that my wife is named Roberta.
There are, indeed, more Matts here than you'd expect. I go by Matt in real life, but I post here as Matthew since the only other one is Saiselgy, and he's Wehttam now.
I am my wife's fifth or sixth (and hopefully last) Matt, and she's my third of her name.
Interestingly, I was supposed to be a Matthew. Matthew Patrick. My mother says they handed me to her, though, and she looked at me (I was a 10-1/2 pounder, fwiw) and said, "This isn't a Matthew. Or a Patrick."
Actually, I was supposed to be an Amanda, as was my brother, but then mom just gave up.
Mmmmmm.... pickled karma.
Mr. Harvey, if haven't got the record already you should go for it. It could be one of those kinky European art films, called "Matt 24". Perhaps in the end there could be a group sex thingie at the end too.