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Can Philosophy Exist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Simon Blackburn
Simon Blackburn*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina
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Extract

Near the beginning of this century an episode of note occurred in Vienna. In 1894 the University had commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint a series of panels depicting the triumph of light over darkness. The first panel that Klimt finished, in 1900, represented Philosophy. The Faculty, evidently, had hoped for something like Raphael's depiction of the School of Athens: Plato, Aristotle, perhaps Galileo and Hume and Kant and Mach, would discourse gravely whilst a suitably impressed crowd of bystanders looked on and learned.

Type
Part One: Demarcating Philosophy
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 19: New Essays on Méta-Philosophie - Reconstructing Philosophy? , 1993 , pp. 83 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 Strawson & Grice, 'In Defence of a Dogma,' Philosophical Review (1956)

2 This need not be so in other endeavors: the military for example tends to promote people precisely for these and other defects. See Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape 1976).

3 I owe the term to Mark Johnston, 'Objectivity Refigured,' forthcoming in Realism and Reason, J. Haldane & C. Wright, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992).

4 This argument finds forceful expression in Stephen Stich, 'What is A Theory of Mental Representation?' Mind 101 (1992).

5 For an excellent diagnosis of this trend, see Edward Craig, 'Advice to Philosophers: 1hree New Leaves to Tum Over,' Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1991) 265-81.

6 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding, Section I

7 I was pleased to find an excellent statement of the position in Elizabeth Fricker's 'Analyticity, Linguistic Practice, and Philosophical Method,' in Meaning Scepticism, Klaus Puhl, ed. (New York: De Gruyter 1991).

8 I am not here suggesting that obviousness is in any way sufficient for a 'folk' verdict of 'analytic.' But it may be necessary. See 'Morals and Modals,' in my Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press 1993).

9 Jonathan Bennett defended the practice of Strawsonian metaphysics as the iteration of obvious steps to unobvious conclusions, for example in his Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966). I do not pretend to refute the theoretical possibility here, but there is something Sorites-like about it in all the philosophical cases I know. As in a Sorites, outside mathematical and formal contexts it tends to be unobvious that you can agglomerate all the obvious steps.

10 Hereafter I shall talk of properties, to avoid repetition, but the points made apply, I believe, to philosophical searches for identity of states, events, things, and even kinds.

11 The phrase is Mark Johnston's; see his 'Dispositional Theories of Value,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 63 (1989) 139-74. See also Philip Pettit, 'Realism and Response Dependence,' Mind 100 (1991), and for an excellent treatment, see the papers in Response Dependent Concepts, Peter Menzies, ed. (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences 1991).

12 Richard Rorty, 'Keeping Philosophy Pure,' in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1982), 34

13 This is one of the messages of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988).

14 This is a point pressed by Stanley Fish in many essays: for example, 'Consequences' in Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham: Duke University Press 1989).

15 This rather enigmatic instruction is filled out in my 'Enchanting Views,' forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 1990 St. Andrews Conference honoring Hilary Putnam.