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Trouble with Leprechauns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Martin Hollis
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Extract

The impulse to philosophy is often provided by leprechauns, mischievous little sprites who lurk at the end of fine chains of reasoning and make trouble. They delight in absurdity and paradox, and are especially happy to help ambitious thinkers dig their own graves. Philosophers spend much of their lives trying to put a stop to leprechauns or fencing them out with the aid of reason. But in truth the relationship is symbiotic. If a realm of thought can be made fully coherent, there is no work for philosophers to do in it. Science is the obvious case but the remark applies, paradoxically, to philosophy itself. A philosopher who solved all the problems of philosophy would be about as popular as a huntsman who shot the fox or a theologian who proved the existence of God. Luckily there is no serious risk. At least on the view of philosophy to be taken here, there will always be leprechauns to keep us busy.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 33 , September 1992 , pp. 25 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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References

1 That is no doubt why a philosopher has been included in the project on the Foundations of Rational Choice Theory at the University of East Anglia funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award R 000 23 2269). The theme at the core of this lecture is part of the project and I would like to thank Robin Cubitt, Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Judith Mehta, Chris Starmer and Robert Sugden for many fertile discussions of it. I am also grateful to A. Phillips Griffiths for his comments on an earlier draft.

2 Professor Phillips Griffiths has kindly drawn my attention to this pithy comment on Holbach's version of the doctrine by Marx in The German Ideology. ‘Holbach represents every activity of individuals in their reciprocal intercourse, e.g. speech, love, etc., as a relation of utility and exploitation. These relations are thus not allowed to have their own significance but are depicted as the expression and representation of a third relation which underlies them, utility or exploitation. These individual relations no longer have value on their own account, as personal activity, but only as a disguise for a real third purpose and relationship, which is called the relation of utility.’ 29

3 David Lewis Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969) is central to more recent discussion. Margaret Gilbert (1989) argues that, on Lewis's account, rational agents ‘act blindly’ when co-ordinating, because reason cannot guide them. Robert Sugden (1991) endorses doubts about the scope of strategic reasoning and suggests thaj rational agents must rely on simple induction.