¹ Barzun, Jacques, The American University (New York, Evanston, IL, and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 221.Google Scholar

² Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers, ed. Hartshorne, Charles, Weiss, Paul, and Burks, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 5.520 (c. 1905), 6.6 (c. 1903), 1.128 (c. 1905)Google Scholar. References are given by volume and paragraph number; parenthetical dates refer to dates of individual essays or fragments.

³ Ibid., 2.82 (1902) (the “real love of truth”); 1.43ff. (c. 1896) (the “scientific attitude”); 1.34 (1869) (the “craving to know how things really are”); 5.583 (1898) (the “Will to Learn” — William James's The Will to Believe, dedicated to Peirce, was first published in 1897).

What I have to say also has a good deal in common with Plato's account of “false philosophers” in Book VI of the Republic; not, however, his conception of knowledge as exclusively of the Forms, nor of philosophers as the only real lovers of truth—which is why it is Peirce, rather than Plato, who will be my guide here.

⁴ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 1.57 (c. 1896).Google Scholar

⁵ Ibid., 6.3 (1898).

⁶ Mark Migotti reminds me that Aristotle observes that philosophy is unavoidable because to reject it intelligently demands that one engage in it, in order to defend one's rejection of it.

⁷ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 7.605 (1903).Google Scholar

⁸ Ibid., 1.34 (1869).

⁹ Peirce, in Eisele, Carolyn, ed., The New Elements of Mathematics (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), vol. 4, p. 977Google Scholar; Peirce is referring to Paul Carus.

¹⁰ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 1.135 (c. 1899).Google Scholar

¹¹ Frankfurt, Harry, “On Bullshit,” in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 117–33.Google Scholar

¹² Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], III.x.6.Google Scholar

¹³ Brent, Joseph, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 16.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh (1903; New York: Signet Books, The New American Library of World Classics, 1960), p. 259Google Scholar; Butler continues: “Yet it is only those few who can be said to believe anything at all; the rest are simply unbelievers in disguise,” revealing that, unlike some contemporary philosophers, he realizes that there is an internal connection between the concepts of belief and truth.

¹⁵ Housman, A. E., M. Manilii, Astronomicon I (London, 1903), p. xliiiGoogle Scholar; see Frankfurt, Harry, “The Faintest Passion,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 66, no. 3 (1992), pp. 5–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ When I heard it, this observation was attributed to Burton Dreben. Israel Scheffler, however, tells me that his recollection is that the original source was Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman, and the original observation, “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is science.”

¹⁷ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 8.142 (1900).Google Scholar

¹⁸ From the “statement of purpose” supplied by the editor, Fuller, Steve: “The journal is committed to both examining and exhibiting the social structure of knowledge; thus, its policy is to publish ‘collaborations’ which are the collective product of several authors” (Directory of American Philosophers, 1994–95 [Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1994], p. 228).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Thanks to Louise Rosenblatt and Sidney Ratner for suggesting Principia Mathematica as a possible candidate; I would think this better described, however, as combining Russell's philosophical work with Whitehead's mathematical work. The joint work of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley might be suggested as another possibility; none of this, though, seems to me as important as, say, Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, or his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rosenblatt and Ratner also drew to my attention an observation of Max Fisch's likening the Library of Living Philosophers volumes to cooperative scientific work; but I find the likeness remote at best.

²⁰ Harding, Sandra, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 251.Google Scholar

²¹ Chronicle of Higher Education, 04 27, 1994, p. A15.Google Scholar

²² See my Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), chs. 6, 7, and 8.Google Scholar

²³ See my “Science as Social? — Yes and No,” in A Dialogue on Feminism, Science, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Nelson, Jack and Nelson, Lynn Hankinson (The Netherlands: Kluwer, forthcoming).Google Scholar

²⁴ O'Brien, Conor Cruise, “Politics and the Morality of Scholarship,” in Morality and Scholarship, ed. Black, Max (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 73.Google Scholar

²⁵ Goldman, Alvin, “Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 10 (1978), p. 523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Bonevac, Daniel, “Leviathan U.,” in Dickman, Howard, ed., The Imperiled Academy (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Press, 1993), pp. 1–26Google Scholar, is illuminating on these matters.

²⁷ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 1.645 (1898).Google Scholar

²⁸ Arnold, Kenneth, “University Presses Could Still Become the Cultural Force for Change and Enlightenment They Were Meant to Be,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 07 29, 1987Google Scholar; cited in Sykes, Charles, Profscam (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988), p. 129.Google Scholar

²⁹ Gutting, Gary, “The Editor's Page,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1 (1994), p. 87:Google Scholar

Learned journals are ostensibly dedicated to presenting essential new discoveries to a community of scholars. This purpose alone, however, cannot explain the immense volume of contemporary journal publications.… [N]one of us can hope to read more than a very small percentage.… The obvious implication is that most articles published in journals are not essential scholarly contributions.… One common, if seldom explicitly noted, reason [for publication] is to certify the academic competence of their authors.…

³⁰ My estimates are based on the Directory of American Philosophers and the International Directory of Philosophy; they can be only estimates, because the information there is incomplete, and, in particular, does not include data about journals that folded.

But aren't there, after all, many more philosophers now, as well as many more journals, than in 1900 (a challenge pressed by Louis Pojman)? Indeed, there are. But—if I sound cynical, so be it—the idea that there are, in the U.S. alone, nine thousand or so people all capable of genuinely significant philosophical work, strikes me as itself preposterous.

³¹ Not to mention that a large proportion of those few hundred sales will be to university libraries, not to people spending their own money, actually intending to read the book.

³² In an article entitled “Seeking Profits, College Presses Publish Novels,” The Wall Street Journal, 09 20, 1994, pp. B1 and B8Google Scholar, Marj Charlier writes that for Luther Wilson, director of the University Press of Colorado, “even to mention profits indicates a shift in academic publishing,” and continues, “[t]raditionally, universities subsidized their presses so they could publish definitive—and probably money-losing—treatises…. But now, universities are reducing their subsidies, and budget-strapped libraries are cutting back on their academic purchases,” and university presses are having to seek money-making projects.

See also Boynton, Robert S., “Routledge Revolution,” Lingua Franca, 03/04 1995, pp. 25–32Google Scholar, on the present condition of a once highly respected academic press.

³³ My source is Wilshire, Bruce, The Moral Collapse of the University (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 106–7.Google Scholar

³⁴ I owe to Mark Migotti the following splendid quotations from Nietzsche, , Human, All Too Human [1878], trans. Faber, Marion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984)Google Scholar, section 284, “In favour of the idle”: “One sign that the valuation of the contemplative life has declined is that scholars now compete with men of action in a kind of precipitate pleasure, so that they seem to value this kind of pleasure more highly than that to which they are really entitled and which is in fact much more pleasurable”; and section 285, “Modern Restlessness”: “… agitatedness is growing so great that higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to mature; it is as though the seasons were following upon one another too quickly. From lack of repose our civilization is growing into a new barbarism.”

³⁵ Santayana, George, Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920)Google Scholar; my source is White, Morton G., Science and Sentiment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 244.Google Scholar

³⁶ I have invented this neologism—by analogy with Peirce's coinage of “pragmaticism,” for his specific version of pragmatism—because I want to disassociate myself from some of the things Putnam, Hilary says when, in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, he repudiates scientism; specifically, unlike Putnam, I do not mean to deny the possibility of “one true description of the world.” Apropos, see my “Reflections on Relativism: From Momentous Tautology to Seductive Contradiction,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 11: Metaphysics, ed. Tomberlin, James E. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).Google Scholar

³⁷ See my “Between the Scylla of Scientism and the Charybdis of Apriorism,” in Hahn, Lewis, ed., The Philosophy of Sir Peter Strawson (La Salle, IL: Open Court, forthcoming)Google Scholar, for an articulation and defense of a conception of philosophy which I there describe as “scientific but not scientistic.”

³⁸ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 5.17 (1903).Google Scholar

³⁹ In “How the Critical Commonsensist Sees Things,” Histoire, Epistemologie, Langage, vol. 16, no. 1 (1994), pp. 9–34Google Scholar, I try to relate Peirce's approach to this question to J. J. Gibson's and R. L. Gregory's.

⁴⁰ W. V. Quine—in whose work a plausible naturalism sits side by side with an implausible scienticism—makes the first of these diversionary maneuvers; Alvin Goldman makes the second. See my Evidence and Inquiry, pp. 130–35Google Scholar, on the former problem-shift, and pp. 152–57, on the latter.

⁴¹ This peculiar affinity is strikingly manifested in the announcement of a conference organized by the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick in May 1995:

VIRTUAL FUTURES 1995 is an interdisciplinary event that examines the role of cybernetic and specifically dissipative or non-linear models in the arts, sciences, and philosophy. The conference explores the relationship between postmodern philosophy and chaos theory, with topics ranging from: information technology, hypertext and multimedia applications, virtual reality and cyberspace, C₃, complexity theory, cyberfeminism, artificial life and intelligence, neural nets and nanotechnology. Literary themes such as apocalypse, narcotics, cyberpunk science fiction, and annihilation are all welcome. Philosophically, the conference emphasizes materialist schools of Continental philosophy and neurophilosophy….

(My thanks to Jenny Teichman for sending me this announcement.)

Stove, David: “[W]ill someone please tell me that the Logical Positivists were on the wrong track … and that the human race is not mad?” (“What Is Wrong with Our Thoughts?” in The Plato Cult [Oxford: Blackwell, 1991], pp. 179–205Google Scholar, quotation from p. 204).

⁴² Churchland, Paul M., “The Ontological Status of Observables” [1982], in his A Neuro-computational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge, MA, and London: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1989), pp. 150–51Google Scholar; Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 165Google Scholar, and Rorty, , “Science as Solidarity,” in Nelson, John S., Megill, Allan, and McCloskey, Donald, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 46Google Scholar; Church-land, Patricia Smith, “Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 10 (1987), p. 549Google Scholar; Harding, Sandra, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. xiGoogle Scholar; Stich, Stephen P., The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, MA, and London: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1992), pp. 118ff.Google Scholar; Steve (“yours in discourse”) Fuller, , E-mail message, 05 4, 1994.Google Scholar

⁴³ Peirce, , Collected Papers, 1.57–59 (c. 1896).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Rorty, Richard, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Common Knowledge, vol. 1, no. 3 (1992), p. 141Google Scholar, and Rorty, , “Science as Solidarity,” p. 45.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA, and London: Sage Library of Social Research, 1979), p. 82.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Fuller, , E-mail message, 05 4, 1994.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ This is a term I first introduced in “Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist,” Partisan Review, Fall 1993, pp. 556–64Google Scholar; reprinted in Our Country, Our Culture, ed. Kurzweil, Edith and Phillips, William (Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1995), pp. 56–65.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Cole, Stephen, Making Science: Between Nature and Society (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 12, 21.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Bleier, Ruth, “Science and the Construction of Meanings in the Neurosciences,” in Rosser, Sue V., ed., Feminism within the Science and Health Care Professions: Overcoming Resistance (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), pp. 92, 101.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ The relevance of feminism to social philosophy is clear enough; but more recent feminism is marked by an insistence on extending its relevance to all areas of philosophy, including the most central. This is manifestly the agenda in, for example, Harding, Sandra and Hintikka, Merrill, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1983)Google Scholar. See also my review of this book in Philosophy, vol. 60, no. 232 (1985), pp. 265–70.Google Scholar

⁵¹ This tendency to mutual admiration in recent academic feminist writing is shrewdly observed by Levin, Margarita in “Caring New World: Feminism and Science,” American Scholar, vol. 57 (Winter 1988), pp. 100–106.Google Scholar

⁵² Harding, Sandra, “Who Knows? Identities and Feminist Epistemology,” in Hartman, Joan E. and Messer-Davidow, Ellen, eds., (En)gendering Knowledge (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 109.Google Scholar

⁵³ Bacon, Francis, The New Organon (1620), Book I, aphorism LXXXVIII.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Lewis, C. I., The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 34.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Rorty, Richard, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar