Fishing for philosophy

Okay, so my last response on Jesus as a philosopher didn’t satisfy Chris Schoen, but then nobody, least of all me or him, thought that I was going to be able to. But I find some interesting misunderstandings. Since the onus for communication lies with the communicator, this is clearly my fault, but it seems to me that he and several others, both here and there, have a tendency to read into my statements more than there is intended, if not more than they hold. This will get boring to many, so I understand if you’d rather go read xkcd instead.

Chris says that I want philosophy to be fully worked out arguments with complete premises, justifications for premises and so on. I don’t. I realise there are enthymemes in philosophy (the mere fact that we even have a term for incomplete arguments suggests this should not be problematic). I even teach my students this.

I realise that, as a commentator there says, that philosophy occurs in a context, and that arguments can start and end in partial ways (how else can they start and end? We do not have all time to construct arguments and we must always presume something). I also realise that philosophers, qua philosophers, use metaphors, sayings (think of the Investigations, which I have spent many hours pondering and discussing) and stories. We need no prophet to tell us this. But for something done by a philosopher to count as the activity of philosophy, it has to issue forth in an argument, either in the reader’s head or between individuals. One of the things that is most intriguing and for teachers infuriating about the Investigations is that Wittgenstein’s aphorisms are conclusions to arguments that the reader is invited to construct, and then defend or critique. But arguments are there, and W intended there to be arguments. The claims in the Investigations are not to be taken seriously just because W said or wrote them. One of the problems with the Wittgensteinian movement in philosophy in the mid century was that more than a few philosophers seemed to be arguing exactly that way, and as a result Wittgenstein was treated as a religion by critics.*

Chris thinks my net is too wide and catches dolphins as well as tuna. I do not. He, not I, is the one who is overextending the criteria I espoused. I merely said, and I quote from the first post:

So, what is needed to make someone a philosopher? I think that there are two preconditions: one, that the topics are themselves philosophical, and two, that the way the person has arrived at conclusions regarding these topics is through reasoning, and not merely intuition or inheritance.

Did I say anything that licenses this characterisation? –

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, the barricade John wants to erect around Philosophy with a capital-P cordons off an ideal version of the practice no one will ever attain. We can define some of the premises surrounding a problem or concern, but never all of them. In fact we would be hard pressed to identify most of them.This is not to malign precision or thoroughness. It is just to say that these exist along a continuum, and the place where John wants to draw the line between philosophy and not-philosophy is quite literally off the map.

I think I did not. I know what Chris is responding to: the omnipresent evil demons of philosophy who are usually called logical positivists, or worse, analytic philosophers, but that is not, I think, me. In fact, it is a strawman target of many in the philosophical community. But I have almost never met a philosopher who held those views (almost!), and the kernel of truth here is merely that there is a tendency to overformalise arguments. Much worse could be said of mathematics, for example.

So why would Chris think that my view of philosophy is “quite literally off the map”? It has to be that he has this strawman in mind, and sure, that is off the map, largely because nobody does that sort of philosophy outside a very limited subdiscipline of a particular kind of axiomatising formalism. I certainly have never argued for it. I don’t even like using symbols like X and Y or P and Q in my arguments, let alone S1 through S5 modalisations or LZF set theory, etc. Thinking that I require this of Jesus or anyone else is a pure invention of Chris’s. I would ask him to attack what I did say, and not what he wants me to have said.

And what is that? That for something to be philosophy it has to have “arrived at conclusions through reasoning”. These reasonings must be something others can follow.

Now there’s a basic formal fallacy called “affirming the consequent”. It works like this. Suppose I say that if someone is a philosopher they must use reasoning. Somebody else says, “Ah, but Jesus used reasoning, so he must be a philosopher”. This doesn’t follow. Plumbers also use reasoning (quite sophisticated too, when they are problem solving; the guy who figured out that my hot water service was not working because of a small plastic washer designed to regulate flow rates in my shower was doing science, in my view), and they are not, because of that, doing philosophy. To say that using reasoning means Jesus is a philosopher is to affirm the consequent (in effect, to reason backwards). Reasoning is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for philosophy.

I also said that the topics had to be philosophical, and that others must be able to follow the reasoning. Some criticisms have relied on the fact that I make philosophy about philosophical topics. Why this is a problem I fail to see. Philosophy is indeed a cultural tradition, a historically contingent process. We allow that philosophy is done by Indus Valley thinkers and Confucius and so on, but I would say this is because of an honorary diploma we award these thinkers for being similar enough to the western tradition (although I also think that the Indus Valley thinkers, along with the Persians and very probably Egyptian thinking, contributed by direct transmission and indirect diffusion to the western tradition, especially pre-Socratics).

So, do I need to throw out these babies with the bathwater? Is Nietzsche a philosopher? Is Heraclitus? This is a question not of essential properties, of propria, but of history. Consider the following – the evolution of anthropology. Initially this is a theological and philosophical subject, but it eventually becomes a scientific discipline (of sorts; I think there are some serious methodological problems with anthropology, especially cultural anthro, which is a topic for another day). Is, for example, Kant a philosopher or anthropologist when he writes his lectures on anthropology? From one perspective he’s clearly in the philosophical tradition, and the game he is playing is a philosophical one. From hindsight, he’s clearly contributing to the nascent discipline of anthropology, just as he also did to biology and astronomy.

One may remain in the philosophical community and do non-philosophical things. One may do both simultaneously. This is why we treat Nietzsche as a philosopher, and not a literary figure, a linguist, or a social commentator. Kierkegaard is even more difficult in that respect. Partly why they remain in the philosophical tradition is how they are used later, but also the fact that they are trying to play the game as philosophy was played in that time and place and culture is what makes them philosophers. Not quite “philosophy is what philosophers do”, but nevertheless one must attend to historical context.

Jesus is neither in the tradition, nor the community, nor does he do what philosophers then or now do (but then, see Plotinus a few centuries later; by then the degradation of traditional philosophy into mystery religions is almost complete, despite the good work of Porphyry his student and disciple). At the time and place Jesus did his work, it was possible to be in the philosophical tradition. He was not. Likewise what he did doesn’t figure as philosophy now (outside France, at any rate), so he fails the test in several ways.

Chris points out that many philosophers have been inspired by Jesus and have thought of him as a philosopher. This is true, and entirely irrelevant, for a few reasons. First, philosophers have been inspired by scientists and science (especially Newton), by pop stars (Lennon), by science fiction (guilty as charged) and even by political leaders like Churchill or Lenin. That Jesus is a source of inspiration, and that his teachings set up problems that require philosophical treatments, is besides the point. So does Joss Whedon.†

It is also irrelevant because Jesus’ doesn’t provide arguments. Now Chris objects to my thinking that all reasonable people must be able to be swayed by the arguments for something to be philosophy, but I fail to see why. Reasonable people can act as “fictional agnostics” (a term I use to explain to students why we use arguments even if people are already decided), and take a “by your own lights” approach. I can argue that creationism is incoherent even though I do not believe the Bible to be a divine text. But if you accept the premises of an argument, even provisionally, and the argument is good, then you are forced to accept the conclusion (provisionally). Incidentally, the tu quoque Jesus uses in Luke 20:1-8 is a kind of argument, although I would say it is more like legal reasoning than the philosophical. Jesus was a lawyer, perhaps… in any case, I fail to see how anything can be called philosophy unless it uses arguments that appeal to reason. Chris is welcome to try to show me wrong on that.

And I never, not anywhere or anyplace, suggested or even hinted, that one could not be a religious figure and a philosopher at the same time. Where Chris got that from I cannot say. Moreover, I do not think I overstated anything in the first post – I think you over-interpreted.

I am a bit annoyed by his commentator also called Chris, who objects to my comment that “I think that what you get from mystical and poetic statements is not knowledge, but attitudes.” I am referred to Cassirer, Wollheim and Goodman, all of whom I have read in some detail over the years (and Cassirer even gets cited in my species book, which is something of a stretch). Does he think I am simply uninformed? Am I to bow before the authority of these people? No, I must be berated for failing to deal with their arguments, if anything, and I do not recall their arguments against my view in, say, Art and its objects. Of course, it is a very long time since I read them, so perhaps I have forgotten. I look forward to seeing the detailed refutation. And yes, I am a moral vacuum, but do we need to bring that up here?

So I really do not see that my arguments have even been closely addressed, let alone rebutted. I stick by my claim: Jesus, whatever else he may be, is no philosopher. How others read him, or construct philosophical systems out of his utterances, is irrelevant to his status as a philosopher. I think that the demons being wrestled with, the dolphins in the net, are of Chris’ and Chris’ own capture, not mine.

* I found Wittgenstein independently of my teachers, apart from the study of the Tractatus (thanks, Tim), and so I never saw him like that. I was quite shocked when I first met the anti-Wittgensteinians amongst analytic philosophy who made these charges.

† In fact the philosophical implications, both moral and aesthetic as well as epistemological and metaphysical of Buffy are in may ways more interesting than anything theism has raised for me. Possibly because I am at heart a Zoroastrian dualist.