Philosophical Confession

A truly bizarre conclusion to an otherwise excellent review:

I will end this review with a confession. As I read these books, I often found myself persuaded on one or another point, and I could not help admiring the clarity and power of the presentation. Yet I also experienced a growing feeling of irritation and frustration, slipping at times into anger. Perhaps this review displays too much residual irritation, frustration, and even anger. I hope that it also conveys some of the ground for these feelings.

Actually, we wouldn't have guessed you were angry; we simply thought you cared about the truth.

Please, wait a day or two, edit if need be to remove lapses in courtesy, and then publish the critical review without sharing your feelings. If your anger is unjustified, confessing it cannot be a remedy, and if it is justified, then, that you confess it adds a fault where there was none.

Eleatic Question: 3

What's the difference between (i) someone who says that thinking is exalted and divine, and who holds furthermore that we can think only the thought that 'it is', and (ii) someone who holds that thinking is an irrelevancy?

Suppose a Cartesian is having a conversation with a Hobbesian. A Hobbesian believes that human cognition simply is the power of imagination, shared with animals; a Cartesian holds that human cognition involves additionally the power of 'understanding'. By imagination, the Cartesian claims, we picture a chiliagon; by understanding we know the distinction between a chiliagon and a polygon with one more side.

Hobbesian: "I've converted to your view. I accept at last that we humans have a power of understanding or thought. In fact, the truth of this was recently revealed to me, even, by a goddess. This power of thought is something very high, and very divine."

Cartesian: "So you admit now that an entire world of mathematical ideals, abstract principles, and speculative philosophy is opened up to us through the use of this power? You agree that we can soar above this passing world with our minds?"

Hobbesian: "Oh, no, no. Upon careful consideration, I am convinced that this power of thought is capable of forming only one judgment, and nothing other than this judgment: namely, the mystical realization (or 'empty tautology', if you prefer) that 'it is' or 'what is, is'. Everything else we might wish to say or believe is a matter of the imagination."

Would the Hobbesian's conversion impress you?

Eleatic Question: 2

How should one reply to the following?

It is clear that it is possible to think of plurality and imperfection. Consider a right triangle with unit sides. It has three sides (plurality); and its hypotenuse is essentially not commensurable with the sides (negation, imperfection).

But if plurality and imperfection do not exist, and we can think only of what exists ('it is'), then we do not in fact think of right triangles--we have only 'beliefs' about them.

That is, must Parmenides, on the standard reading, hold that mathematics too is an illusion, part of the deceitful web of mortal beliefs? But strange that thinking of mathematics should not be paradigmatic of thought. (One begins to wonder what thinking, then, is.)

Eleatic Question: 1

I can post on Parmenides only if my questions are accepted in the spirit (again), what a non-expert might wonder about. One must allow thinking that wants to be intelligent but is not yet scholarly research.

Here is a question that, although small, nonetheless niggles away at me: What did Parmenides mean by a 'road' (path, way)? As you know, he distinguishes three roads ('it is'; 'it is not'; 'it is and is not'). But what sort of thing is a 'road'? Why did he select that word to mark out the alternatives?

You'll say that it is a road of inquiry, as Parmenides himself says. Fine, but what does that mean? A type of inquiry, and so there are three types of inquiry? Yet it seems clear that Parmenides acknowledges at most two types of inquiry ('it is not' being a complete non-starter). Moreover, a road suggests progress from a starting point to an endpoint, from premises to conclusion: but Parmenides allows only one of these. Also, are the tags--'it is', 'it is not', 'it is and it is not'--names of 'roads', or are they the starting points (premises) or end-points (conclusions)?

If this is a stupid question, why does it seem so difficult to give an answer, or to keep to an answer? Here's an example. Gwil Owen is an accurate thinker, for sure, and yet in "Eleatic Questions" he is constantly shifting about in what sort of thing he takes a 'road' to be. A 'road' is variously:

(1) a group of opinions, such as mortal opinions (49); or

(2) an'account of mortal ideas' (49); or

(3) a theory (such as Heraclitus') or a 'cosmology' (49n2); or

(4) a possible answer to the question 'Does it exist or not?' (56); or

(5) it's making a claim (viz. 'that there is nothing whatever in existence') (56); or

(6) it's a 'daily use of language' (60); or

(7) something that can be 'refuted from its premise' (60n47); or

(8) an argument or 'programme of an argument' (76).


Well, what is it?

Schweine / hund

Since I don't have much to post while I'm pondering Parmenides (how could I?), by popular demand, here are pictures of




MUDDY MAN





and


LULU.

Taking Scepticism--and Knowledge--Seriously

These concluding paragraphs from a review by Lloyd Gerson of a recent exploration of relativism in ancient Greek philosophy (by Mi-Kyoung Lee) seem to me quite important. And they show something of the 'cash value' of Gerson's approach (discussed in some earlier posts on this blog):

The principal strength of this fine book is the meticulous
reconstruction of the epistemological views of Protagoras and
Democritus. The principal weakness of the book is owing to the fact
that Lee is also or especially concerned to explore the engagement with
Protagoras and Democritus by Plato and Aristotle. Not unreasonably, she
does this based on the hypothesis that an undercurrent of skepticism
was to be found among the ideas of the two Presocratic giants. The
problem with this is that both Plato and Aristotle criticize their
predecessors based on their own firm views about what knowledge is and
their convictions that the Protagorean and Democritean approaches
cannot attain it. Plato holds that knowledge is exclusively of
separate, intelligible reality; Aristotle holds that knowledge is
exclusively of what "cannot be otherwise." How these two views are
related is another story. But the criticism of Protagoras and
Democritus -- which is what this book is to a significant extent about
-- comes from these perspectives.

Lee does not say much about the views of knowledge that generate the
criticism. Admittedly, a thorough exposition of these is the subject of
one (or more) additional books. Yet without a more explicit discussion
of these views, the criticism of the skeptical tendencies in Protagoras
and Democritus is rather captious. One way to defeat a skeptic or to
disarm her is to agree that there is such a thing as knowledge and to
insist that the word "knowledge" is merely to be applied stipulatively
according to whatever socially rooted criteria happen to be convenient.
To be a skeptic about knowledge thus construed would indeed be foolish.
This way of dissolving the skeptical challenge has always been
attractive to some philosophers. But it is not the way followed by
Plato or Aristotle. Lee's book would have been even better if she had
taken seriously Sextus' remark to the effect that if skepticism can be
made to prevail, then Greek pretensions to wisdom will be unmasked for
what they are. Plato and Aristotle took skepticism as seriously as did
Sextus and for exactly the same reasons.

Syllabus of Errors of Parmenides

I've been troubled by Parmenides recently. I thought I understood him but now doubt that I do.

On a lark, I googled 'Parmenides' and found lecture notes which, after giving a reconstruction, conclude:

7. A summary of Parmenides’ errors:

a. He thought that what does not exist could not exist (possibly confusing this idea with the truism that, necessarily, if something does not exist then it does not exist).
b. He thought that denials of existence are impossible (i.e., they cannot be both meaningful and true)
c. He thought that all denials, all “is not”s, are denials of existence.

One might have thought, rather:

7. A summary of Parmenides' errors:
a. He thought that only one thing exists.
b. He denied change.
c. He denied imperfection.

(Frankly, I was a bit surprised to find philosophy lecture notes which simply say, outright, that controverted philosophical views are 'errors'. No, these notes are not from a class given by an emeritus writer of scholastic manuals.)

Obscurum Per Obscurius?

As might have been predicted from the title ("The Togetherness of Thought and Being: A Phenomenological Reading of Plotinus' Doctrine 'That the Intelligibles Are Not Outside the Intellect'"), Eric Perl's BACAP lecture last Thursday was an attempt to show the fundamental similarity of outlook between Plotinus and Husserl. In fact Perl is something of a pioneer of this approach to Plotinus.

I found myself agreeing with the drift of Robert Berchman's commentary--that Plotinus' motivations were so different as to make the doctrine different, no matter how similar in some places the words might seem; that Husserl's phenomenology is, of its nature, a reply to a kind of scepticism that could not even arisen before Descartes.

I also wondered additionally about the purpose of such a project. In his conclusion, Perl urged that a phenomenological reading of Plotinus might help us respond to an 'alienation of external reality' which afflicts modern culture:

But the importance of reading Plotinus in this way goes beyond its value in helping us to understand his philosophy. For the subject-object dualism which both he and Husserl are opposing is not merely an isolated problem in epistemology, but an aspect of the ultimately nihilistic alienation between consciousness and reality that afflicts so much of our contemporary culture and life. Nihilism consists most fundamentally in a denial of the intelligibility of being, of its intrinsic givenness to thought. Being, thus stripped of its intelligibility, is objectified as something “outer,” over against and alien to consciousness, and is thus denied any sense, any meaning, any eidos such that being itself could be grasped by consciousness. All form, all sense, all intelligibility is considered to be subjectively constructed and imposed on being from without. Conversely, consciousness, thus denied any grasp of reality itself, is subjectified as an “inner” sphere, so that all meaning, value, and sense have no place in “external” reality. As a result, being is reduced to raw material for human projects. This externalization and alienation of being from awareness, the reduction of beings to objects, is the foundation for the human dominance and devastation of the world in the last several centuries. As Descartes saw, by objectifying reality we become “masters and possessors of nature,” but we thereby reduce nature, or indeed all reality, to a slave, something stripped of its proper personhood, dignity, and intrinsic value. Our present-day problems of, for instance, technology, biotechnology, and environmental destruction, are at bottom not merely social or ethical but ontological in nature, and must be addressed at the level of being and our comportment with it, and therefore at once ontologically and phenomenologically.

Perl wanted to claim that, in the face of these problems:

Plotinus’ doctrine of the togetherness of thought and being ... is not merely a historical curiosity, but an insight which our current nihilistic predicament makes it vital for us to recover. The affinity of phenomenology with Plotinus opens a way, within contemporary philosophy, for such a retrieval.

I'm all in favor of scholars believing that their work has benefits to society that go beyond, even, the great benefit of simply discovering the truth. And I'm willing to accept, also, that there is a large measure of truth in Perl's diagnosis of contemporary ills.

But I don't see how, even on these terms, Plotinus can be of any importance. Wouldn't it be the phenomenology of Husserl, not that of Plotinus, which would offer a timely response to the alienation and nihilism of today? It's not as though there are all kinds of followers of Plotinus, sitting idly about, ripe and ready to be enlisted in a phenomenological crusade against nihilism.

Moreover, to me it seems that a phenomenological reading of Plotinus carries with it a double dose of perplexity: it contains not merely all of the obscurities that affect phenomenology, but also all of the obscurities that are found in Plotinus--and aren't the difficulties in interpreting Husserl more than enough?

It seemed that nearly every passage of Plotinus quoted by Perl as relevant to his project contained an apparent contradiction:

... that which thinks (to nooun) must be one and two. For if it is not one, that which thinks and that which is thought will be different...but if it is, on the other hand, one and not two, it will have nothing to think: so that it will not even be that which thinks. It must, then, be simple and not simple (V.6.1.12-14)

Its nature therefore is to become other in every way...It is not then possible for the beings to be unless intellect is actively at work, forever working one thing after another and, we may say, wandering down every way and wandering in itself...But it is everywhere itself; so its wandering is an abiding one (VI.7.13.26-34)

But if it should stand still, it does not think; so that if it came to standstill, it has not thought; but if this is so, it is not. It is, then, thought, that is, all movement filling all reality...But intellect keeps always the same journeying through the things which are not the same...But it is also itself the other things, so that it is all itself (VI.7.13.39-52).

Husserl believed, as Perl noted, that the view of the relationship of object to consciousness, accepted in the British empiricist tradition following Descartes, "not only leads to scepticism but is intrinsically incoherent". Yet, given these apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in Plotinus (and not a few others), how could we be confident that Plotinus's view avoids being, in its own way, intrinsically incoherent?

BACAP Lecture Tonight

I'm off later tonight to Eric Perl's lecture, in the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, at Boston College, at 7:30.

I'm not sure what I'll be able to make of this paper on Plontinus. Maybe I'll have something to post. But anyway see the previus post on this subject for location, if you are in the area and can attend.

I missed a lecture yesterday by Geoffrey Lloyd at Brown, on ancient ways of living in China and Greece. (Yes, I should have posted a notice for that.) Oh well, one cannot do everything.

The Road to Reality: Out of the Cave?

It looked like a deal that I couldn't pass up when I found it in a quaint Viennese bookshop: Roger Penrose's 1099 page The Road to Reality: The Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, an encyclopedic account of state-of-the-art physical science, for the bargain price of 30 Euros. (One might have called it, following Gamov: 1, 2, 3, ....1099.)

I greedily snatched it up as, I thought, the analogue today of Aristotle's Complete Works (or at least of the physical treatises thereof). With Aristotle on one end of the shelf, and Penrose's tome on the other, I'd be set; I'd own both the earliest and most recent authoritative surveys of physical science.

(I was doubly wrong about the book, hwoever. It wasn't a bargain: unbelievably, one can buy it new on Amazon for just over $17. And it proves to be rather eccentric in many places, and not comprehensive.)

Naturally at some point I scanned the book for its treatment of philosophers, especially of the ancient variety. Frege, Russell, Leibniz are mentioned in passing. Aristotle is dealt with briefly (but surely wrongly) in an elegant discussion of "Aristotelian" space-time--that is, absolute Euclidean space-time. Pythagoras is praised over a couple of pages as probably having originated the notion of a demonstration, and, of course, for his sense that reality is deeply mathematical.

But to Plato, shockingly, the first 383 pages of the book are dedicated. At least, that's how Penrose describes his preliminary discussion of the mathematical notions required for modern physics: it is, he says, an examination of 'Plato's world':

Let us now take a glimpse into Plato's world--at least into a relatively small but important part of that world, of particular relevance to the nature of physical reality (23).

This is 'Plato's world' because:

Plato made it clear that mathematical propositions--the things that could be regarded as unassailably true--referred not to actual physical objects (like the approximate squares, triangles, circles, spheres, and cubes that might be constructed from marks in the sand, or from wood or stone) but to certain idealized entities. He envisaged that these ideal entities inhabited a different world, distinct from the physical world (11).

Penrose gives Fermat's last theory as an example of the reality and objectivity of this 'world', and then also the Mandelbrot set:

The point that I wish to make is that no one, not even Benoit Mandelbrot himself when he first caught sight of the incredible complications in the fine details of the set, had any preconception of the set's extraordinary richness. The Mandelbrot set was certainly no invention of any human mind. The set is just objectively there in the mathematics itself. If it has meaning to assign an actual existence to the Mandelbrot set, then that existence is not within our minds, for no one can fully comprehend the set's endless variety of unlimited complication. Nor can its existence lie within the multitude of computer printouts that begin to capture some of its incredible sophistication and detail, for at best those printouts capture but a shadow of an approximation to the set itself. Yet it has a robustness that is beyond any doubt; for the same structure is revealed--in all its perceivable details, to greater and greater fineness the more closely it is examined--independently of the mathematician or computer that examines it. Its existence can only be within the Platonic world of mathematical forms.

This is an idea that does not easily go away. Penrose is no dummy; and I've heard many mathematicians (well familiar with set theory, logicism and intuitionism) say the same thing.

Another Question about the Pre-Socratics

Maybe this is a dumb question. Hasn't Barnes answered it?

When I lecture on ancient philosophy, or philosophy at all, like other professors I like to put arguments up on the board, in 'list' version (numbering the steps), for ease of analysis.

In lecturing on the presocratics, however, if I try to be faithful to the extant fragments and reliable testimonia, then--to be honest--I can do that sort of thing, I think, only with Parmenides and Zeno, but not, it seems, with anyone else. What argument does Empedocles give anywhere? Or the atomists? Or even Anaxagoras? One finds no defense of premises (either by conceptual analysis or from observation), and no deductions of conclusions from premises. One can only say such things as "Empedocles insisted (apparently without a very good response to Parmenides) that there were four elements (without giving any reasons for this) and asserted (again, without giving reasons) that the universe went in cycles" etc. etc.

Admittedly, Aristotle gives lots of reconstructions--of why Thales might have thought that water was the first cause; or why proponents of the apeiron might have thought that body was everywhere and apeiron; and so on. But these are Aristotle's reconstructions.

And so, it seems, one is left with the following alternatives:

1. The presocratics indeed had arguments, which they did not care to give to us, or which our extant sources do not represent, and we therefore may rightly attempt to reconstruct what those arguments were. (This makes sense. After all, if we really did have a chance to pose questions to, say, Thales, do you think he would have nothing to say in defense of his view?)

2. The presocratics had no arguments. What they were up to, rather, was simply sketching a way in which the world could be. They didn't think they had to establish, by evidence, that that is how it must be or was likely to be --perhaps because they thought it enough to establish something, rather, about themselves (namely, that the person putting forward a view was indeed a 'wise man'). (By the way, on this second alternative we needn't say the presocratics weren't philosophers. We might say, instead, that philosophy can take the form of sketching a novel picture of how everything might be.)

Perhaps this is overly pessimistic. But that's the philosophical mood I'm in currently.

What's wrong with looking at things in this way?

Theion Ti

Okay, I resisted bragging for a long time.

But I can't hold out any longer.
(This is a blog, after all.)



Elizabeth Bayley Pakaluk
13 September 2005
7 lbs. 10 oz.

Nature = The Non-Supernatural

An astute review in BMCR of Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (see it here) contains , however, the following curious passage, noteworthy relative to some previous discussions on this blog:

GN's survey of these different pre-Socratic thinkers is undertaken in part to illustrate several general theses. First, GN believes that Anaximander's i(stori/a peri\ fu/sewj initiates a tradition of inquiry which is, on the one hand, a continuation of mythopoetic authors, in that pre-Socratic accounts of nature include a three part schema discernible in works like Hesiod's Theogony, namely a cosmogony (or account of the origins of the universe), an anthropogony (an account of the origins of humanity), and a politogony (an account of the origins of society); but on the other hand, pre-Socratic accounts of nature depart from such mythopoetic accounts in that they locate such explanations within human time and make use of naturalistic causal explanations, whereas earlier accounts had located their explanations in illo tempore and made use of supernatural elements as causes.

Okay, so what was distinctive about presocratic accounts of nature, in contrast with mythopoeic accounts, was that they involved naturalistic explanations, and didn't appeal to anything non- or super-natural. That helps.

Sages, Sophists, and Philosophers

My thanks are due to a friend and reader of Dissoi Blogoi, who just wrote to draw my attention to what I agree is an excellent essay by Andrea Nightingale, "Sages, Sophists, and Philosophers: Greek Wisdom Literature" (in Oliver Taplin, ed. Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective, OUP, 2000).

Nightingale argues that the presocratics are best understood as 'sages' who competed with one another, as well as with Homer and Hesiod, to be accounted 'wise men'. Their writings are records of 'performances' by which these thinkers, in a time before university degrees and other credentials, hoped to "put themselves on the map as intellectual authorities or 'masters of truth'."

Nightingale's remarks nicely complement my post, 'The Analysis of Presocratic Thought', and subsequent readers' comments:

In fact, scholars often ascribe to the early Ionian thinkers the heroic feat of liberating philosophic discourse from the shadowy realms of 'mythos' (since their 'naturalistic' accounts of the cosmos rejected the poetic accounts that attributed causality to the weddings and wars of the gods). But the many scholarly attempts to trace the movement from poetry to philosophy--'from mythos to logos'--have foundered on the problem of defining the intrinsic qualities of 'myth' and of 'rational argumentation', and of identifying texts that are either purely mythic or purely analytic. Since the Greek poets were quite capable of constructing arguments, and the 'philosophers' were unable to avoid metaphor and myth, it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between mythos and logos. To be sure, we see in the Ionians a new way of thinking about the world; but we cannot say that their accounts are devoid of any mythical notions. What we can say is that these thinkers adopted a critical attitude towards received wisdom and were prized for their original speculations.

Nightingale additionally makes the extremely valuable point that the thinkers who are attacked by presocratics are presumably, therefore, up to the same thing; in their attacks, then, the presocratics reveal their understanding of themselves:

It is worth noting that Xenophanes attacks Homer explicitly, and Herakleitos inveighs not only against the poets Homer, Hesiod, and Archilochos, but also against Hekataios (a proto-historian ...), Xenophanes, and Pythagoras. Such attacks remind us that these thinkers conceived of themselves as rivalling 'wise men' in general rather than the specialized group of intellectuals who were later called philosophers. The fact that Herakleitos' opponents include poets and prose writers, as well as a religious/political guru such as Pythagoras, gives us a good idea of the breadth of 'wisdom' that he himself recognized as authoritative.

The View from Nowhere?

I think Thomas Nagel is correct when he claims in "Subjective and Objective" (and also in his book, The View from Nowhere) that progress in science often takes the form of moving from a subjective or perspectival view of the world, to an ostensibly objective framework, in which the perspectival view is one among many other such views, and which accounts for why that perspectival view appears as it does.

We see the sun rising now. Problem is, people to the East saw the sun rising earlier. Did it, then, both rise and not rise? The difficulty is solved if we say that in fact the earth is turning, hence people in different longitudes see the sun cross the horizon at different times. That the sun 'rises' is perspectival; that the earth turns is (ostensibly) objective.

Similarly apparent versus absolute magnitude: I see the penny as an ellipse stretched out from North to South. You, at a right angle to me, see it as an ellipse stretched out from East to West. By supposing that, objectively, it is circular, and by supposing, too, the principles of optics, we can explain why it looks the way it does to each of us.

Heracleitus is clearly concerned these sorts of issues, with whether there are any claims that are non-perspectival: he suggests that predications (many? most? all?) which appear to be absolute are in fact perspectival because relative to some implicit class of comparison. Sea water is foul and fresh water healthy-- to us, of course; but to fish it's the other way round. Helen is beautiful--that is, only so long as we do not compare her with a goddess. (And yet, one might wonder, what about the claim, "A goddess is beautiful"? Is that similarly perspectival? What could show that claim to be true only relative to some class?)

Suppose we take Xenophanes to have a similar concern. There is a fragment which suggest that he does:

If god had not made yellow honey, men would consider figs far sweeter.

ei) mh\ xlwro\n e)/fuse qeo\j me/li, pollon\n e)/faskon
glu/ssona su=ka pe/lesqai

If he does have this concern, then we might plausibly take him to hold, furthermore, that remarks about gods cannot in this way be perspectival. In the theological fragments, then, he would be arguing, in effect, that the gods do not have bodies, on the grounds that any attribution of bodily form to the gods is evidently perspectival. His theological views would then become important because, like Milesian cosmology, they would be an example of someone's insisting upon the shift, so important for scientific progress, from a subjective to an objective point of view.

Now I am not proposing this, so far, as an interpretation. My point here is merely to sketch an interpretation which seems interesting and which has some plausibility, but which we wouldn't even happen upon--we wouldn't think we needed to formulate it-- once we had applied the crude 'reason/authority' distinction in interpreting Xenophanes.

Upcoming BACAP Lecture, September 22, at Boston College

B. A. C. A. P.

The Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy
presents

The Togetherness of Thought and Being:
A Phenomenological Reading of Plotinus’ Doctrine
“That the Intelligibles Are not Outside the Intellect”

By Prof. Eric Perl
(Loyola Marymount University)

Commentator:
Prof. Robert Berchman
(Dowling College, Bard College)

Thompson Room, The Burns Library, Boston College
Thursday, 22 September 2005 at 7:30 p.m.


Prof. Perl’s public lecture will be preceded by a seminar on Ennead V.5 and V.9
Conference Room (St. Mary’s Hall), 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Both the lecture and the seminar are open to the public
For more information, please contact:
Prof. Gary Gurtler, S.J., gurtlerg@bc.edu

The Analysis of Presocratic Thought

Refute me if I'm wrong. You'd be doing me a favor.

I've been harping on Xenophanes, I now realize, because I want to make a larger point about how we analyse presocratic thought and therefore properly assess its contributions.

The interpretation of Xenophanes that I see in McKirahan and Hussey strikes me as 'encyclopaedist' history, in MacIntyre's sense. It takes a distinction from the Enlightenment, which opposes Reason to authority and tradition; it holds that 'Reason' is a single, uniform, framework; it supposes that 'Science' arises once the viewpoint of 'Reason' is adopted; and therefore it looks to find, in the presocratics (who are at the origin of science) the adoption of this viewpoint and framework, to the exclusion of competitors.

Besides going beyond the evidence, that sort of interpretation seems to me on broad grounds to be inappropriate. Thales perhaps takes his ideas from Near Eastern creation myths--or at least, if he did, no one would be surprised. Pythagoras is evidently not a proponent of Reason, in any usual sense. Parmenides presents his doctrine as if a revelation. So does Heracleitus (although he is doing the revealing). One sees the same thing in what comes after: Socrates accepts revelations from a spiritual being; he takes received views seriously, as received. Plato takes inspiration from myths. Aristotle's method of sifting through endoxa is all about giving authoritative views their due weight. Etc.

Yes, of course, there are various moves one can make--"It's insofar as they adopt the viewpoint of Reason that they are philosophers (or scientists)"; "The religious language is allegorical (conventional, demythologized)"; and so on--but at what point is theory driving data, then?

However, a more serious concern, for me, is that this reason vs. tradition opposition is too blunt. It may, therefore, lead us to overlook more interesting things, that perhaps better account for the importance of the presocratics ... even Xenophanes (yes, yet another post to come).

Once More with Xenophanes

There is a point to this. I don't want to be flogging a dead horse.

It's interesting that Hussey, in his admirably concise and elegant book, makes the same unjustified leap as regards Xenophanes that McKirahan does. After citing the four extant theological fragments, Hussey claims (on p. 14):

For the first time, a conscious and deliberate attempt had been made to set up a standard of what was and was not 'reasonable' or 'fitting' in theology.

This is undeniable; that such a thing has been attempted is clear. (And yet that this is the first time is not so clear. 'Second Isaiah', notably not a 'philosopher', attempts something similar, perhaps earlier than Xenophanes.)

But then Hussey says, in the next sentence:

Everything was to be judged in terms of this standard alone, and the authority of tradition, or of a general consensus, or of a great scholar, was to count for nothing.

But why should we go on to say this? What grounds do we have for saying that Xenophanes wanted to judge everything by this standard? Why should we say that authority, tradition, consensus, and scholarly judgment (even), for Xenophanes, were to count for nothing? (Quite outrageous, really. It makes Xenophanes into a lunatic.)

This looks to me like an Enlightenment polarity, imposed upon texts where it doubtfully belongs.

One might say, "Well, we interpret Xenophanes in the context of Ionian philosophy, and that is what the Ionians accepted." --And yet Hussey argues the other way round. He says that we can understand what the Milesians thought, by beginning with Xenophanes and using Xenophanes to represent or 'shed light' on them (see p. 13). It's a circle to say: 'We can be confident that Xenophanes rejected authority and tradition because he was like the Milesians in this regard; and we can infer what the Milesians are like by working back from what Xenophanes said.'

And yet that is how Hussey reasons.

What Bloggers Might Do

I didn't post yesterday, contrary to my resolve, because it never even crossed my mind.

Bloggers can be fanatics, after all. I once saw a humorous cartoon about golf. A golfer with a worried look on his face approaches a foursome and says, "Mind if I play through? My wife is in labor."

Bloggers are so fanatical, that they might do the same: "Mind if I keep this post short? My wife is in labor?" Not I, of course--wouldn't think of it.

A Distinctively Philosophical Way of Thinking

I had the following exchange with Hilary Putnam when I was a grad student.

I had just read one of Putnam's papers (I can't recall which), where he says something to the effect that no one should even attempt to do serious philosophy without first gaining a good background in advanced mathematics. I was a serious student, so I took this very seriously. I had an ordinary mathematics background, up to basic calculus, and then the usual courses in first-order and meta- logic. This was clearly not 'advanced mathematics'. I therefore combed carefully through the course catalogue and devised a four-year sequence of courses, which I could take in the remainder of my graduate education, and which would certainly count as training in 'advanced mathematics.'

I presented this plan to Putnam when I next saw him. But I was taken aback by his response. Far from being pleased and excited by it, as I expected, he was disturbed. "Oh no, Michael", he said, "this is not what you should be spending your time doing. You need to devote your years in graduate school to acquiring a distinctively philosophical way of thinking. A sequence in mathematics such as that would be a distraction."

I thought about that. How does one acquire a distinctively philosophical way of thinking? What did that mean? Would that mean, perhaps, reading Naming and Necessity over and over again? Or were Quine's paradoxes especially illuminating for philosophy--Quine who effectively denied that there was any distinct discipline of philosophy? Quine who denied that the phrase 'in that respect' made any sense? Dreben I knew had an answer: grapple with problems from Wittgenstein--or perhaps Frege. But Dreben notoriously denied that one should ever assert a doctrine. How could philosophy not arrive at resting points in thought? Most of the literature of recent philosophy I dismissed, and I was (I think) taught to dismiss--largely 'logic chopping', the prosecution of a clever point in isolation from its real philosophical or historical significance. (This is harsh and exaggerated, admittedly, but perhaps not very far from the truth.)

When I turned to the history of philosophy, I found largely figures who (as Gilson says) were amateurs--who worked piecemeal, and who had one or two clever ideas or admirable intellectual traits (such as Hume)--or thinkers who were comprehensive in a way, but who nonetheless aimed too much to warp all of reality so that it fit within the scope of a few attractive but limited ideas (such as Leibniz).

I don't think I found the answer to my question until I began the systematic study of Aristotle (and I would include now Plato). In Plato and Aristotle one finds the breadth, flexibility, variation in types of argument, and array of viewpoints, that can help one to acquire, easily and reliably, a genuinely philosophical habit of thought.

And this seems to me the most important reason for graduate students, or more advanced undergraduates, to study ancient philosophy--to learn how to think philosophically.