I just stumbled across this response by Dirk Martin Grube to the Joseph Margolis article considered in the previous post. The Grube article is called, Pragmatism: A bridge between Anglo-American and Contintental Philosophy?, and it interprets Margolis to be saying that:
"Like Rockmore does in his contribution, Margolis takes as the vantage point for his considerations the existence of three distinct sorts of philosophies, viz. Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Anglo-American pragmatism and continental philosophy. His sympathies lie with pragmatism. And the thesis that matters most for our present purposes is that pragmatism is, as he calls it in the written version, ‘…perhaps a connective tissue spanning the great divide between…analytic and continental philosophy’.The reason that it makes a chance of being such a connective tissue is that it is to a good extent capable of avoiding the weaknesses of both analytic and continental philosophy while retaining their respective strengths".
But what does that mean? Grube says Margolis means:
"...that the philosophical contest within the Anglo-American confines is, or, rather, should be decided in favor of pragmatism over analytic philosophy. That being the case, the best insights Anglo-American philosophy has to offer can be used to augment continental philosophy. And stripped of its pretentions to exceed the human in the direction of the necessary and stripped of all privileges, cognitive or otherwise, continental philosophy is not as strongly at odds with Anglo-American philosophy as is usually assumed."
Does Grube buy this account? He thinks otherwise. He wants to
"....insist that it is not analytic philosophy as such that is committed to scientism and naturalizing tendencies but, rather, that this is the case where some analytic philosophers have taken a wrong turn. But analytic philosophy can be pursued without such allegiances, say, be reconstructed in terms of more or less formal, i.e. (in the broad sense of the word) logical concerns—in line with the intentions that lay at its origin. That way of putting the matter allows you to take a more moderate stance towards analytic philosophy and to regard pragmatism as an important improvement on it rather than as its substitute."
What the revisionism suggests is that “analytic” philosophy is a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic. And they identify more closely with the sciences and mathematics than with the humanities. In other words, "analytic" philosophy no longer has a substantive research programme. “Analytic” philosophy--as a substantive research program--is dead.
Brian Leiter's popular revisionist account holds that "continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation). "
Then Leiter makes a defence of the analytic school after conceding that it is has limitiations by attacking postmodernism through the category of good philosophy and bad philosophy. He says:
"Whatever the limitations of "analytic" philosophy, it is clearly far preferable to what has befallen humanistic fields like English, which have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world’s bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history. (Surely English professor “celebrities” like Stanley Fish and Andrew Ross are fine contemporary examples of “the man of letters who really is nothing but ‘represents’ almost everything, playing and ‘substituting’ for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated....”) When compared to the sophomoric nonsense that passes for “philosophizing” in the broader academic culture--often in fields like English, Law, Political Science, and sometimes History--one can only have the highest respect for the intellectual rigor and specialization of analytic philosophers. It is also because analytic philosophy remains very much a specialty that it is possible to rank departments: the standards of success and accomplishment are relatively clear, maintained as they are by a large, dedicated scholarly community."
"...increasingly meaningless label: much of what philosophers do on the European Continent these days is "analytic" philosophy or historical scholarship. A small minority of philosophers in the U.S., it is true, still use the label 'Continental philosophy' to demarcate whatever someone suitably obscure has done in Paris recently, or to signify a commitment to a particular brand of phenomenology that is largely defunct everywhere, including in Europe."
Tricky huh?
What has happened to the awareness of "method” of doing philosophy that is underpined by certain pre-philosophical commitments regarding human nature, ontology, knowledge etc.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 17, 2004 05:34 PM | TrackBack