Philosophy Summarized
Philosophy Summarized
Philosophy is a human construction with a human history, like art and politics. It has origins, antecedents, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. It evolves. I am going to describe this history from Descartes to the present day. The brush will be broad but hard-edged. It is all about Descartes and reactions to him. He had two main problems: the problem of knowledge and the matter-mind problem. Impressed by skepticism, he sought to place knowledge on a firm foundation; it wasn’t going to be easy. Eventually he resorted to proving that God exists and then asserting that God is no deceiver. This is not what we would have expected: one would think that ordinary knowledge claims could be grounded on ordinary facts not theological speculations. He introduced theological epistemology—epistemology denaturalized. Not many people have found this persuasive. On mind and matter he offered two theories: mechanism about matter and anti-mechanism about mind. Hence radical dualism: two quite different substances standing in an uneasy relation to each other, one material the other immaterial. One might have thought that something less drastic would be forthcoming, not a cosmic schism. Not many people found Cartesian dualism attractive. Notoriously, it couldn’t explain psychophysical interaction (pineal glands are not miracle workers). Less noticed, it couldn’t explain knowledge either: for how could knowledge (a state of the immaterial substance) be causally explained by mechanism and extended bodies? Yet Descartes had put his finger on two sore points and said something—the problem of justifying knowledge and the problem of joining mind with body. The trouble is that what he said was hard to take seriously, try as one might. He revolutionized philosophy only to put it in peril of incoherence and absurdity. Cartesian philosophy was in a state of crisis from the start.
The reaction was swift though divided. On the one hand, we had empiricists like Locke and Hume who sought to secularize knowledge and sidestep skepticism (Berkeley simply eliminated matter and put God in its place). They had little positive to say about the mind-body problem, though they disdained Cartesian dualism. Still, the empiricists had a theory about how knowledge is possible, rooted in the idea that knowledge is a faint copy of sense experience. On the other hand, we had the rationalists who attacked Descartes’ dualism: Leibniz with this monadology of multiple immaterial monads (a kind of democratized idealism), Spinoza with his one big infinite substance that packs in God, mind, and matter. It cannot be said that these non-dualistic theories garnered many adherents, though they were comparably mind-boggling. What about the idea that the one big substance is actually a hive of small buzzing monads? It cannot be said that the conundrums posed by Descartes were resolved by these responses. Kant entered the fray and tried to find a middle ground: knowledge is of a phenomenal world that reflects the structure of the human mind, and the mind-matter problem gets safely tucked away in the noumenal world of which we know nothing. This was another form of idealism coupled with a dose of ontological duality—the known and unknown.
Now we skip ahead to the twentieth century and the ground begins to clear, the options narrowed down. The two problems continue to dominate; Descartes is still on everybody’s mind. Empiricism is the order of the day, diluted and qualified, but alive and kicking. Science gets in on the act. Degrees of empiricism are distinguished and marketed: full-on phenomenalism, inference to the best explanation, logical positivism, Popper’s critical philosophy, Husserl’s phenomenology, Quine’s stimulus-response behaviorism. Skepticism hovers menacingly in the background, never quite resolved. Meanwhile the mind-body problem intensifies and ramifies: we get reductionist physicalism, token identity theory, behaviorism, functionalism, panpsychism, eliminative materialism. It tends to be uniformly anti-Cartesian, though with some true believers hanging on for dear life. Matter comes to be the preferred mode of reality, though with ingredients added (property dualism, neutral monism, Wittgenstein’s anthropological naturalism). Descartes’s mechanism persists (sans ghost). These views have their adherents and apologists, though they cannot boast universal acceptance. Descartes hangs heavy over the proceedings. We live in a post-Cartesian philosophical world.
These two problems afflict other areas of philosophy not just epistemology and metaphysics. I will mention ethics, language, and mathematics. We have the problem of ethical knowledge: how do we know ethical truths—do we even know them at all? What kind of experience could they be based on? Are there really ethical propositions? Then we have the problem of how values fit into the world as a whole—the value-fact problem. There is clearly a relation, but what is that relation—identity, supervenience, expression? In the philosophy of language, we have the problem of knowledge of meaning and the problem of how meaning is related to the world. Is semantic knowledge a kind of ability or disposition or justified belief or image or brain state? And what is reference—that elusive relation between words and things? Is it a kind of isomorphism or a causal relation or an exercise of intuition or nothing at all? This is the meaning-world problem, analogous to the mind-body problem. In mathematics we likewise wonder about the nature of mathematical knowledge and how mathematics relates to the non-mathematical world. Do we perceive numbers and with what kind of causality, what grounds our certainty about mathematical truths, are numbers really there to be perceived? And does mathematics somehow arise from the empirical world, or is it an autonomous realm, or pure fiction? The same pattern is recurring in each area—the Cartesian pair. It seems to define philosophy as it we have it; it underlies the history of the subject.
Can we envisage an alternative to this pattern? Is there a way out of it? Can we question Descartes’ assumptions. Two things seem obvious: Descartes didn’t know how we know and he didn’t know how mind and matter are related. He developed theories that undertake to supply the knowledge we lack. Let’s look at the mind-body problem again. Our mind knows about itself—we call this introspective knowledge—but it doesn’t know about our brain. We know about our brain by means of our external senses; introspection is powerless in this regard. Similarly, our brain doesn’t know about our mind: that is, if our brain were equipped with a faculty for knowing itself, this would not add up to knowledge of the mind (recall the “knowledge argument”). We thus lack the kind of bridging knowledge that would potentially solve the mind-body problem; we can’t acquire the necessary knowledge from knowing our brain and knowing our mind. The mind-body relation is a mystery to us—one that requires for its solution a type of knowledge that transcends our ordinary methods of knowing (perception and introspection). It requires what might lamely be called “theoretical knowledge”. What about our knowledge of knowledge? To know about that would require two things: knowledge of knowledge as a psychological phenomenon and knowledge of the nature of the world known. Do we possess such knowledge? We do not—not deeply anyway. We have a lot of trouble even defining knowledge, let alone understanding it as an achievement of consciousness (with which it is intimately connected); this is a longstanding philosophical problem. Nor do we have very penetrating knowledge of the reality known: we don’t know the underlying nature of matter, or space and time, or natural laws, or causality, or other minds. It doesn’t seem to us to be intrinsically knowable. We are thus ignorant of both things—the things that together constitute knowledge. We don’t have a theory of knowledge—knowledge of knowledge. Accordingly, knowledge of reality is mysterious to us[1]—like the mind-body relation. Descartes could have said, “I know so little about the mind and the world, and the mind and the brain, that I don’t feel able to comprehend how knowledge is possible or how the brain and mind interact”; but he didn’t—he tried to forge theories from thin air. These theories were ingenious enough, but quite batty—just not credible. His successors saw this immediately but proceeded on the same assumptions as Descartes—a kind of unwarranted presumptuousness about human faculties of understanding. Hence the history of the subject. What if he had said, “Of course, these theories are mere speculation on my part; it may be that my cognitive faculties are inadequate to the task I set before them”. That might have changed the course of history. In particular, subsequent philosophers would have been able to avoid striding confidently down blind alleys. They could have still wandered down those alleys—they are interesting to explore—but they would not have exhibited such overconfidence (exactly what Socrates had warned them against two thousand years before). It turned out that Descartes was quite wrong about the nature of matter, as later physics revealed, and his psychology was primitive at best, and his biology was nonexistent—and his immediate successors were not much better. It is not wise to venture dogmatic theories concerning things about which you are blaringly ignorant; they are apt to be wrong. Maybe our philosophers should have followed Popper’s critical philosophy and claimed only that their theories had not yet been falsified. The epistemology of philosophy should have been more self-critically considered. Human nature got in the way of the history of human philosophy.[2]
[1] As a priori knowledge is generally taken to be, often to its discredit.
[2] Is this because philosophy was aligned with religion and religion is characteristically dogmatic? Probably. Religion gets you accustomed to wacky dogmas, so you tolerate them in philosophy. Descartes had this kind of education. What if less of a genius, say John Locke, had initiated the modern period with his more plodding but sensible reflections? As it is, a great deal of modern philosophy consists of replies to Descartes, including Locke. Descartes preferred certainty to doubt, solutions to mysteries. He was a “solutionist” not a “mysterian”. The entire tradition has a solutionist flavor, thanks to Descartes.
It seems that you are saying Descartes was the most influential and his framing of philosophy can still be felt today. Imperfect as it may be, what was it about his thought that made him so influential?
It was his incorporation of the new physics and his rejection of Aristotle, as well as the Cogito and his response to skepticism.
Is there such a thing as the the “philosophy of philosophy” in the same sense as the philosophy of science?
Because what you have just described fits in very well with a Kuhnian paradigm shift..
It’s called meta-philosophy; there’s a whole journal called that. There are philosophical paradigm shifts just as there are scientific ones. But I don’t buy into Kuhn’s entire conception of them.
Very interesting, I’ll try to look into meta
So Descartes’ formulation of the basic problem — “how could knowledge (a state of the immaterial substance) be causally explained by mechanism and extended bodies?” — still stands as identifying one of the most fundamental problems that philosophy pursues, and still stands unresolved, including for other areas like ethics, mathematics and language. (Although if he had thought (to continue your imagined alternatives), “How could the construction of knowledge be causally explained ….”, he might have got us off on a more interesting path.) I agree that the “quest for certainty” is misguided, since it takes the process of understanding as closed and having a final answer, and leads to dogmatism about what are just attempts, when it’s better to conceive the process as open-ended. It’s impossible to predict the results of the qualities thought has of creativity and imagination. (And thanks for highlighting the problem of reference, which could, I imagine, be more effectively understood as “the relation between (on the one hand) thoughts and the meanings of words and (on the other hand) things. (Why didn’t Quine follow Frege on that one?))
That is still a central problem of epistemology, though without the dualist metaphysics. The problem of reference has been central for the last hundred years or more. Of course, some things are certain, such as the Cogito.
“I am thinking; therefore I must exist!” in modern English.
I have several papers on this blog about the Cogito; it’s not as simple as it sounds. Even the reduced Cogito, “I think, therefore there are thoughts” is problematic. Compare, “I think for the sake of peace of mind, therefore there are sakes”. Or, “I think for all the good it does me, therefore there are goods”.
Following Hobbes in the replies, though a bit differently, why not “I walk therefore I am.” I’ve long thought Cartesian dualism is based on epistemology, in turn based on skepticism. If different things, the mind or the physical world are known or doubted differently, then they are different.
That is no good because I am not certain I am walking–I might only be dreaming I am walking or be a brain in a vat.
A couple of years out of graduate school (1990 or thereabouts) it started to dawn on me that philosophy had taken a wrong turn with Descartes, and I started investigating what this could mean: it became a major research project. I ended up with a paper that went through several variations and incarnations, a few of which I read at meetings during the late 1990s on into the 2000s, each iteration an improvement (I hope). I’d isolated what I believed the problem was — and I’m going from memory here, not having the thing in front of me — in the process of methodological doubt, not the cogito or anything that came after. The core argument I made was that Descartes mistakenly believed that doubting what came to be known as a priori propositions could be made intelligible. His argument seemed to embody a dilemma: whether, in doubting mathematics and geometry he also doubted propositions of basic logic such as those dating to Aristotle. If the answer was No (whether because it did not occur to him or for some other reason), then there was at least one category of propositions Descartes did not doubt, and he had no reason to proceed to the cogito. If the answer was Yes, then he’d just removed his means of moving forward to the cogito (reasoning, based on logic). In other words, either the cogito was unnecessary or it was impossible. The title I remember: “Descartes and Methodological Doubt: Was the Cogito Necessary?”
To be sure, the subsequent history of philosophy would have been entirely different had there been no cogito. What philosophy would look like today is anybody’s guess, I suppose. But we would probably have avoided the Cartesian autonomous rational intellect, an abstraction rather than a human person, and its disastrous modern stepchild, the *homo economicus* of classical liberalism and neoliberalism.
In any event, six journals rejected various versions of the paper. Only a couple sent referees comments; one referee said it was too long; another provided an outline that indicated he (she?) had read it and understood it, but could not recommend it for publication. He (she?) did not give a reason for not recommending it (e.g., that this or that part of the argument was unclear, or refuted by considerations I missed, etc.). By 2007 all my spare time was occupied with other matters such as caring for elderly parents. I’d basically given up on publishing the paper (there’s a version of it on Academia.edu). In 2012, both my parents deceased, and with one other major paper bounced by four journals during this same time span, I said the hell with academic philosophy and left the country.
Curious, though: is the above argument about Descartes and the cogito clear, possible, plausible? Or am I crazy? If you think I’m crazy, go ahead and say so; it doesn’t matter since I have no future plans to try and publish it. As I said, the hell with it.
What the Cogito adds to logic is existence: it allows us to deduce the existence of the self, whereas logic by itself never establishes the existence of objects. So, it is necessary to getting to reality outside of pure thought.
Respectfully: your response is strictly valid, but I think it misses my point. If there’s a crucial ambiguity in the line of reasoning leading up to the Cogito (should it be capitalized? ok), are we fully justified in saying we’ve arrived at that point? Moreover: what “self” has Descartes proven? His phrase, I believe, was a “thinking thing.” An abstraction, that is: the autonomous and exclusively rational entity shorn of its (appropriate pronoun) experience, memories, personal traits, cultural heritage, etc., “seen from the inside,” as it were. Is this really what we mean by a “self”?
I quite agree: I’m not saying the Cogito proves what Descartes thinks it proves; I’m saying that’s how he saw it. If you do a search on this blog, you will find several essays on the Cogito discussing what it proves and doesn’t prove.