The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  39. Rorty’s historicism clearly doesn’t take the systematic form of Hegelianism nor, it seems, Heidegger’s futural form, even if Rorty very often congratulates Heidegger for his “historicism.” For Rorty, this recourse to history is in fact the consequence of contingency. The future is contingent and we do not know it, but it alone will decide between this or that position. To return to the example already discussed, if fascism reigns tomorrow, history will have agreed with it, and no democrat will be able engage a resistance by claiming to have stronger arguments or a “better” viewpoint.

  40. With Récanati and, clearly, Apel, I make no distinction between a pragmatic and a performative contradiction—it is in both cases a contradiction between the statement and the utterance. We will come back to this later.

  41. As Apel has remarked, there are many who have no other objection to the argument that they engage in a performative contradiction than that they are tired of hearing this argument again and again! Notwithstanding that the fact that an argument is already known seems to give no indication of its falsehood, it seems that if we mean to insist on this logical pathology—certainly recognized since antiquity, as Putnam notes, who finds it in Rorty and Quine—this is because, as I will show, it runs insistently throughout contemporary philosophy. So it seems to me that it is time to ask why. How is it at this point that an error of this kind (contradiction between a statement and its utterance) could be perennial? Why, moreover, are we witnessing today its unprecedented resurgence? What stage of discursive thought are we at that self-refutation could become a quasi-systematic feature? These are my questions. So it is not a question of raising an unheard of argument, never before raised by anyone, against Rorty or Levinas, but of interrogating the exact structure of a logical pathology and of understanding (in part 2) the bearing, form, and contents of a way of thinking that would make the rejection of this performative contradiction one of philosophy’s express tasks.

  42. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24.

  43. In this context, it is clear that “the pragmatist” refers to Rorty himself. This curious particularity of his writing seems to me to be one more indication of Rorty’s uncomfortable discursive position, but since I don’t need this supplemental argument in order to portray his attitude, I mention the phrase only in passing.

  44. Rorty, CP, xxxvii.

  45. Ibid., xviii.

  46. See, for example, CP, 222: “We can only do what lawyers do—provide an argument for whatever our client has decided to do, make the chosen cause appear the better.”

  47. Following Richard Bernstein (“Faire la part”), one can indeed point out this very “preachy” and “moralistic” side of Rorty. In his texts, there is virtually always discussion of the “arrogance” of the West—or of philosophy always mixed up in the same opprobrium—of its brutality, its failure to care for the weak, of the commercialized greed of the American middle class, etc.

  48. Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 246.

  49. Which could be done as well. For example, the framing of pragmatism as “anti-” presupposes at a minimum that the objectionable positions (“essentialism,” “representationalism,” and “foundationalism”) are not Don Quixote’s windmills.

  50. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (henceforth CIS) and elsewhere. In the same vein, see the article “Nietzsche: Un philosophe pragmatique.” [This is an expanded version of “On Bloom’s Nietzsche.”]

  51. Rorty, CIS, 136.

  52. “Rorty’s charitable readings of authors like Heidegger and Derrida do carry evident drawbacks: such readings run the risk of considerably relativising their philosophical importance and of confirming the suspicions … [and] above all, … reinforcing the already widespread conviction that, in regards to these matters, everything is a simple question of subjective attraction, indifference or distaste” (Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 134).

  53. With the notable exception of very rare French analytic philosophers who do not consider Rorty to be part of “serious” or “professional” analytic philosophy and therefore think he should not be discussed at all, the philosophical world has always recognized Rorty’s importance. Rorty is extensively discussed by the most important philosophers, including—to give only a brief outline—Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank in Germany; and, in the Anglophone countries, apart from Hilary Putnam, whom we’ve already discussed, Donald Davidson (“Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”), who even claims agreement with Rorty on certain points. See also Nancy Fraser’s intervention in the same volume [“Solidarity or Singularity?”; also in Fraser, Unruly Practices]. I can also cite Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency” [a revised version published as “Philosophy and Social Practice: Richard Rorty’s ‘New Pragmatism,’” in Ideals and Illusions, 11–34] and Bernstein’s important piece (“Faire la part de ce qui sépare Rorty et Habermas et se situer dans l’entre-deux”), which situates Rorty in the category of “skeptical moralists” and tells us that “the more [Rorty] insists upon the irreducibility of incommensurable vocabularies, the more he … seems trapped in ‘performative contradictions’” (18). See also Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism. In France, apart from the authors already mentioned, I would cite Claudine Tiercelin (“Un pragmatisme conséquent?”), who even writes that “Peircian reflection lacks a political and historical dimension, a dimension that Rorty deserves credit for reintroducing, at the risk of appearing frankly unfashionable.”

  54. Laugier, Recommencer la philosophie, 19–20.

  55. On my reading, a certain current philosophical configuration (notably in the mode of naturalism) goes back to Hermann von Helmholtz’s views. I mean no slander in this—Helmholtz was a great scientist as well as a great philosopher, too little studied in my opinion—but these various “positivist” thinkers generally do not even think of referring to Helmholtz, who was nevertheless the veritable founder of the current naturalist movement.

  56. Let’s recall the goal: it is a matter “of constructing a new science of the phenomena constitutive of our psycho-biological apparatuses and the interactions between these apparatuses and our behaviors—including their highly symbolic forms such as languages and cultures” (Vignaux, Les sciences cognitives).

  57. On “naturalism,” see—apart from W. V. O. Quine’s famous article “Epistemology Naturalized,” to which I will return—Pascal Engel’s definition in Philosophie et Psychologie: “A naturalized epistemology aims to define the notion of knowledge, which is an essentially normative notion, in natural terms—that is, in terms of processes that are causal, psychological, neurophysiological, biological, or otherwise determinable by the natural sciences” (340). The most “radical” form of naturalism is that “there is nothing but these psychological, neurophysiological or biological descriptions of these causal processes implying a relationship between the sensory stimuli and an exterior environment … This radical naturalism simply denies that there is an autonomous philosophical discipline that could be called ‘epistemology’ or ‘theory of knowledge’” (345). It is difficult to put forward a typology of the different forms of naturalism since “programs of naturalization” “are fashionable at the moment” (Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 128).

  58. By this term we clearly must understand the last thirty years of what Anglophones term “philosophy of mind” [In English in the original], which “designates, in a first approximation, the field of philosophy concerned with the nature of mental phenomena and their manifestations” (Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit [henceforth PEEL], 11). I will return to this point, of course.

  59. Bourdieu calls for sociology to break with “both terms of the epistemological couple formed by logicist dogmatism and relativism,” in which, in his view, sociology has been trapped in recent years (Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 3). This suggests that the swings between relativism and scientism that we will see here in philosophy are also happening in the human sciences.r />
  60. Fichte is the author most cited and most esteemed by Helmholtz, who sees him not only as the apogee of true criticism as far as the theory of knowledge is concerned but also as a harbinger, with his theory of perception, of a number of discoveries in physiology.

  61. As Daniel Andler notes in “Calcul et représentation,” it is a matter in this context of a “reduction of biology to physics” (17n2). As he also notes, at the current time, this reduction is desired rather than realized, programmatic rather than effective. This is clearly also the case for all the versions of scientism that I’ve mentioned here.

  62. It is not an innocent fact that mathematics is today no longer a candidate for supremacy, as it could be in Descartes’ era—in my view, this is an index of scientism’s growth. Indeed, when (in the Discourse on Method and not the Meditations) Descartes considered mathematics as the paradigm of truth, he took up its methods (the distinction of clear and distinct ideas, etc.) and not its contents (to give one example, he did not take up the concept of a figure to explicate the passions or thought). But this is not the case for those who assert biology as the paradigm for all truth, to the extent that not only the methods but also the contents of the concepts themselves (genes, natural selection, cerebral processes) are taken up by philosophers, who therefore work as biologists and not merely as taking inspiration from its methods.

  63. On the difficulty of translating Aufbau, see the French translator’s notes on the 1928 text (La construction logique du monde). [The German title is Der logische Aufbau der Welt, the English title is The Logical Structure of the World; Aufbau is translated into French as “construction” and into English as “structure.”]

  64. This is the famous 1932 text “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” This theme, as has been noted many times, is also to be found in Heidegger; see Soulez, “‘Que reste-t-il.’”

  65. Galison, “Constructing Modernism.”

  66. Carnap, Logical Structure of the World, xviii.

  67. Barberousse, “Le présupposé de la science achevée.” Barberousse writes, “I will try to show that if we follow the consequences of this presupposition of a completed science, we will arrive, perhaps unexpectedly, at a tightly closed system similar to that of the Hegelian Absolute Knowledge” (95).

  68. Feigl, “Unity of Science.”

  69. Jacob, “Le problème du rapport du corps,” 421, where he analyses the “reductionist materialism” developed “in the middle of the century by Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place, and J. J. C. Smart.” “Reductionist materialism,” he tells us, “anticipates the identification of the mental states of ordinary psychology and cerebral states on the model of the following scientific identifications: [1] Water is a liquid composed of H2O molecules. [2] A body’s temperature = the average kinetic energy of the molecules that constitute it. [3] Lightning = an electrical discharge” (422).

  70. See, for example, Fisette and Poirier in their preface to PEEL.

  71. As a general rule, evolutionary theory in economics is defined by its reference to either Darwinian or Lamarckian biology.

  72. “Firms” refers to all businesses with an economic aim.

  73. Nelson and Winter write, “Our use of the term ‘evolutionary theory’ to describe our alternative to orthodoxy also requires some discussion. It is above all a signal that we have borrowed basic ideas from biology” (Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 9). In economics, the term “orthodox” refers to Milton Friedman’s theses and more generally to neoliberalism.

  74. Ibid., 11 (emphasis in original).

  75. I use this expression to differentiate those for whom the models are metaphors and those for whom they are realities. My task is not at all to take up these positions, and even less to enter into a debate on the role of “analogy” in different disciplines, but simply to examine how (methodologically or ontologically?) a model is used.

  76. Hodgson, “Mystery of the Routine,” 366 (emphasis added). This analysis of Hodgson, as well as all my analysis of economists (see the subsequent discussion of Herbert Simon) is based upon the work of Claude Parthenay, in particular his doctoral dissertation “Théorie de la firme,” as well as his book Vers une refondation de la science économique?. He and I coauthored the article “Science économique et philosophie des sciences.” I thank him for allowing me to present some of our analyses and conclusions here.

  77. Hodgson, “Mystery of the Routine,” 367 (emphasis added).

  78. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

  79. In English in the original.—trans.

  80. Hodgson, “Hidden Persuaders,” 167 (emphasis added).

  81. Imbert, “Neurosciences et sciences cognitives,” 54.

  82. Within the philosophy of mind PEEL establishes the following typology: behaviorism, neurologism, and functionalism. Furthermore, within each of these categories are three subclasses: reductionism, nonreductionism, and eliminativism. See the table summarizing these divisions on p. 139.

  83. Jean Delacour, Une introduction aux neurosciences cognitives (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998), 27.

  84. Delacour writes that we must “conceive their relation in terms of equivalence, of correspondence, rather than causality” (ibid.).

  85. Even if Diderot admitted the following: “We must all agree on this: the organization or coordination of inert parts most certainly does not produce sentience. Secondly, the presence of universal sentience in all molecules of matter is only a supposition, and a supposition of which the whole strength is derived from the difficulties from which it extricates us; and in good philosophy, that is not enough” (“Refutation of the Work of Helvetius,” 285).

  86. In D’Alembert’s Dream, Diderot compares the brain to a harpsichord, in which the philosopher is not to be understood as a pilot driving the instrument but rather as the instrument itself. The philosopher is simultaneously both the musician and the musical instrument.

  87. Recall that Descartes thought that the union of body and soul was located in the pineal gland. This led to the idea of a seat of representations, that some sort of homunculus orchestrated. Diderot, with his idea of the musician-instrument, rejected this “localist” model.

  88. I have said that Fisette and Poirier (PEEL) use a typology of three classes, each subdivided into three subclasses: eliminativism, as its name suggests, consists of “eliminating” the terms of a relation. Thus if the question is to know the relationship between physiology and intention, then one could understand the relation as a parallelism (there are physiological states and intentional states), or a causalism (physiology is the cause of intentions), or rather one could reduce one of the terms to the other by eliminating intention. This appears in the present case as the following: the day will come when we will no longer need our current psychology, which thinks in terms of propositional attitudes (i.e., in terms of belief and desire as in “I believe that I am hungry, I desire to eat”), but we will think directly in neurological terms such as, “Fiber c has activated, neurological type z responds”). In sum, someday we will view our states as we look at an ultrasound on the monitor.

  89. Ibid., 147.

  90. Ibid., 146. This concerns all forms of eliminativism, whether behaviorist (Quine), neurological (Paul and Patricia Churchland), or functionalist (Fodor).

  91. Indeed, the second proposition borders on the truism that says that the species that are best adapted are those that are least badly adapted.

  92. Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 128.

  93. This is what I understand Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier to be doing in defining their “moderated naturalism” in opposition to a “strong naturalism,” even though their position is not, in my view, particularly “naturalist.” They write that “Moderated naturalism must thus explain how the conceptual scheme necessary to establish philosophical knowledge is sufficiently distinguished from that of science to not be reducible to the latter (in which case it would defend a strong naturalism) while at the same time being suffici
ently close to that of science that the two conceptual schemes could entertain the relationships of mutual influence posed by its naturalism” (PEEL, 125). This definition could be applied to any nonnaturalist philosophical project, including the Cartesian project, and is thus so vast that it isn’t clear why the position is termed “naturalist” rather than something else. The naturalism that I am about to consider can in fact be defined as what Fisette and Poirier here call “strong naturalism.”

  94. Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 129.

  95. Ibid., 129–30 (emphasis in original).

  96. Ibid., 130 (emphasis in original).

  97. Quine uses both these phrases in “Epistemology Naturalized,” 90.

  98. Ibid., 82.

  99. Fisette and Poirier note this character trait of contemporary “philosophy of mind.” In this literature, Descartes is the devil himself and the very example of what must neither be said nor believed. I will come back to Descartes’ current paradoxical status (he has, negatively, fathered every claim of contemporary naturalism), but be that as it may, naturalism has historically defined itself in contrast to the Cartesian position. It thus wouldn’t be possible to dub as “naturalist” a position that Descartes would have been the first to advocate, unless we were to say that the “naturalism” that has been introduced as a break with all classical philosophy is in fact its continuation. The only philosopher who could deny science has any impact on philosophy or philosophy on the sciences (“mutual influence”) would surely be Heidegger—that is, the only philosopher who shares the scientists’ view of the death of philosophy!