The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  100. Laugier, “Présentation de W. V. Quine,” 33.

  101. PEEL, 100.

  102. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 82.

  103. PEEL, 102. Fisette and Poirier rightly insist on a feature of Quine’s philosophy that some of his numerous commentators have tended to pass over in silence, namely, that Quine is one of the most radically scientistic philosophers of the entire analytic movement. Considering several parameters for defining the different degrees of naturalism, Fisette and Poirier show how Quine always fits in the category termed “radical.”

  104. Ibid., 146. On intentional and extensional statements, and on Quine’s view that only the latter correspond to the criterion of scientism and thus nonextensional statements constitute a “trademark of non-scientism,” see chap. 5.

  105. Behaviorism was initiated by the psychologist John B. Watson, who studied animal behavior in terms of stimulus-response and wanted to show that the psychic phenomena of consciousness or the so-called interior life were reducible to external stimulus behavior and response. This theory is at the origin of materialist and determinist theories of meaning for which language is an ensemble of reactions to nonlinguistic stimuli determined by external stimuli. B. F. Skinner and Quine are the principal representatives of what Fisette and Poirier also term “eliminativist behaviorism.”

  106. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 82–83.

  107. Thus Noam Chomsky could demonstrate, contra B. F. Skinner, that to learn a language is not at all a conditioned response to an identified stimulus of our environment. The behaviorist project’s failure has now been established by many others.

  108. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 114.

  109. See in particular two articles: “Das Problem der phänomenologischen Evidenz im Lichte einer transzendentalen Semiotik” and “Transcendental Semiotics and the Paradigms of First Philosophy.”

  110. Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 242. I will not take up Putnam’s argument in full. I cite him here simply to indicate that I am clearly not the first to have noticed the tensions in Quine’s thought. Many authors have taken up, for example, the tension between a proven skepticism and the strictest scientism. This tension or contradiction between “what Quine says here” and “what Quine says elsewhere” explains how he can be claimed by two opposed camps of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, namely Rorty, the skeptic, and Paul and Patricia Churchland, initiators of what Fisette and Poirier term the “eliminativist neurologism,” and who are currently the best examples of the most extreme scientism.

  111. PEEL, 146, about Quine.

  112. Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 243 (emphasis in original).

  113. Ibid., 243–44 (emphasis in original). Putnam adds here, “It may be, also, that I have just got Quine wrong. Quine would perhaps reject the notions of ‘right assertibility’, ‘intended model’, and so on. But then I just don’t know what to make of this strain in Quine’s thought.”

  114. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, 55.

  115. Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 173.

  116. I make this argument because one could reply that Quine would perhaps be willing to accept self-contradiction, and that only an exterior point of view—for example, a certain conception of reflexivity—could be concerned to see this kind of contradiction appear in a system. We will return, in the next chapter, to the position that consists in claiming the right to performative contradiction. In the meantime, I will only point out, with this example, that for every thinker, including those as well versed in pragmatism as Laugier, it is disturbing that a series of propositions would assert both one thing and its opposite at the same time and in the same sense.

  117. Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 270. It is Laugier who employs the term “system” in reference to Quine’s philosophy (13).

  118. I’m speaking here of Rorty insofar as he endorses Derrida’s claims, since I haven’t examined deconstruction except through him.

  119. Unless one were to embrace this contradiction and claim to “desire incoherence”—this is a stance that we will discuss in the next chapter and is not held by the authors I’ve discussed so far.

  120. Quine, “Replies,” 318; quoted in Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 178.

  121. Once again, in “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine wants to do away with any idea of a theory of knowledge and transform it into a chapter of psychology.

  122. Rorty, PMN, 372.

  123. That is, contrary to the current trend, a philosophy, independent of the sciences of physics, mathematics, etc., that need make no reference to them in order to claim to speak the truth.

  124. See Pitch of Philosophy, 3: “The arrogance of philosophy is not one of its best kept secrets.” The phrase does not necessarily have a moralistic connotation, but it is nonetheless revealing of philosophy’s position in Cavell’s eyes.

  2. “Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject

  1. Critique de la représentation.

  2. Chalier, “L’idolâtrie de l’être,” 89. On the problem of idolatry, see Jean-Luc Marion, especially Idol and Distance. Olivier Boulnois adopts the same perspective of “critique of representation.” This style of critique of representation clearly has its source in Heidegger’s philosophy.

  3. Récanati, La transparence et l’énonciation, 95.

  4. I associate the critique of philosophy with critique of representation because the authors that I shall look at do so, but I have shown in Critique de la représentation that representation can be overcome while simultaneously preserving philosophy. Briefly put, I have shown that moving from critique of representation to critique of philosophy does not have a happy outcome.

  5. As Sandra Laugier ironically remarks, some of her French analytic colleagues have adopted the habit of setting themselves up as “victims” of a malevolent fate and of a grievous epoch (Du réel à l’ordinaire, 17.) In their eyes, Anglo-Saxon philosophy is vilified, scorned, and quite simply ignored in France. If this claim was accurate in the 1960s and 1970s—that is, at the time when Bouveresse introduced Wittgenstein into a landscape describable as either structuralist or Heideggerian—it is now more than forty years later, however, and analytic philosophers cannot continue to take on the airs of condemned philosophers. As early as 1980, Jean Largeault noted, with a humor that his analytic successors have often lacked, “As a new panacea, analytic philosophy has supplanted Marxism. I miss Marxism. This is a new act in a bad play” (Quine, 179). He summarizes the struggle between paradigms as follows: “In France, two sorts of epistemology are struggling for primacy: the grotesque (that of literary hacks and similar types) and the boring (neopositivism or Popperianism). I prefer the grotesque … Here, logicians and analytic epistemologists like to underscore how different they are from other philosophers. The bulk of their work consists in putting down the others’, by invoking precision and rigor … My feeling is that it would be better to opt for the others, because they might, by chance, discover a hidden treasure, which won’t happen with the first” (180). I won’t take sides here between the “grotesque” and the “boring,” fertile confusion and sterile precision, but I would like to quote these passages from the most important figure to introduce Quine to France, to show how surprising it is, twenty-five years later, that certain French analytics not only continue to scorn the Continentals but, moreover, continue to pose as martyrs even though, as Largeault noted, analytic philosophers had “supplanted” the Continentals as early as 1980.

  6. In English in the original.—trans.

  7. Austin preferred “linguistic phenomenology” to this expression. Be that as it may, its task is to investigate our ordinary usage of various expressions in various contexts—we ought rather to answer the question, “What are we doing when we say that …?” instead of the Platonic question, “Ti esti?” “What is …?”

  8. For Austin, we are not mistaken when we say that a stick bends w
hen put in water. Ordinary language describes what we perceive without wondering about allegedly deceitful appearances. Appearances are visible and ordinary language conveys them accurately. On this canonical example of the classic dispute about realism, see, for example, How to Do Things with Words (henceforth HTW), 3 and 12. “The stick that looks bent in water … is far too familiar a case to be properly called a case of illusion” (Sense and Sensibilia, 26). See also Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung, “L’‘argument d’illusion.’”

  9. As François Récanati terms it in La transparence et l’énonciation (95); he characterizes Wittgenstein and Austin as the originators of the second wave.

  10. An expression favored by Austin to evoke the tradition’s most important error; see, among many other examples, HTW, 3.

  11. Austin uses this term rather frequently to describe the break that he is making with earlier approaches. See, for example, HTW, 3 (“it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy”), as well as Philosophical Papers, 234 (“they have effected, nobody could deny, a great revolution in philosophy”).

  12. On this switch at the heart of HTW—from a bifurcation to the view that every utterance is an act and the division of this act into three subcategories—see, among others, François Récanati’s commentary in the section entitled “Performative Versus Constative: Austin’s Critique of His Earlier View” in Meaning and Force, 67–70.

  13. “In the light of the more general theory we now see that what we need is a list of illocutionary forces of an utterance” (HTW, 149–50).

  14. In English in the original.—trans.

  15. I cannot declare, “The meeting is in session,” under any circumstances or in any context—for example, by myself deep in a forest. It is thus the concrete context that determines whether the same act, “The meeting is in session,” will be successful or not.

  16. In English in the original.—trans.

  17. There is another possible interpretation, which can be supported by some of Austin’s comments (for example, when he speaks of usages of the phrase “the survival of the fittest” [In English in the original]). Here it is a matter of a form of linguistic “Darwinism.” This form of evolution consists in claiming that in the end, that an expression has survived through time testifies to its suitability. Extinct expressions would have disappeared through a sort of natural selection, because they were inadequate or ineffective. Briefly, if to philosophize is uniquely to analyze the different contexts in which the expression x has meaning (“what we say when . . .”), if the only way to do this is to consult a dictionary of current usage—which Austin does—then either we are led to a classical conventionalism (arbitrariness of usage like the arbitrariness of words), or we assert that certain expressions are true because they have best held up over time. Usage is to be judged by how well it holds up.

  18. HTW, 149–50 (emphasis in first sentence added).

  19. See the table of “Types of Illocutionary Acts” and their conditions in Speech Acts, 66–67.

  20. Ibid., 67, from the table.

  21. Searle and Vanderveken, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic.

  22. To be specific, with this theory of speech acts, Searle does not commit the “mistake” that he sometimes blames others for, of moving from a theory of speech acts to a theory of states of the agent (of the subject, or of what is behind the act). Indeed, the necessary link between the statement and—to use my example again—the “sincerity conditions” requires that the linguistic analyst carefully separate the expressed intentional state from the real intentional state. For more on this point, see my article “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique.”

  23. Soubbotnik, La philosophie des actes de langage, 13.

  24. “Universal voice,” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 59–60.—trans.

  25. See Claim of Reason.

  26. See Pitch of Philosophy.

  27. See my Critique de la représentation and Fichte, as well as my article “Dogmatisme et criticisme.”

  28. A pseudonym adopted by Gottlob Ernst Schulze.—trans.

  29. See Du réel à l’ordinaire and especially Recommencer la philosophie.

  30. I could include the sequence Quine-Rorty-Churchland here, too.

  31. Recall that for Feyerabend myths have no less value as a matter of knowledge than science or philosophy. Briefly, we are in a world in which there is as much “truth” in a novel as in scientific discourse and where the statement “The earth is blue like an orange” is just as valid as “The earth rotates.” See, for example, Against Method.

  32. Chauviré, “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?” She shows how a certain contemporary philosophy, notably in its Anglo-Saxon version, has a tendency to think in terms of good and bad rather than in terms of true and false. This is a further sign of a discipline that has lost its bearings.

  33. I allow myself this apparently absurd neologism insofar as I have shown that positivism and skepticism, far from being antinomies, engender each other, that is, come together within a single line of thought (Quine and Austin).

  34. In a recent article, Jocelyn Benoist speaks of Husserl’s “positivism,” but he does so in order to recall his claim of scientificity (“Dépassements de la métaphysique”). But, as I said at the beginning, I call “scientistic” a philosopher who elects a different science (whether it be mathematics, physics, sociology, etc) as a paradigm of truth. I reserve the term “scientificity,” in contrast to “scientism,” for philosophers who have proclaimed philosophy as an entirely separate science. In my view, the two steps are clearly not a shared assessment, since in one case one chooses a different science in which philosophy is dissolved, but in the other one proclaims philosophy’s distinctness.

  35. See, for example, the introduction to Phénoménologie, sémantique et ontologie.

  36. Bégout, La généalogie de la logique, 10.

  37. This evolution was initiated by Jocelyn Benoist’s work—notably the most recent: L’a priori conceptuel, Représentations sans objet, and Intentionalité et langage dans les “Recherches logiques” de Husserl—as well as Bruce Bégout’s magnificent study La généalogie de la logique. The pioneer of this more epistemological orientation was Jacques English, who, for a certain period of time, was preaching in the desert. Then came the innovative work of Benoist, Bégout, and Robert Brisart (see the collection he edited, Husserl et Frege). The figure or period of phenomenology that I am discussing is not theirs, nor is it that of Jean Toussaint Desanti. My focus is on a particular phenomenology inspired by the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and later, Emmanuel Levinas.

  38. Bégout, La généalogie de la logique, 10.

  39. In his “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.”

  40. Life, intimacy, passivity, affect, the body, sensation, arche-original desire, etc., are among the themes that, it will be easily granted, have a very clearly existentialist coloration.

  41. Janicaud, “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” 20–21 (emphasis added).

  42. Even if I might share, in the end, Bruce Bégout’s astonishment, surprised to see so many philosophers today claiming to represent Husserl while they distort his aims. Perhaps it would be better, for the concept’s univocity, if all these thinkers, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, were to find another name besides phenomenology to characterize their investigations. I say that without meaning any negative critique, since Merleau-Ponty is the first to recognize and to announce that what interests him is the Husserl located “at the limits of phenomenology.” (This was the title of his 1959–1960 course at the Collège de France: Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 113.) On this proclaimed “infidelity” to Husserl, see also Richir, “Le sens de la phénoménologie.” In a similar vein, see Strasser, “Antiphénoménologie et phénoménologie.”

  43. I include Jean-Luc Marion among the founding fathers even though from a strictly generational point of view he ought to be placed on the other side of the line. In fact, hi
s writings’ importance compels me to place him where I have. My “probably” indicates a hesitation with respect only to the question whether Marion really belongs to the existential phenomenology that I’m describing. He sometimes seems to situate himself in an “elsewhere,” which would require an entirely different study.

  44. I could obviously add many other names. As my aim is not to make an exhaustive list (which would be impossible), I cite only a few names in a few “Continental” countries. Further, I have not named anyone who is strictly a historian of philosophy, not even the most significant, for their project is not to transform phenomenology, even if their observations can alter its meaning. To be sure, all those I have named are also historians of philosophy, but they mean to add something to phenomenology. Take for example Natalie Depraz: she is, of course, a historian of philosophy and a Husserl specialist, but she adds gnosis to her reading, which has nothing to do with a strict commentary on his texts. This is the act of transformation that I am trying to define within this constellation that I’ve called “existential phenomenology.”

  45. Here again, it is impossible to list all the most significant thinkers. See Escoubas and Waldenfels, Phénoménologie française et phénoménologie allemande. In this text, Waldenfels points out current German trends in phenomenology.

  46. See n. 70.—trans.

  47. I accept here the historical thesis of a dual transfer of phenomenology, which would be at the origin of its current forms. Phenomenology left Germany and was then successful in France, where it was transformed and returned to Germany after the war (where, due to Heidegger’s role during the war, it had been in certain aspects neglected) and expanded to other countries (including the United States, via Derrida et al.). The contemporary phenomenology that I have identified with the authors I’ve named is the product of this journey.

  48. Sartre, Situations, 230.

  49. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 84. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida says that this book “was for me, as for many others before me, the first and best guide” (11).