Maverick Philosopher

Young Scholar, Old Scholar

The young scholar may pepper his prose with foreign expressions so as to appear erudite. But as the years pass, a different ideal may appear choice-worthy, namely, to write as simply as possible, using only the resources of the mother tongue.

David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book

David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008.  The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher:

From the Mail Bag: Dogmatism in Academe

This just over the transom:

I wish I could express to you just how much of a blessing your blog has been (and continues to be) to me.

I am a grad student in a Ph.D. program here in the states.   I read your site for enjoyment, but also because I find that you tend to very acutely and eloquently crystallize objections and points that I find appearing in my own mind in a very rudimentary and unrefined way.  It is a great reassurance when I find you making a point so clearly that has occurred to me, but that I haven't known quite what to do with.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of your topics and insights that are well beyond me and never would have occurred to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with this field.  I love it, but I suffocate within it because of predominating paradigms.   I was recently instructed by a professor in one of my courses that "no reasonable person needs to argue for naturalism" when I pointed out that a certain author never once argued for the naturalism he was presupposing.

Philosopher of Religion Complains, "I Don't Get No Respect"

Like Rodney Dangerfield, we philosophers of religion get no respect. As philosopher of religion Nelson Pike puts it,

If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into the eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and somebody asks what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion . . . [Quoted in D. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2006, p. 33)

I'll go Pike one better. I am an academically unaffiliated philosopher of religion. Could there be anything more contemptible?

Once Again on Liberal Bias in Academe with Some Remarks on Indoctrination

A reader e-mails (my responses in blue):

I had a question regarding your blog post, From the Mail Pouch: Of Comments and Liberal Bias.  Does the intention to indoctrinate follow from the fact that academia has more registered Democrats than Republicans? 

No, it doesn't follow, but neither did I say that it followed.

Obviously, group think and unconscious bias can and does happen when you get like-minded people altogether. 

Yes indeed.

Amateur and Professional

Amod Lele e-mails: 

I've been enjoying your blog for some time now, and particularly appreciated your post Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation. I recently mused on this topic at my own philosophy blog - http://loveofallwisdom.com/2009/06/neither-career-nor-hobby/ - and you might find my remarks there of some interest. I'm intrigued, though, by your distinction between professionals and amateurs, as distinct from those who get paid and those who don't. I suspect that by your definition I aspire to be a professional philosopher who doesn't get paid; but I'm not sure, because I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Would you care to spell this distinction out further?

 

Here is what I wrote:

 

While I'm on this topic, I may as well mention two other distinctions that are often confused. One is the distinction between professionals and amateurs, the other between people who make money from an activity and those who do not. These distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to one another, hence do not coincide. Spinoza was a professional philosopher even though he made no money from it. One can be a professional philosopher without being a paid professor of it, just as one can be an incompetent amateur and still be paid to teach by a college.

 

A better way to put it would be as follows.  'Professional' and 'amateur' each have two senses.  In one sense, a professional X-er is a person who makes a living from X-ing.  This sense of 'professional' contrasts with the sense of 'amateur' according to which an amateur is is an X-er who does not make a living from X-ing.  As the etymology of the word suggests, an amateur in this first sense is one who does what he does for love and not for money.  In a second sense, a professional X-er is a person whose X-ing meets a high standard of performance, while an amateur in the corresponding sense is one whose X-ing fails to meet a high standard of performance. Examples:

A. Tiger Woods is a professional in both senses and an amateur in neither. Kant is an example among the philosophers.

B. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professionals in the second sense and amateurs in the first sense.

C. Ayn Rand was a professional in the first sense, but a rank amateur in the second.

D. The vast majority of chess players are amateurs in both senses: they neither make a living from chess, nor do they play at a high level.

 

Philosophy as Hobby, as Career, as Vocation

An e-mail from a few years back with no name attached:

Leiter fancies himself a gatekeeper to the realm of academic philosophy. You gotta love the professional gossip that seeps through his blog - Ned Block got an offer from Harvard but turned it down, here's the latest coming out of the Eastern APA, or noting, yesterday, that Ted Honderich consulted him during the publication of the new Oxford Companion to Philosophy. And look at the way Leiter prides himself on knowing the goings on at each school and each professor. . . what a status-obsessed elitist (I believe those are your words). No wonder this guy publishes the PGR. Others of us enjoy doing philosophy, most of the time, but here is a man who loves *being* a philosopher, all of the time.

If Obituaries Were Objective . . . II

I found the following in this morning's mail bag.  From a philosophy professor who enjoyed my  If Obituaries Were Objective . . . :

Perhaps a more realistic, and to my mind a more depressing objective obit would read as follows:

Philosophy professor x showed great academic promise from early in his career. He published a revised version of his dissertation to great acclaim. He followed this work by well over one hundred articles and scores of books. His third book was for three weeks on the NYT bestsellers list. Within the discipline, professor x is perhaps best known for his famous counter-example to the such-and-such argument. He was, in short, one of the rare examples of a successful professional philosopher.

 

On the other hand, professor x was known to have been an insufferably arrogant boor and a notorious seducer of his graduate students. His work was motivated almost exclusively by a desire to improve his reputation and advance his professional career; he was driven by appetite and thumos, rarely if ever by nous; he really had no genuine personal connection to what the great ancient philosophers would have recognized as "philosophy." 

 

In sum, professor x was a successful professional-philosopher, but he was no philosopher.

 

(Have I just composed the obit of the typical follower of the Leiter Report?)

Advice on Publishing From the 17th Century

Suppose you are working on an article that you plan on sending to some good journal with a high rejection rate. You know that what you have written still needs some work, but you submit it anyway in the hope of a conditional acceptance and comments with the help of which you will perfect your piece. This is a mistaken approach. Never submit anything that is not as good as you can make it. And this for a reason supplied long ago by that master observer of the human condition, Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658):

Never show half-finished things to others. Let them be enjoyed in their perfection. All beginnings are formless, and what lingers is the image of that deformity. The memory of having seen something imperfect spoils out enjoyment when it is finished. To take in a large object at a single glance keeps us from appreciating the parts, but it satisfies our taste. Before it is, everything is not, and when it begins to be, it is still very close to nonbeing. It is revolting to watch even the most succulent dish being cooked. Great teachers are careful not to let their works be seen in embryo. Learn from nature, and don't show them until they look good. (The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231, tr. Christopher Maurer.)

If Obituaries Were Objective . . .

. . . some of them might read like this.

Antioch College: Death by Political Correctness

I have a sentimental connection to Antioch College. An inamorata from the '70's graduated from there, as did my old friend, the philosopher Quentin Smith. During my tenure at the University of Dayton in the late '70s and '80s I would often make the pleasant drive over country roads to the sleepy little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio to take in an art film at the Little Art theater or buy incense at a '60s style 'head shop' or chase a burger with a couple of beers at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, or hike in Glen Hellen, a nature preserve behind the campus. At home, my FM tuner was set to WYSO, which emanated from the campus of Antioch College and was a rich source of out-of-the-way folk, blues, jazz, country and other music. I may be a conservative, but I am a BoCon, a bohemian conservative, or perhaps a HipCon, or maybe even a Bobo (to adopt the term if not quite the sense of a David Brooks coinage), a bourgeois bohemian.

There is also the Twilight Zone connection. Rod Serling graduated from Antioch, taught there at one point, and featured the statue of Horace Mann on campus in one of his best episodes, The Changing of the Guard.

So it is too bad that Antioch College has suffered Death by Political Correctness. This excellent piece confirms my view of contemporary liberals: they are simply incapable of arresting their slide into the looniest precincts of hard Leftism. Quentin Smith was on campus during the beginning of the end in the early '70s. I recall him telling me about the bringing onto campus of unprepared ghetto blacks who proceeded to terrorize the place with Black Panther type demands and armed thuggery.

UPDATE  (21 July 2009):   Relevant YouTube clips (HT: Mike V.) Antioch College 1858-2008? Antioch University Decides Womyn's Center Library is Garbage; Water Damage at Old Main

 

Five Kinds of Reviewer

Five Kinds of Reviewer

(adapted by Roger Shiner from Susan Swan, ‘Nine ways of looking at a critic’, Toronto Globe and Mail 30th November 1996. E23)

1.      The Spankers are out to administer discipline over anything from ill-conceived plot-lines to misplaced commas.

2.      The Young (and Old) Turk sees the review solely as an opportunity to demonstrate her or his own intellectual superiority and above-average intelligence.

3.      The Self-Abusers feel they could have written a better book on the subject, given half the chance, and describe it at great length.

4.      Gushers skip over discussion of the book; they just want to communicate the enjoyment of reading it.

5.      The Good Reviewer will represent the book (without lapsing into long-winded summaries) so the reader gets a sense of what the book is like whether the reviewer likes it or not. The good reviewer will also offer an interesting or revealing point of view from which the book can be perceived critically.

The above was found here.

More on Texts and Translations

A regular reader responds to  On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages: 

 

Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in---are there serious problems with some works?--- but the problem of working with translations becomes even more acute with classical texts like Cicero and Aristotle. Often the texts are in bad shape with extensive lacunae and obvious ancient editioral tampering. Restorations rely on ancient paraphrases in languages like Arabic or Syriac. Or the restorations are pure conjectures (the 19th century German scholars were very quick to restore).

 

All of this is concealed in a typical English translation. The Greekless young scholar thinks he is reading Aristotle, but perhaps only 80-90% of his text is well established. Crucial passages often turn out to be corrupt in big or small ways. The scholar who wishes to be able to say "Aristotle said..." instead of "W.D. Ross' translation says..." needs to be familiar with his text at the level of the so-called critical or variorum edition, where (hopefully) all the textual problems are owned up to and the scholar can make his own informed judgment about what the best text is.

 

 For this reason, college reading editions like the Loeb texts are not good enough, because they are not critical texts. Some editors do a better job than others in noting problems, but the Loeb Greek or Latin is once again often a heavily restored text. You need to work with the Teubners or the OCT's or special critical editions by individual scholars.

 

The truly dedicated scholar should in fact go one step further back and consult the MSS themselves. Often no one has taken a good critical look at the MSS in the years since some German did the original MSS work in the 19th century. The Germans made mistakes! And they restored and otherwise edited. The MS is not the same in many ways as their transcription. With the new optical technology, it is time and overtime for scholars to revisit the MSS and recover better texts. Where some competent scholar has just done this work, perhaps new MSS work is unnecessary, but where the critical text is 100+ years old, it is not reasonable to trust it.

 

If you are a young philosopher or classicist and reading this story does not excite and challenge you, if you are too unmotivated to master a language and its texts, then for God's sake don't pretend to be doing scholarship in the history of philosophy with a bunch of translations at hand. I'm preaching to the converted, right?

On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages

From the mailbag:  

What are your thoughts on reading philosophical texts in the original language?  Do you think it's preferable -- or do you suppose it even makes a difference?  The idea of reading philosophy in the original is very interesting to me, because I've found that when you study texts in the history of philosophy at a university you'll for the most part be reading them in translation -- whereas whatever department is in charge of teaching the language in which the text was originally written usually will not offer it if it is too technical or specialized to be of general interest.

Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities? Part II

On February 9th I linked to Thomas H. Benton's Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go.  Today I discovered his Just Don't Go Part II.  Prospective graduate students should digest it thoroughly albeit cum grano salis.  I don't recommend Benton's piece in order to discourage anyone but to apprise them of what they are up against should they embark upon graduate study.  But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to live like a monk, take risks and perhaps later on retool for the modern-day equivalent of lens-grinding, then go for it!

Here is the question you should ask yourself.  Will I consider it to have been a waste of time and money to have devoted 4-10 years of my precious youth to graduate study if I find that I cannot secure a tenure-track appointment in a reasonably good department in which the chances of tenure are reasonably good and find that I either have to re-tool or become an academic gypsy moving from one one-year appointment to another, or end up as an adjunct teaching five courses per semester for slave wages?

If you answer in the affirmative, then you almost certainly should avoid graduate school given a very bad job market that gives every indication of getting worse. But if you love your discipline, have some talent, and your very identity is bound up with being a philosopher, say, then you should take the risk.  I did, and I don't regret my decision for a second.  Of course, I was one of those who secured a tenure-track position right out of grad school and went on to get tenure.  But had I failed to get a job, I would not have considered my time in grad school wasted.  They were wonderful years in a wonderful place: Boston on the Charles, the Athens of America.  I lived on next-to-nothing but avoided debt by tailoring my lifestyle to the modest emolument of my teaching fellowship.  But that's just me.  Philosophy for me is the unum necessarium.  I cannot imagine who I would be were I not a philosopher.  For me, no way of life is higher.  I am going to do it one way or another, whether or not I can turn a buck from it.

Now if you think like I do, but allow yourself to be cowed by parents and friends and the manifold suggestions emanating from a money-grubbing society in which 'success' is spelled '$ucce$$' and pronounced 'suck-cess' into thinking that you must be 'practical' and put economic and career considerations above all others, then you may wake up one morning a rich shyster or medico but with deep regrets that you didn't have the courage to pursue your dream.

Academic Credentials

The Ph.D. is a trapping that means something, but not that much. There are fools with doctorates, and sages without them. Should Kierkegaard go unread because he is a mere Magister? Does anyone prefer his brother Peter over Søren because the fomer was called Doktor? Should we turn a blind eye to Eric Hoffer's True Believer because its author was a migrant farm worker and stevedore who, as a pure autodidact, had no credentials at all, not even an elementary school diploma? Fifty years after it was written, in these days of Islamo-militancy, Hoffer's penetrating book has gained even more relevance.

As Schopenhauer was always keen to point out, there is a difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy, namely, the difference between someone who lives for philosophy and someone who lives from it. The professors, parading their titles and credentials, show thereby that they are more concerned with appearance than with reality, when the office of the philosopher is precisely to penetrate appearance and arrive at reality. (I am reporting Schopenhauer's view here, and would point out against him that of course a professor of philosophy can be a genuine philosopher. Schopenhauer himself would be forced to admit this given his great admiration for Kant.  What he could not abide was Hegel, whom he considered a charlatan, and Fichte whose Wissenschaftslehre he mocked as Wissenschaftsleere and as Onanie.)

An important text relating to the question of academic credentials is William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" in Essential Writings, ed. Wilshire (SUNY 1984), pp. 343-348)  It first appeared in 1903 in the Harvard Monthly.

In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow).  I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy."  I also took a course in logic from him.  The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books.  And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I taught.

I don't believe Morris ever published anything.  The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question.  But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.

The moral of the story?  Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy.  So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.

I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when.  The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend.  I've done it a number of times.  I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher.  I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no.  What ingrates we  are.

So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.  Heute rot, morgen tot.

The Politicization of the American Philosophical Association

Several people have asked me my opinion on the recent petition to the American Philosophical Association regarding alleged discrimination by certain colleges and universities against homosexuals.  At the moment I have nothing to say about either the petition or the counterpetition.  I want to point out that the politicization of the A. P. A. is nothing new and, more importantly, that it is inconsistent with the charter of the A. P. A as a professional organization that it take groups stands on debatable social and political questions.  My reasons are given in the letter to the A. P. A. reproduced below.

Neven Sesardic e-mailed a while back:

I wonder whether there has ever been any reaction to your wonderful letter to the APA about their stand on the war in Iraq. I let my subscription lapse after that.

 

I did receive a very nice supportive letter from Panayot Butchvarov, although it may have been in reference to an earlier letter in which I protested the APA's taking of a group stand against capital punishment. Having lived under Communism, Butchvarov is familiar with the perils of groupthink.

I am glad to hear that Sesardic let his membership lapse. So did I. And I encourage other conservatives and libertarians to ask themselves whether it is really in their best interest to fund Left-leaning organizations. But even liberals should be able to appreciate that professional organizations ought not take group stands on eminently debatable social and political questions. Here is the Iraq letter, published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 77, no. 2 (Nov., 2003), p. 85.

Dear Editor:

The APA Pacific Division has proposed a resolution to "express our serious doubts about the morality, legality and prudence of a war against Iraq led by the United States." If individual members have doubts, it is their right to express them in their capacity as private citizens. But a collective expression by the APA as a whole, or in any of its Divisions, is clearly inappropriate. The reason should be obvious. The purpose of the APA is "exclusively educational, literary and scientific . . . " as per its constitution. It is therefore in keeping with its charter that the APA provide a framework in which serious discussion of questions concerning pacifism, just war doctrine, etc., can take place. But for the APA to endorse pacifism, or just war theory, or a version of just war theory that rules out preemptive strikes, or to express doubts about the moral justification of a particular war, is clearly in violation of its mandate. This would be as wrong, and indeed as absurd, as if the APA were to adopt an official stance on the mind-body problem, or on any other philosophical problem. If the APA is not prepared to take sides in the debate between, say, John Searle and Daniel Dennett, then it ought not take sides in the debate in foreign policy between, say, William J. Bennett and Noam Chomsky.

But the effort and expense spent on this hopelessly belated resolution are not entirely wasted. The arguments given in favor of the resolution, fallacious as they are, provide excellent fodder for logical analysis, and so may be of some use to teachers of logic. The latter can say to their students: Here is what happens when otherwise intelligent people allow ideological bias to cloud their thinking.

The Recent Dennett-Plantinga A. P. A. Debate and the Question of Tone in Philosophy

This just over the transom (interspersed comments in blue by BV):

I regularly follow your blog, and have for a couple of years now. I have considerable respect for you as both a philosopher and a communicator in general - you seem to get curt or impatient at times, but you still manage to be civil even then, and your treatment of arguments in your posts always comes across as fair and in the spirit of trying to best represent the views of those you are discussing.

I mention all this because my question is this. What do you make of exchanges along the lines of what was recently recounted on Prosblogion, between Dennett and Plantinga? I'm not talking about the content in this case, but the tone. Is it really the case that arguments in favor of God/theism in general, and Christianity in particular, are treated with open mockery and derision even in what is supposed to be a professional exchange by a respected philosopher? Is Dennett representative of how naturalists treat theists/Christians in discussion, or is he exceptional?

Philosophy and Livelihood: Build a Slave!

One reader asks:

How does an independent scholar get bread and butter on the table?

Another inquires:

How could one make a living in philosophy and the humanities besides being a professor?

A Reader Wants to be a Professional Philosopher

From a reader's e-mail: "Now, I want to be a professional philosopher, period! It's not as if I kind of want to, or happened to be thinking about it."

My young correspondent does not tell me what he means by 'professional philosopher,' or why he wants to attend graduate school, so I'll begin by making a distinction. In one sense of the term, a professional is one who makes a living from his line of work. Now it is a fact of life that one can make a living in a line of work without being particularly good at it. There are plenty of examples in the field of education of people who are incomptetent both as teachers and as scholars. Although these people manage to get paid for what they do, they are amateurs in point of competence. In a second sense of the term, a professional is one has achieved a certain high standard of performance in his line of work. This of course is no guarantee that one will be able to make a living from it. Now if a person persists in his line of work without remuneration, there is a clear sense, etymologically based, in which he is an amateur: he does what he does for the love of it. But this is consistent with his being a professional in point of competence. There are quite a few historical examples. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professional philosophers in point of competence but not in point of filling their bellies from it. Employing a Schopenhauerian turn of phrase, both lived for philosophy not from it.

Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?

This piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education is something you should read. People should know what they are in for.  But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to take risks and perhaps later on have to retool for the modern-day equivalent of lense-grinding, then go for it!  (Hat tip: Victor Reppert.)