Maverick Philosopher

Remarks on David Stove's The Plato Cult

The following is excerpted from a November 2004 entry on my first weblog.  I like Stove's political conservatism but I don't much cotton to his positivism. The original entry of 2004 is prefaced with a polemical screed in which I denounce Stove as an anti-philosopher, and with some justice. But nowadays I direct my polemic only against my political enemies, holding, as I have for quite a few years now, that polemic has no place in philosophy proper.  

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My focus will be on The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991), and for now mainly the preface thereto. Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (p. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (ibid.) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)

We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (p. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:

Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his left hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)

Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally) in terms of brain states.

Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical with complex states of our brains. (I don’t think that this is true, and I think that  there are formidable arguments to the contrary, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Stove is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance.  (One could of course argue that this identity theory is unstable and, given a few pokes, topples over into eliminativism about the mental; to discuss this instability, however, is beyond the scope of this entry.)

Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the coffee cup perceived is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.

Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.

Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, r in terms of trope resemblance-classes.

Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the non-modal, the normative to the non-normative, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H20 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended.

Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.

I may have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he is politically conservative. (I left the political tone of this last paragraph in place to give you a flavor of the original.)

David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

Philosophy as Misosophy? Religion as Misology?

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Should Nagel's Book Be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

Via Reppert's blog I came to an article by Simon Blackburn about Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. The article ends as follows:

There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index [of prohibited books].

The problem with the book,  Blackburn states at the beginning of his piece, is that

. . . only a tiny proportion of its informed readers will find it anything other than profoundly wrong-headed. For, as the title suggests, Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain.

Blackburn doesn't explicitly say that there ought to be a "philosophical Vatican," and an index of prohibited books but he seems to be open to the deeply unphilosophical idea of censoring views that are "profoundly wrong-headed."  And why should such views be kept from impressionable minds?  Because they might lead them astray into doctrinal error.  For even though Nagel explicitly rejects God and divine providence, untutored intellects might confuse Nagel's teleological suggestion with divine providence.

Nagel's great sin, you see, is to point out the rather obvious problems with reductive materialism as he calls it.  This is intolerable to the scientistic  ideologues since any criticism of the reigning orthodoxy, no matter how well-founded, gives aid and comfort to the enemy, theism -- and this despite the fact that Nagel's approach is naturalistic and rejective of theism!

So what Nagel explicitly says doesn't matter.  His failing to toe the party line makes him an enemy  as bad as theists such as Alvin Plantinga.  (If Nagel's book is to be kept under lock and key, one can only wonder at the prophylactic measures necessary to keep infection from leaking out of Plantinga's tomes.)

Blackburn betrays himself as nothing but an ideologue in the above article.  For this is the way ideologues operate.  Never criticize your own, your fellow naturalists in this case.  Never concede anything to your opponents.  Never hesitate, admit doubt or puzzlement.  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Winning alone is what counts.  Never follow an argument where it leads if it leads away from the party line.

Treat the opponent's ideas with ridicule and contumely.  For example, Blackburn refers to consciousness as a purple haze to be dispelled.  ('Purple haze' a double allusion, to the Hendrix number and to a book by Joe Levine on the explanatory gap.) 

What is next Professor Blackburn? A Naturalist Syllabus of Errors?

Related articles

Nagel's Reason for Rejecting Theism

Nagel Again

Plantinga Reviews Nagel

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview

Thomas Nagel Reviews Alvin Plantinga

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)