Rejecting the Core of Your Own Identity, Research Time, 16/02/2018

The funny thing about reading up on the influences of contemporary thinkers is how much baggage you have to sort through and throw away. And I’m not just talking about the poorly-written essays.*

* But there are a lot of poorly-written essays. I won’t name names, but I really want to.

I mean the concepts that create intractable, insoluble problems. These are the problems that define philosophical and metaphysical inquiries for literally centuries. Thousands of people across the tradition search for solutions – major, minor, underground, and utterly unremarkable thinkers.

But the most success they have is remixing the problem into new contexts. They can never solve these problems because the terms of the problem are set up in such a way that it is insoluble.

In particular, I’m talking about the mind-world problem. There are a few essays in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy that talk about this – which I find hilarious, because Gilles Deleuze never considered it an issue.

You could say – because I don't want to say it
definitively, but I still find it fascinating – that
Deleuze's most important idea for any thinker
to understand is his notion of philosophy as
the exploration and mapping of conceptual
terrain, rather than finding definitive answers
to questions.

I used to consider it an issue. It was the main concept I latched onto when I was first studying philosophy of mind in my early 20s. And it was one of the first philosophical concepts I ever studied, because my first ever philosophy course started with a month studying Descartes’ Meditations.

The mind-world problem has persisted through centuries of Western thought. The main reason it did was because it’s literally an insoluble problem – you can’t repair it on its own terms. You always end up in some terrible situation.

A big one is the problem of other minds – when you separate mind from world, you end up threatened by a solipsistic prison. In the essay in that volume about Edmund Husserl’s influence on Deleuze, they discuss how Husserl’s thinking floundered and even crashed on the problem of other minds.

He theorized endlessly – especially in the unpublished draft manuscripts, of which there are horrifyingly large amounts – about the encounter between yourself and others. But he could never really get past conceiving it as an encounter with the Other.

At most, other people become abstract. They’re the harbingers of an encounter with the Other. But the actual identities and existence of those other people can’t break through.

So when Deleuze engaged this problem, what did he do to get around it? Well, seeing how Deleuze repaired the mind-body problem was a big part of what first turned me on to his thought.

He didn’t. He just didn’t care about it.

That’s all you need to do! The mind-world problem arose from a few key works that engaged with the philosophical problems of their own times, and were influential enough to change the orientations of whole fields of philosophical questioning.

What the mind-world problem ends up doing is creating an empirically senseless dualism. There’s the individual mind of a single creature on one side – on the other side there’s all the other variety and diversity in the world. But its core framework reduces all that variety in our actual experiences to an abstraction – the encounter with the Other.

Understand this, and it isn’t a problem to be solved. You understand the mind-world problem as a breakdown in thought – an obsessive focus on a problem that takes you away from the problems of real existence.

The problem breaks thought because it keeps you from thinking of anything else and can’t actually be solved. So get rid of it.

Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

Get Your Hate On I: Problems of Reference, Research Time, 03/01/2018

Yes, I took the Xmas week off from writing on the blog, especially when I was in Montréal to visit my father’s side of the family. But I’ve kept up my research, of course, and I’ve been working through different ideas on how Gilles Deleuze’s thought affects my own thinking.

I want to talk, over the next day or two, about an argument that takes up the sixth chapter of What Is Philosophy?. Deleuze could find inspiration for his own projects in pretty much any field of the Western tradition. Except one.

It’s difficult to give a precise name to the tradition, because there were writers who called themselves and were called Analytic Philosophers whom Deleuze respected. Bertrand Russell was among them. Ludwig Wittgenstein, not so much.

My interpretive allegiances are a little different, because my own memories of having learned the great figures and history of Analytic Philosophy™ are very different. I was educated in North America, and my senior colleagues and teachers included people who thought almost all the work of Deleuze and others lumped under the near-meaningless heading of “Continental Philosophy” was nonsense and charlatanism.*

* Most of this comes down to writing style, but I want to leave questions of style aside. At least for a day or two.

Willard Quine, one of the most consistent reductionists in the
recent history of philosophy. It is no coincidence how boring his
books are.

But I do broadly agree that the tendency in self-identified Analytic Philosophy is unfortunate for actual philosophical creativity. Deleuze discusses it directly in What Is Philosophy?.

Let’s start from one important question. What is empiricism anyway? Deleuze calls himself an empiricist, but the major thinkers whose ideas defined typical Analytic Philosophy™ considered themselves empiricists too. And the latter would never have considered Deleuze a true empiricist. Marketer in obscurity, more likely.

To me, empiricism means that the ultimate purpose of creating philosophical concepts is building frameworks to understand the world. Deleuze would call it thinking immanently, where thinking is about understanding what you and everything else in the universe can do.

What are our capacities? What are our abilities? How can thinking in different ways open opportunities for understanding and action that wouldn’t have come about if we weren’t thinking in those ways.

The empiricism of Analytic Philosophy™ is very different, in Deleuze’s account of it. Under this model of thinking, being an empiricist means your concepts are always rooted in direct reference. Concepts are about meaning, and meaning is rooted in referring accurately to some part of the world.

I consider Willard Quine the arch-empiricist of Analytic Philosophy™, because he was so uncompromising in his brutal reductionism. Here’s a representative quotation, from his book of essays, From a Logical Point of View:

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience.”

You might find it a funny coincidence how so many of the most
esoterically dry and reductionist philosophers were white male
academicians from the upper or at least aspirational crusts of
their societies.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all – I think it's a possibility
condition.

Philosophical creativity becomes impossible when you consider the only purpose for thinking as correct reference. The only philosophical thoughts you can have legitimately, in such a framework, are the building blocks of quantificational logic. “There is,” “For all,” “For some,” and build from there.

Once you consider reference and the quantificational logic that grounds mathematics the only purposes for philosophy, philosophy becomes – relatively speaking – dead ground for thinking.

You can’t find meaning or meaningfulness in more complicated ideas or concepts than the frameworks for understanding truth conditions. So social, psychological, political, and moral concepts are out the window.** Even the energetic metaphors of scientific and mathematical thinking are gone because what matters is only truth conditions and reference.

** But there is an Analytic™ tradition of moral and political philosophy. Maybe so, but G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica reduces ethical and moral thinking to problems of reference – What acts and situations are good? As for the political, remember why John Rawls broke so big with A Theory of Justice – no one in philosophy departments had done original creative political thinking in decades because the Analytic™ model made it illegitimate. Rawls found a way that would work on that model.

Who wrote Waverley? What colour is this cup on the table?

I share Deleuze’s frustration here. Who cares? The school of Analytic Philosophy™ began with a lot of remarkable potential. But it was all squandered on the pursuit of problems irrelevant to people’s lives, as if those were the most important problems imaginable. What matters is what’s interesting. What’s needed.

Getting Old and Feeling Surly, Research Time, 25/11/2017

Right now, I’m working on a short article for the Reply Collective. If I’m going to solicit contributors as Digital Editor, I may as well contribute some content myself. Especially since I’ve been a regular contributor since the place started up.

Recently, we published two articles that pick up a conversation which began last summer. I mean, there was a pretty big gap between instalments, but the conversation was pretty linear. It’s a discussion of John Searle’s theories of human rights.

John Searle's aggressive, unsubtle style of writing
turned out to be very influential throughout
analytic philosophy during the 1980s, and continues
to shape the approach of many philosophers in North
America. I consider that a damn shame, because
Searle first became prominent as one of the thinkers
bringing metaphysical and ontological issues back
into the analytic tradition.

I’m not going to link every single one individually, but you can start from the most recent two, by Gregory Lobo and J Angelo Corlett. You can also look through Raimo Tuomela’s recent piece, because the whole chain started from a review of his book Social Ontology, that SERRC published last year.

That’s what I love about this platform.

Anyway, there are some ideas in this debate that are good food for thought in my own research on utopian drives and concepts in contemporary ideologies. Now that I had the chance to engage with the exchange a little more closely, I could see some interesting convergences with my own work.

So this week, I’m drafting a more formally-written contribution to the discussion. And I’m going to sort out some of the ideas in it here.

Here’s what I latched onto in the discussion. The ideas and concepts floating around make for good elements in a non-reductive materialist conception of how human society works. Let me lay that out for you.

Materialist – Generally,* you don't think any supernatural substance or being is needed to explain things like life, consciousness, human intelligence, or the conditions of the universe’s existence (questions like, ‘What caused the beginning of the universe?’).

* And I’m talking extremely generally.

Non-reductive – You don’t think being a materialist about reality means you have to explain away some aspect of human experience, ability, spirituality, or identity.

As I looked into Searle's late-period social-political thinking, I saw what was in many ways kind of an inadequate system. A few years after Searle’s first book on this project, The Construction of Social Reality, Neil Gross wrote a pretty solid essay showing how wrong-headed the project was because of what it ignored.

I think Gross’ conclusion can apply to the later Searle material that focusses more directly on questions of human rights as well. It’s because Searle’s major creative philosophical works all fit together as a continuous development of a single grand theory.

The return of metaphysics to analytic philosophy had the potential
to create beautifully weird and creative ways of thinking and
writing in that tradition. Instead, such  fantastically strange thinkers
as Saul Kripke and David Lewis became outliers in an increasingly
stagnant stylistic field.

The concepts he developed during his first creative works carrying forward John Austin’s analyses of speech acts were a foundation for his arguments about the nature of mind and intentionality, how people direct their action in the world.

The decades he spent developing those theories laid a groundwork for his account of the social world as shaped by collective and shared intentions. The conception of shared intentions as the atoms of society became the basis for his theory of human rights.

Here are the problems I have with this, which Gross helped me put a finger on.

Problem one – Searle’s insularity. Remember, Searle developed all this theoretical machinery largely as building blocks from his own older work. He’d established his theoretical system, and like the old system-builders, he expanded those concepts and theories to apply to new areas, eventually to give an account of all human phenomena.

So he didn’t think he had an incentive to read the works of other authors as equals. In response to critics – well-versed in social and sociological theory – who said Searle’s ideas didn’t go much beyond what Emile Durkheim developed a century ago, Searle said that he didn’t really read much of Durkheim.

Why? Because what little he’d read of Durkheim convinced him that one of the founders of the entire discipline of sociology didn’t make much sense. No attempt to understand Durkheim’s very different intellectual world or priorities. No attempt to understand why he wrote the way he did. Because Durkheim didn’t write like a doctrinaire analytic philosopher, he didn’t make sense. That’s it.

Which brings me to problem two – Searle’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Searle is infamous for having convinced pretty much everyone in analytic philosophy that everything influenced by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or any other philosopher from continental Europe’s traditions is empty charlatanism.

Because those ideas, even though they were sometimes
written in very strange ways, turned out to be very
useful to the social sciences. It was almost as if the
hermeneutic and post/structuralist theories were
philosophies of the social sciences, waiting for the
social scientists to catch up a bit. Just a thought.

The obvious arrogance is in the conclusion that, because I don’t understand something, it’s nonsense. In his exchange with Jacques Derrida, they both talked past each other to epic intensities.

Searle was convinced that Derrida spoke nothing but nonsense. Derrida was convinced that Searle was an arrogant hypocrite who made no effort to understand the vulnerabilities and blindnesses of his own position and thought.

When I read Gross’ critique of Searle’s social theory, I understood how these two threads – his insularity in his own corpus, and his arrogant, dismissive attitude to ideas and styles he didn’t immediately understand – connected.

The ideas that were at the forefront of social theory for sociologists come from hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and philosophy of the intensive sciences. The schools of philosophy that Searle has aggressively dismissed as nonsense and fraud for literally decades.

By this late state in his career – when he had also become more untouchable than Harvey Weinstein for his sexual exploitation of young, female students – Searle had become incapable of the humility required to catch up on social theory. He would have likely seen what trends had influenced contemporary sociology and dismissed it all as nonsense without bothering to read any of it.

So he’s a fellow traveller in giving a materialist theory of human thought, society, and institutions. But his arrogance and self-certainty keeps Searle from having anything useful to say to anyone else.

I doubt he’d care. If they think differently from him, he’d likely say they were all simply wrong.

Metaphorical Words? I: In Search of a Real Question, A History Boy, 20/01/2015

Here’s another idea in the McLuhans’ Laws of Media that stuck into me as I was reading through this book. The role of metaphor in language, and the meanings of words. 

I first encountered philosophy that explored this topic in Donald Davidson’s writings. It was the last year of my undergraduate degree, and I was coordinating Memorial University’s philosophical discussion group, Jockey Club. This was one of the papers that one of our participants brought in my first months on the job, over the summer semester as I transitioned out of full-time work at The Muse, the university’s student newspaper.

In that first Jockey Club discussion of "What Metaphors
Mean," I'll never forget the recurring example of a
clearly meaningless metaphor, "Love is a fish."

“What Metaphors Mean” was a very uninspiring essay to me, and I should say that I don’t pretend to give a definitive take. I don’t have a copy of the paper anymore, I haven’t read it since 2005, and I’m not about to pirate a copy and read the whole thing again for the sake of a blog entry of a few hundred words in between modules of a research ethics tutorial.*

* I find it ironic that, despite finishing a doctoral degree in philosophy, I never had to complete the Canadian Tri-Council training program in proper ethical conduct in research until my communications program. I’m not totally sure what that says about philosophy as a discipline (maybe another sign of its distance from the lived reality of people?) but I don’t have the energy to go into that again.

I found “What Metaphors Mean” the most depressing example I had read until then of what I call deflationary philosophy. It was an argument that what you might think is an interesting problem isn’t actually worth talking about. It’s the one principle that makes me anything of a partisan in the Analytic – Continental conflict in philosophy. 

Most of the time, when a philosophy professor makes a big deal about the worth, or lack thereof, of one side or another of this divide, he or she just repeats the same empty dogma that they learned from their original supervisors. But Analytic philosophy did have one core fundamental problem** in its definitive years.

** Continental philosophy, from my own personal perspective, has one core fundamental problem in its definitive years as well, and his name was Martin Heidegger.

It began in just circumstances, as a rebellion against the conservatism and quietism of British Idealism at Cambridge. The movement’s major weapon was a set of tools for logical analysis of propositions and statements, articulating them in a form that would clearly display their truth conditions, the foundation of a proposition’s fundamental meaning. 

If logical analysis showed a statement’s truth conditions to be unclear and impossible to clarify, then it had no sense. Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore were the main figures arguing that all of metaphysics itself was nonsense. Unable to clarify the meaning of the core questions, they could not be settled. The traditional subjects of philosophical discussion were, in essence, not worth talking about. 

The deflationary thought of
Donald Davidson.

Davidson’s essay, at least in my decade-old memory of it, delivered to me the conclusion that the meaning of metaphors were one of these nonsensical topics. By the time Davidson published his metaphor paper in 1978, much of Analytic philosophy was in an uproar, as many of the old metaphysical topics were returning to respectable discussion through the previously entirely respectable fields of logic. 

From exploring the logic and truth conditions of counterfactuals, David Lewis developed a theory of possible worlds really existing, not just as imagined postulates for the sake of an inference, but as actual planes of reality. From developing a systematic logic of necessity and possibility, Saul Kripke introduced a new approach to the metaphysics of possibility.

So to read this essay about metaphor that struck me as so reactionary, even before I knew this history as well as I do, disappointed me. Davidson’s basic argument was quite simple. Metaphors use words in picturesque ways that do not match their proper referents. Since they don’t match their proper referents, words used as metaphors no longer have meaning. They may evoke, but there is no longer any meaning. 

I still remember, at ten years’ remove, Davidson’s argument as assertively reductive. Because metaphors had removed themselves from the realm of meaning, there was nothing more that could be said about them philosophically, no question worth asking, no inquiry worth exploring. 

I couldn’t have called it such at the time, but it was a perfect example of deflationary thinking. And it actually depressed me. I’ve read work by writers who see the world and human life as existentially empty and devoid of purpose, who analyze the most horrifying crimes and horrors humanity can produce. None of these struck my soul in quite the same way as the declaration that we should discard an idea as conceptually rich as the metaphorical power of words. To be continued. . . . 

It’s Pronounced Næss I: A Hidden Oracle, A History Boy, 18/12/2014

Arne Næss wasn’t exactly hidden, but he isn’t as prominent in typical histories of philosophy as I think he should be. He plays a major role in my Ecophilosophy manuscript, returning multiple times to the manuscript’s argument, each time with a different aspect of his thought in focus, depending on the context manifested by appearing at that point in the book’s overall plot.*

* I realized a while ago that a lot of my writing works by creative repetition, cycling through several key ideas or themes, letting what’s come before change the new occurrence or each concept or image. This is true for my philosophy and my fiction work.

I wanted to find a picture of a fairly young Arne Næss, if
only to be different from almost every other photo out there.

I’ve never really written about Næss on the blog before, even though engaging with his work was vitally important for developing my Ecophilosophy manuscript in the first place. This was the first seriously large production in philosophy that I’ve ever done, and writing it marked a serious transition in my abilities to write and to plan long-form works. 

Most of my research and interpretation of Næss' ideas was already in the past long before I started the Adam Writes Everything blog in July 2013, so I never wrote much about it. Næss’ philosophy played an important role in the Ecophilosophy manuscript, as one major goal that ran throughout the entire project was to rescue his core concepts from the relative neglect into which they’d fallen in the discipline. 

But one of the final results of that manuscript is in pointing out how, while Næss’ ideas get the ball rolling on a genuinely ecological philosophy, they also contain their own limitations that prevent him from finishing the job. My manuscript exists to finish the job.

Næss spent a lot of his career in a strange position that way, always ahead of what would turn out to be the curve, but in ways that never had any direct successors or imitators in the discipline of philosophy. For example, even though he’s mostly known today for the works he composed later in his life on environmental and ecocentric ethics, did you know that Arne Næss was a member of the Vienna Circle?

Næss' entire family live interesting
lives. To illustrate, these are two of Arne
Næss' grandchildren, Ross and Evan,
with their mother, Diana Ross.

You probably didn’t. But Næss didn’t die until he was 96 years old, and that was in 2009. Being born in 1912 gave him the chance to experience every major change in analytic philosophy in the 20th century. He isn’t remembered as a major member of the Vienna Circle because he was never a protagonist in many of their historically significant debates or a direct influence on any of their followers or successors. As well, most of his professional life he spent in Norway, and Oslo is too far outside the major hubs of analytic philosophy’s social networks during its formative years to have been directly powerful.

But his work on logic during the 1930s and 1940s, his first major development as a young philosopher, became the foundation of his first major masterwork, Interpretation and Preciseness. It was an application of set theory to argumentation theory, creating a detailed formal method of how the act of making a statement very precise actually worked. Basically, a description becomes more precise as you add more content and qualifiers, and none of those new qualifiers allow for any possible interpretations beyond what the previous, more general description did.

As well, his period with the logical positivists produced a remarkable early product of his career, Cognition and Scientific Behaviour. This was the first serious work in what has become a rather hot new field, experimental philosophy. Næss literally designed a survey and what we would today call a focus group protocol, which tested people’s intuitions about basic scientific and philosophical concepts like causality. 

This method of doing philosophy, slamming the empirical techniques of the social sciences into what’s typically a purely contemplative practice, is considered controversial and strange today, when it’s practices in the labs and campuses of Joshua Knobe and Jonathan Weinberg. Consider how this must have gone over in the Weimar era of Europe. 

Næss, for much of his career, was a pioneer of new techniques and ideas in philosophy whose status as such was only given retroactively, not because he had any direct successors. He was a harbinger of philosophy’s future in experimentation and an intriguing side contributor to a significant movement. Until he read Silent Spring. . . To be continued

Good and Bad Analytic Philosophy: Precise Definitions, Jamming, 10/08/2013

I got some quite interesting feedback to my post about Colin McGinn’s resignation the other day, and thought that it would be worth at least a partial response. It would also allow me a first, tentative crack at one of the more controversial sets of ideas I have about the state of contemporary philosophy: my stance on the conflicts of analytic and continental philosophy.

This is an enormous and complex mess of concepts, influence, publications, and politics of academic, social, and sometimes even military stripes. So I can’t exactly lay out all my thoughts on the matter in one post (or one journal article, or even one whole book). Every blog post is just a glimpse into my thoughts, my research, and creative processes. 

But I made one comment that my friend D took issue with, an ambiguity on how I referred to the techniques of analytic philosophy. Argument and critique in analytic philosophy is usually a matter of precise definitions of technical terms, sometimes to the point of pedantic madness. This technique is easy to make fun of. I can draw a hilarious picture (at least, hilarious to philosophers) of two nitpicking old souls getting into a ludicrously heated argument trying to distinguish the precise meaning of ‘physical’ and ‘material,’ or ‘insight’ and ‘intuition.’ 

Even though I don’t identify as an analytic philosopher (and I don’t identify as a continental philosopher either), I actually use this technique of precise technical definition in my own doctoral dissertation. For example, there I very carefully distinguish ‘constitute’ from ‘compose.’ The latter is the assembly of a complex body by an external intentional agent, while the former is the assembly of a complex body through more autonomic or mechanical activities. These definitions and their contrast from each other are very important for my ontological thinking in my dissertation and my ecophilosophy project. Like a good analytic philosopher, I used precise definitions of my technical terms to accomplish a lot of productive conceptual work. 

However, not all analytic philosophy is good, and sometimes these techniques of precise definition can be used badly or used for nefarious purposes. Here’s my take on this distinction. Good analytic philosophy uses precise technical definitions of terms as the groundwork for arguments and investigations that achieve productive and interesting conceptual work. A good analytic philosopher (or any kind of philosopher, no matter your self-identification) understands technical definitions as conceptual tools for projects with a larger scope than composing those definitions alone.

You can guess, given that definition, what bad analytic philosophy does about technical definitions. Bad analytic philosophy takes the composition of precise definition of technical terms as all the work that needs to be done for an inquiry to be productive. A good metaphor to understand how silly I think such an approach to philosophy is: imagine a tradesperson who shows up on a worksite and spends the day admiring and reflecting on what good tools he’s brought with him, but never actually does any work on the project. And at the end of the day, he still expects the same wages as the people who built the house.

Colin McGinn and the Inevitable Sexism of Institutional Power, Jamming, 08/08/2013

Sometimes I’m not always happiest with what I post on my blog. I occasionally think a post could have been written a little better than it is, and once or twice I’ll get the date of an update wrong on the actual post. But today I can definitely say that I’m doing better than Colin McGinn. His blog isn’t even up anymore, last time I checked.

Of course the real reason I’m doing better than Colin McGinn is that he’ll probably never hold a university position again, whereas I’m freshly entering the job market and haven’t committed any acts of institutionally-enabled sexual harassment at all. This New York Times article lays out perfectly how McGinn used his position of power as a tenured faculty member with a highly respectable reputation in his field to habitually harass a female graduate student in his department at University of Miami, then greasily and shamefully attempted to defend himself on his blog, and was forced to resign in disgrace.

I could probably write Colin McGinn
quite an Afterword for any new editions
of his The Meaning of Disgust, but I
don't think he'd like what I'd write.

I’ve occasionally mentioned on the blog that post-graduate university job seekers are often discouraged from speaking their minds in public arenas for fear of offending or alienating those who may potentially be on hiring committees. In my own moments of doubt, I do second-guess what I write here. But I have no problem writing this: Colin McGinn is an unrepentant villain who received precisely the proper repercussions for his reprehensible actions. He harassed a woman whose position below him in the hierarchy made her especially vulnerable to his verbal abuse (and sexual harassment is verbal abuse). Now he can never commit these disgusting acts again, as he no longer has an institutional title allowing him to inflict pain and fear upon, and to exert verbally violent control over vulnerable women. 

As you can tell, I’m a little angry.

I never quite liked McGinn’s philosophy, although up until I discovered he abused his faculty position to harass a woman to whom he should have been a guide and mentor, I did respect him as a person. (To be perfectly clear, if I wasn’t sufficiently so for you in the above paragraphs, I no longer respect him as a person. Just banishing any trace of ambiguity.) I never agreed with his mysterian or borderline ontological dualist position on philosophy of mind. I think the belief in perceptual qualia is based on a category mistake that illegitimately distinguishes representations of the world from perceptions of the world. But I did find his tendency in his late period of publishing small, mass-market books of deep and erudite yet popular philosophy a refreshing break from both the ponderous character of late-career research and the tendency to laurel-resting of faculty as they approach retirement. And given my own multifaceted writing projects, I respected any academic who also wrote novels. 

Now, of course, all my professional engagement with his ideas is coloured with his disgusting actions. It can’t be helped. I certainly will never pay my own money for one of his books from now on. But if we can learn anything about contemporary philosophy (apart from the fact that sexism is encountered daily by many practitioners) is a sign of irony in the orthodox language of analytic philosophy. 

The usual rhetoric in analytic philosophy is that this style of writing and speaking is more clear than any other, precisely defining technical terms and arguing aggressively to be sure that no possible critique of an idea goes unaccounted.* Yet the Times precisely calls out McGinn for using exactly those analytic techniques of precisely defining terms to obscure the material nature of what he had done. He can use all the definitional subtlety he wants in distinguishing what it is to “suggest” an action from “entertaining” that action. He has used the style of language that is so often held as a method of clarity and transparency to excuse, trivialize, and brush away his violence toward a woman. Repeated harassment in the face of protest is abuse, a verbal and psychological assault on a woman over whom he had institutional power. 

* This is often used to distinguish upstanding and honest analytic philosophy from the obscurity of dreaded continentalism. More about this laughable ‘conflict’ another time.

The blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? describes countless real stories of institutional depravity, sexism, harassment, abuse, condescension, and disrespect that women receive in philosophy departments. The companion blog What We’re Doing About What It’s Like describes the steps the philosophical university community is taking to combat these attitudes and abuses, and shares stories to encourage women to change the system. However, reading about cases like McGinn’s, I don’t think we’ll ever really change the attitudes, self-conscious and non-conscious, throughout academic philosophy that women don’t belong or are inferior. There will always be men who abuse their institutional power and who cover up for those abusers. 

And however much these assaults and this demeaning behaviour may disgust me, there really isn’t anything I can do about it. Over the years that I’ve engaged with these issues in my classrooms and my life, I strained against this fact, because I’ve always wanted to build a better world where women were treated with the dignity they deserve. But I’m a straight male. And women in my professional life will look at me, no matter how much success my career may eventually hold and no matter how dedicated I am to working toward that better world, as another potential McGinn. These habits of verbal violence of men toward women will never go away no matter how hard I work to make it so. What I am makes me a suspect, an untrustworthy object of fear. The sad truth is that I can’t make the discipline I love more welcoming. Some man will always make every woman who wants to live a dignified life into a victim. 

Colin McGinn was a respectable and noteworthy philosopher who had risen to the top of his profession. Somewhere along the line, he broke bad and became a wretch. I know that every woman I meet in my professional life will ask the same question — When will he break bad and hurt someone? — of every man she meets, including me.

Correction, 20.00, 08/08/2013: McGinn's blog works again.