A recent essay by Raymond Guess connects Alasdair MacIntyre with the social history of analytic philosophy. Geuss is a brilliant writer and as trenchant as always, but I wish he hadn’t opened with the false cliché that from “the start of the 20th century … philosophy would be essentially devoted to the analysis of language, the construction of formal arguments and the solution of logical puzzles”—which erases his own work along with much of the last fifty years of “analytic” philosophy, and was never exactly true to begin with.
Lovely review, Kieran. İ don't think a worldview necessary entails glossing over particulars and circumstances; in some ways it means paying more attention to them.
İ also love İris's "we intuit unity" (İ see that as a religious impulse, a longing for 'the garden'). A move to clarity will always involve some kind of simplification/asceticism, no? Marcus Aurelius: 'cut out everything; welcome all things'.
Can we ignore that the modern worldview - a paradoxical "bourgeois metaphysics" (Spaemann)- keeps us riveted to doubt, the fragmentary, and "complex"? Currently reading (around) Montaigne and though there's a danger of reading him simply as a modern the parallels are startling.
"When the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked whether he read novels, he famously replied, without missing a beat, 'Oh, yes—all six, every year.'"
Fascinating to read the anecdote from your years at Princeton in the 70s. I was studying at Berkeley in the 70s, a walk-on, so to speak, and not enrolled (California encouraged such learning then, as long as each student participated actively and passed the exams!); but I was also employed to Read large quantities of Logic papers, a bit under 1000 pages per week. I had the fortune/misfortune of taking several classes from John Searle during his struggle with Derrida. Your anecdote struck me as an accurate assessment of Searle's whole professorial persona, which troubled me as he was head of the department at that time. Often, students in his classes (Ethics and Language in particular) sat somewhat open mouthed and wide eyed at what they heard him saying. For example, his idea of "Speech Acts." Regarding the meaning of a sentence, "If I say, 'I am going to the store,' what that means is that I am going to the store. Therefore, I ought to go to the store." That was almost the entirety of his method of "deriving ought from is." Utterly no concept of taking the sentence to different contexts to test the extent of the theory. By the time my years at Berkeley ended, I was convinced that Searle was much more intent on a plan of social engineering than he was on a plan of educating his students and future teachers on critical thinking and inquiry.
Around then, Willard Quine visited town for a couple of days of lectures and a faculty/grad-student reception afterward. There was a sizeable crowd at the reception. It rapidly became very clear that most of the faculty had no idea what Quine was talking about in the lectures, and those who did understand it (it was, in part, on the inherent fragility of ZFC as a useful but invented language!) were terrified they might inadvertently out themselves on their understanding and fall under the wrath of Searle et al. Since I was not enrolled there and was only a low-paid Reader doing dirty work for the profs, I found the whole thing a hoot. I can't even describe how much I admired Quine for his intellectual depth compared to what was happening at this flagship department under Searle's rigid foot.
Just my opinion, of course, as an outsider then and now.
I thought the philosophers of our advisors’ generation read plenty of genre fiction, especially sci fi and mysteries. But maybe they don’t count as “novels”.
The more plausible claim is that that generation of philosophers read primarily stuff in English. That’s clearly true in philosophy, as you can see from what they cite, but also in fiction, where Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, Tolkien, etc are probably more discussed in tea rooms than Tolstoy.
Lovely review, Kieran. İ don't think a worldview necessary entails glossing over particulars and circumstances; in some ways it means paying more attention to them.
İ also love İris's "we intuit unity" (İ see that as a religious impulse, a longing for 'the garden'). A move to clarity will always involve some kind of simplification/asceticism, no? Marcus Aurelius: 'cut out everything; welcome all things'.
Can we ignore that the modern worldview - a paradoxical "bourgeois metaphysics" (Spaemann)- keeps us riveted to doubt, the fragmentary, and "complex"? Currently reading (around) Montaigne and though there's a danger of reading him simply as a modern the parallels are startling.
Ryle said somewhere that he read J Austen’s novels yearly!
"When the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked whether he read novels, he famously replied, without missing a beat, 'Oh, yes—all six, every year.'"
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/14/the-novel-jane-austen-wrote-when-she-was-twelve/
Fascinating to read the anecdote from your years at Princeton in the 70s. I was studying at Berkeley in the 70s, a walk-on, so to speak, and not enrolled (California encouraged such learning then, as long as each student participated actively and passed the exams!); but I was also employed to Read large quantities of Logic papers, a bit under 1000 pages per week. I had the fortune/misfortune of taking several classes from John Searle during his struggle with Derrida. Your anecdote struck me as an accurate assessment of Searle's whole professorial persona, which troubled me as he was head of the department at that time. Often, students in his classes (Ethics and Language in particular) sat somewhat open mouthed and wide eyed at what they heard him saying. For example, his idea of "Speech Acts." Regarding the meaning of a sentence, "If I say, 'I am going to the store,' what that means is that I am going to the store. Therefore, I ought to go to the store." That was almost the entirety of his method of "deriving ought from is." Utterly no concept of taking the sentence to different contexts to test the extent of the theory. By the time my years at Berkeley ended, I was convinced that Searle was much more intent on a plan of social engineering than he was on a plan of educating his students and future teachers on critical thinking and inquiry.
Around then, Willard Quine visited town for a couple of days of lectures and a faculty/grad-student reception afterward. There was a sizeable crowd at the reception. It rapidly became very clear that most of the faculty had no idea what Quine was talking about in the lectures, and those who did understand it (it was, in part, on the inherent fragility of ZFC as a useful but invented language!) were terrified they might inadvertently out themselves on their understanding and fall under the wrath of Searle et al. Since I was not enrolled there and was only a low-paid Reader doing dirty work for the profs, I found the whole thing a hoot. I can't even describe how much I admired Quine for his intellectual depth compared to what was happening at this flagship department under Searle's rigid foot.
Just my opinion, of course, as an outsider then and now.
I thought the philosophers of our advisors’ generation read plenty of genre fiction, especially sci fi and mysteries. But maybe they don’t count as “novels”.
The more plausible claim is that that generation of philosophers read primarily stuff in English. That’s clearly true in philosophy, as you can see from what they cite, but also in fiction, where Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, Tolkien, etc are probably more discussed in tea rooms than Tolstoy.