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Discord Invitation

23rd March 2017

Post

An Ongoing Change in My Philosophical Outlook

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A few years ago in my post In Pursuit of Definitive Formulations I quoted Judith Jarvis Thompson on Richard Cartwright:

“Richard L. Cartwright is a philosopher’s philosopher. He gives no public lectures, he reviews no books for the popular press, and to the extent of my knowledge he has never declared himself on the crises of Modern Man or Modern Science. Like G.E. Moore he is provoked to philosophize not by the world but by what is said or written by other philosophers. It is to the problems that the world makes for other philosophers and to the problems philosophers make for each other that he has devoted his professional life. He has done so with a love of craftsmanship, with a hatred of the shoddy and shabby, the windy and woolly, and with a passion for the truth — a passion simply for getting things right — that are unmatched in current philosophy and that have perhaps been matched by no one since Moore himself, whose philosophical manner and attitude Cartwright’s so much remind one of.” (On Being and Saying)

Judith Jarvis Thompson has not only invoked a comparison with G. E. Moore, but has also echoed (I assume intentionally) a famous line from Moore’s autobiography: 

“I do not think the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences.”

Anyone who has spent a good portion of their life thinking about philosophical problems can appreciate this sentiment, and perhaps also they can see themselves in it. I can certainly see myself in this also, though I have come to realize that this is less true for me now than it was in the past.

Perhaps I am not a philosopher’s philosopher, as my thinking has become more closely tied to the world and the sciences, and the problems that the world and the sciences suggest to me have, in recent years, been the source of more philosophical ideas than philosophy itself. My reading now consists almost exclusively of scientific papers, supplemented by the occasional philosophical book  that I pick up to brush up on some ideas.

Now I find myself closer than ever to what Bertrand Russell once wrote:

“… philosophy cannot be fruitful if divorced from empirical science. And by this I do not mean only that the philosopher should ‘get up’ some science as a holiday task. I mean something much more intimate: that his imagination should be impregnated with the scientific outlook, and that he should feel that science has presented us with a new world, new concepts and new methods not known in earlier times…” (My Philosophical Development)

At the turn of the previous century, Moore and Russell were very close, and Russell wrote how it was Moore’s influence that made it possible for him to abandon the then-current British idealism of F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart. But for as close as Moore and Russell were, in this particular they are revealed as exemplars of diametrically opposite philosophical tendencies.

I am not saying that there is any problem with being inspired to philosophical thought by peculiarly philosophical ideas – there are countless fascinating philosophical ideas that deserve to be developed on their own merits – but the particular trajectory of western civilization has meant that philosophy flourished immediately prior to a period of scientific stagnation, so that philosophy more-or-less developed in an intellectual vacuum for about two thousand years.

The re-emergence of science as an active and vigorous source of ideas for western civilization is an historically recent phenomenon, and the ancient discipline of philosophy needs to adjust itself to these changed conditions rather than to disappear into a traditionalism that would merely mean one more thoughtless casualty of the Hegelian slaughter-bench of history.

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Tagged: G. E. MooreRichard CartwrightJudith Jarvis ThompsonphilosophyBertrand Russell