Pressed for time today. It seems with the kids on Spring Break, my routine is thrown all out of whack!
Philosophy is the disciplined, intellectual pursuit of understanding. Its most basic question, not coincidentally, is also what could be considered a religious one - Why is there something rather than nothing? The earliest westerners to earn the posthumous label "philosopher" attempted to address this question, and their scraps and fragments, and the reminiscences and summaries of later chroniclers still survive.
Philosophy has survived in the west through many permutations. For a very long period - from the rise of Christianity through the early modern period - it was indistinguishable from theology. Their concerns were intertwined. The great minds of metaphysics and ethics, logic and knowledge, were also churchmen.
In the early modern and modern era, there was a definite break, as it was thought possible to pursue questions of knowledge and social order without reference to God.
Like all human intellectual and artistic pursuits, whether they are science or literature, poetry or architecture, philosophy exists at any given time as a captive of the zeitgeist within which its practitioners live and breathe. "Philosophy" never exists apart from the particular men (and a few women) who philosophize. The questions they ask are usually thought, at the time, to address the most basic questions humans then living can ask.
Considering, then, philosophy as nothing more or less than a contingent human intellectual affair, reflecting certain criteria thought to be "philosophical" without any general definition of what that might entail, a question arises. As all the various human pursuits mentioned above grow and change, some even dying out (who writes epistolary novels anymore?), I have to wonder about the habit in philosophy of considering such disparate individuals as, say Aristotle and Kant, Ockham and Derrida, Parmenides and Heidegger, or Descartes and Quine, as discussion partners, contemporaneous with one another? Why is it that is considered perfectly sound and even intellectually acceptable to peruse a 12th, 16th, or even 19th century philosopher for clues to our contemporary condition when to do so, for example, in physics or biology would hardly be thought worthy of intellectual consideration?
It is for this reason that I approach the history of western thought historically. That is to say, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Montesquieu, and Whitehead (to name just a few) are important as markers in a tradition, to be sure. But markers are all they are. They give us a snapshot of questions and proffered possible responses to those questions at any given time, while not necessarily offering anything substantive to our current dilemmas. As any cursory reading of Rorty, say, or Cornell West, or Charles Taylor (a Hegel scholar of exacting proportions) will show, while some thinkers from different times and places are offered as giving insight (for Rorty is it Nietzsche and Heidegger, although his contemporaries Thomas Kuhn and Donald Davidson are among his biggest discussion partners; for West it is the socialist tradition, as well as the African-American tradition stemming from W.E.B. DuBois as well as the Frankfurt School; for Taylor, Hegel is the beginning, but so are others who wrestle with our current dilemma of identity, and how that is reflected in social organization), they also are quie clear they are addressing the here and now, the krisis offered by the collapse of western metaphysics and the possibility for a post-Enlightenment humanism, secular, prophetic, or Catholic (Rorty, West, Taylor) that addresses our conundrum in our own dialect.
Were we to ask a question about the luminiferous ether, say, as a serious proposal in physics; if we were to offer the perspective of proponents on the various humours as they impact human health; if we considered the relative proportions of the heavenly spheres in astronomy - we would be thought anti-intellectual in the extreme, and rightly so. Yet, philosophers who believe it possible to adduce a possible solution to certain contemporary questions from the writings of someone writing hundreds of years ago in a different language, social and cultural context, and addressing wholly different questions with a whole different set of assumptions lying behind his writing is thought to be not just legitimate, but occasionally profound.
I guess I'm just anti-intellectual because I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this entire approach.
Virtual Tin Cup
