This is part of an argument - hopefully respectful - I am attempting to have with Feodor. Time constraints limit me to only making a general sketch of my points, in hopes that clarification may come in comments. If you aren't interested, so sorry, but I consider this important enough to address at a bit of length and on its own.Over
here, I wanted to make clear what my philosophical position was, after having been tagged an "empiricist". Feodor's retort, which I blithely but unfairly, made sport of, was that there is little difference among various schools of thought that cannot be traced back to certain common sources (in this case, to the contract theory of Hobbes). In what follows, I wish to make my position
vis-a-vis this particular assertion clear, without belittling contrary points of view. That is to say, I will attempt to make my own position clear without assuming it is "the right one to have", whatever that may mean.
Let me begin by saying that the labels attached to various schools of philosophical thought tend to be attached afterward, although this is not always the case. The term "realist", for examples, has been applied to those whose thought, in some general way, follows on the tradition from Aristotle as filtered through his Arab and Roman Catholic interpreters, especially St. Thomas. There is a robust modern realist philosophy, complete with their own journal (
The Review of Metaphysics). The problem, of course, is that not every contemporary realist would consider him or herself a devotee of either Aristotle or St. Thomas, nor would every thinker who follows one or the other - or perhaps a student of one of Aristotle's Arab commentators - would consider him or herself "a realist". A good example would be Alistair MacIntyre, whose
After Virtue and
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? are attempts to recapture Aristotelian ethics as the best way to do ethics in the contemporary world. MacIntyre's work is especially interesting considering part of his argument for the efficacy of an Aristotelian approach to ethics is very post-modern, viz., that much of the steam of the Enlightenment project has long since vanished (MacIntyre, himself a long-time commentator on Hume, does have a bit of expertise on this matter), and is even counter-productive considering among the legacies of the Enlightenment are the Terror and the Holocaust, not to mention the multiple inhumanities of various Marxist states.
Since there is something a bit anachronistic about the use of labels, as well as misleading due to the ways various thinkers assign them to themselves and others, it is always a risky business to engage in the equivalent of name-calling. At the same time, there are good reasons why such labels have been attached to various philosophers in the past. By grouping people as disparate as, say, Descartes and Berkeley on the one hand and Hume and Smith on the other in different schools (rationalist and empiricist, respectively), and creating a demarcation between the thought of Immanuel Kant and those who came after (usually in a line starting with Fichte, moving through Schelling, then finally to Hegel) is a good way to organize,
ex post facto, the way human thought changes. In these two ways, we have a way to start taking what various thinkers have to say seriously, by linking common traits and habits and assumptions on the one hand, and in rough historical terms.
There is a link between these two that I would like to amplify. Philosophical schools are not only linked by common concerns, assumptions, and even methods. They also tend to be linked in time. The rationalists tend to be lumped, in general, chronologically starting with Descartes. The empiricists usually count John Locke, then move through various British and Scottish thinkers. There are, obviously by the name, Hegelians and Marxists - the latter still cluttering up various university departments - and even the occasional positivist (Ernst Mach is often thought of as the first, with Rudolf Carnap being the most well-known and most tedious example of the genre). Each had a heyday of sorts, or at least a period when others of like concern could argue amongst themselves without a whole lot of recourse to explanation as to assumptions, methods, etc. Yet, as time has passed, so has the period in which these various schools were ascendant. Even though there are Thomists who use the label quite self-consciously, I would find it difficult to conceive of a "pure" Thomist for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is there is much in St. Thomas that is "dodgy", to use a favorite British term I like.
British empiricism, running roughly from the late-17th through the late-18th centuries, concerned itself with certain questions considered fundamental to the early-modern project - how is it we human beings can say we "know" something? Of what would such "knowledge", properly understood, consist? What is the proper organizing of human society in order that justice, as a commonly understood predicate of human society, can reign? Their starting point was pretty simple - what human beings "know" the acquire through their senses, primarily sight. Thus, only "empirical knowledge" (which Kant changed to "experience") owns the name in any way that is defensible. There are no "innate ideas", nor are there "clear and distinct ideas", as any skeptical critique demonstrates. Of course, Hume took such skepticism a bit further, applying it to empiricism itself, showing that even "empirical knowledge" gained through the senses hardly warrants the basis of a theory of knowledge.
A pragmatist, by contrast, thinks this entire project silly. The questions asked by empiricists are not questions that are either interesting or particularly fruitful. Part of the reason for this attitude is the passage of time. Locke, Hume, Smith did not have the historical experience of the French Revolution and the ensuing Bonapartist counter-revolution. They did not have the intellectual legacy of Darwin and Mendel, of Freud and Nietzsche, of two world wars, of Einstein and Heisenberg. These historical facts and intellectual revolutions mean something for a pragmatist. Of what possible use is it to think that philosophy can pronounce judgment on "the Truth" as a philosophical concept, transcendent of time and space, in an age that recognizes the contingency of human agency? Of what possible benefit is there in insisting that "our" understanding of the good society is a glimpse of The Good as a transcendental, other than to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness, profundity, and insight? Does such a claim clinch an argument? Is it even possible to defend?
The big difference, then, between empiricism as a philosophical school and pragmatism as an ongoing project, then, is one not so much of "overcoming" the problems of the past, as it is recognizing them for what they really are - historical contingencies rather than glimpses of the Eternal entering time - and setting them aside. This does not mean there aren't important and interesting things for philosophy to do, or important questions still to be asked. The difference, however, is the insistence that philosophy needs to rid itself of the conceit that it sits in the place of Plato's philosopher-kings, a tribunal of last resort judging among various human intellectual and political and juridical pursuits, and proclaiming them either correct or not. It is the temptation to believe it necessary to ask questions, and seek answers, in such a way that the end result is something "beyond language" or even "beyond thought". The True. The Good. Even, The Beautiful.
If there is, indeed, something "behind" a sentence that makes it not just true, but "True", yet what "that" is cannot of its very nature be expressed, what possible good is done by making such a claim? If some form of social organization is not only just, but Just, yet what that is cannot be spelled out in words, has anything of value or insight been said?
The questions an 18th century British empiricist would still consider of vital importance, a 21st century American pragmatist shrugs his or her shoulders at, sets them to one side, and asks a completely different set of questions. Precisely because we do not live in 18th century Great Britain, but in the early years of the 21st century in America.
As for the road analogy - a 21st century road follows an 18th century road - I would counter that this is just factually inaccurate. Leaving north out of my hometown of Waverly, NY is New York Route 34, which begins in my humble village of origin, and winds up in Syracuse, after traversing through Ithaca and other scenic and not-so-scenic places. Along the way, about five miles north of Waverly, to the east about one hundred yards, is a parallel road, names "Old Route 34". At one time, Route 34 took a very different path, at least through this particular stretch of land, having been moved west ever so slightly, for reasons whether of smoothing the ride, engineering or whatnot. While the difference may seem trivial, it was certainly necessary enough to build an entirely new stretch of road slightly to the west of the original.
Similarly, New York Route 17, which stretches from New York City, travels up through the Catskills and across the southern tier of New York all the way past Jamestown, ending just to the west of Erie, PA, was superseded during the late 1960's and early 1970's by a four-lane highway of the same name. Opened early due to lack of funds to continue the project (as well as the pressure put on local communities due to the Watkins Glen Music Festival in 1971, forcing the highway to become a large parking lot from Bath to Binghamton), the four-lane, limited access highway became a suburban thoroughfare through the communities of Horseheads and Corning. For years, one had to go right through downtown Corning. Until, that is, in the 1980's, funds were assigned to build a by-pass. Similarly, one no longer has to stop at traffic lights in Horseheads, as a similar by-pass has been constructed so traffic can flow without the inconvenience of having to stop and start (as well as ridding the world of the speed trap on west bound Route 17 as one comes in to Horseheads and is forced, on an almost 90-degree blind curve to slow to 40 mph). In other words, over time, better ways of building roads are discovered that don't follow the old paths.
UPADTE: I realize this post is already too long and much too dull, but I just wanted to put up a quote from Richard Rorty that makes my point far better than I have been able to do. This is from pp.xxxviii-xxxix of the Introduction to
The Consequences of Pragmatism:
The question of whether the pragmatist is right to be so sanguine [i.e., hopeful that the prospect of a post-Philosophical culture will be better than the previous] is the question of whether a culture is imaginable, or desirable, in which no one- or at least no intellectual - believes that we have, deep down inside us, a criterion for telling whether we are in touch with reality or not, when we are in the Truth. This would be a culture in which neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more "rational," more more "scientific" or "deeper" than one another. No particular portion of culture would be singled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired. There would be no sense that, beyond the current intra-disciplinary criteria, which, for example, good priests or good physicists obeyed, there were other, transdisciplinary, transcultural, ahistorical criteria, which they also obeyed. There would still be hero-worship in such a culture, but it would not be worship of heroes as children of the gods, as marked off from the rest of mankind by closeness to the immortal. It would simply be admiration of exceptional men and women who were very good at doing the quite diverse kinds of things they did. Such people would not be those who knew a Secret, who had won through to the Truth, but simply people who were good at being human.
