Are today’s philosophers guilty of sophistry, in the Platonic sense?
The sophist is defined by Professor James Duerlinger as “a semblance in the form of a sage.” More specifically, “the sophist has the skill in disputation to produce semblances of truth in the souls of the young by the use of arguments that seem to establish the truth of conclusions when in fact they do not, thereby making them say things that are contrary to one another.”
It is obvious that just about nothing is “common knowledge” in philosophy. So who’s to say that a certain argument actually does or does not establish the truth of some conclusion? And if we can’t answer this, how do we know whether or not we’re sophists?
Some of the most respected philosophers are those who completely refute previous views they had held and argued for. If you can knock down your own previous views, it shows that you’re not biased or dogmatic.
Professor Duerlinger, as far as I can tell, hates the idea of bringing the pure world of Ancient Greek philosophy anywhere near contemporary analytic philosophy, and indeed, contemporary arguments are toothpicks thrown at an elephant when it comes to Socrates.
Are the greatest milestones in contemporary philosophy, such as Kripke’s causal theory of reference, anything more than skilled disputations that bring about the appearance of the truth of some conclusion?
I read on a website recently, when searching for some opinions about why more women aren’t analytic philosophers, the answer from some anonymous commenter: Women don’t like to waste their time.
After all, there are plenty of refutations to the causal theory of reference, and it is all but impossible that the resulting discussions will end in a “true” conclusion.
For me, philosophy is the only discipline in which questions are raised that I actually feel driven to entertain. I would bet that many philosophers have a similar motivation: questions in natural sciences, mathematics, psychology, or political science, just aren’t “big” enough.
But it’s starting to sound like “big questions” are just “questions without answers.” It follows from this that philosophy as a discipline is, at best, an exercise in hypothesis and the disputation of others’ hypotheses.
The Ancient Greeks held a higher opinion of philosophy than this: in general, the search for wisdom was thought to constitute the best possible life. “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Is the problem with contemporary philosophy simply that the literature is so massive that a philosopher can’t respectably put forth an argument without contextualizing it in the hot debates of the day? Or is this the most mature form of philosophical thought? And is this even recognizable as the best possible life?
Is philosophy a waste of time, or are we doing our best to emulate Socrates in a starkly different environment? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this question is most appropriately entertained by philosophers.
Is the problem with contemporary philosophy simply that the literature is so massive that a philosopher can’t respectably put forth an argument without contextualizing it in the hot debates of the day?
Yes.
Or is this the most mature form of philosophical thought?
No.
And is this even recognizable as the best possible life?
Probably.
Is philosophy a waste of time, or are we doing our best to emulate Socrates in a starkly different environment?
Socrates killed himself. Ergo, not to be emulated.
What is your preferred form of philosophical thought as the (probable) best possible life?
Socrates accepted his death sentence without fear. Aside from the fact that he spent his life doing what he believed to be the most noble endeavor, he claimed to have no reason to try to avoid death, despite the charges against him being ill-founded. While he supposedly did self-administer the hemlock, his “suicide” wasn’t in despair.
This is a very interesting post. I think that the example you mentioned, the causal theory of reference, is well-chosen. On the face of it, questions about the correct theory of reference for any set of terms are precisely the kind of questions that aren’t big enough. Sure it might be interesting to know how names or common nouns refer, but who really cares? Such issues don’t hold a candle to questions about justice, God, the meaning of life, the nature of the self, etc.
Of course it might be important if it is connected to one of these larger issues. And that is how Analytic philosophy began, with the intuition that some of the more important, larger questions, can be addressed by focusing on language. Rather than helping us address those big questions, however, Analytic philosophy has, to a large extent, come to be about the puzzles; focused on what most people outside of the world of academic philosophy would consider to be minutia.
I completely agree with your observation about what has been or can be proven. Two of the greatest advances in 20th century Analytic Philosophy (the causal theory or reference and the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction) cannot in any meaningful sense taken to be proven. Kripke’s arguments, Putnam’s arguments, Quine’s arguments, while brilliant and insightful, cannot reasonably be thought to amount to conclusive proof. There are too many equally brilliant arguments against their conclusions; and, at least with respect to Quine’s “discovery,” most contemporary philosophers completely ignore it. In fact, the only people to whom the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction matters are either students of Quine or else are working on the issue. Most of the rest don’t even care and carry on as if Quine never existed. So, we have some people who act as if a philosophical theory has been established, and others who remain doubtful about it, and still others who ignore it.
In such a climate it is very unclear to me how anything that might be called advancement is possible. The Cornell Realists (Brink, Boyd, Sturgeon), for example, use (a particular understanding of) the causal theory of reference to defend moral realism. But the theory thus depends upon a theory of meaning which has itself not been securely established. How is this progress?
Underlying all of this is the reality of being an academic philosopher and the requirements for getting tenure. You’ve got to publish, and papers that are narrowly focused and build off of or criticize the conclusions (however dubious) of our teachers are more likely to sound impressive and relevant than those that try to re-invent or re-focus philosophy. Since we have been caught up in minutia for so long, we are forced by the inertia of the field to continue to focus on these “small” issues.
If there is a different approach to contemporary philosophy that tries to recapture the appeal of the timeless questions, I think it must begin recognizing the intrinsic limitations of any kind of philosophical inquiry. In my experience, many philosophers are willing to admit that their pet theories are problematic (though they wouldn’t want to say that in print). We probably are never going to resolve the question of whether names refer causally or via description. So maybe it is a waste of time. Why not return to the larger issues, then? These may be no more resolvable, but at least trying to solve them is more interesting.