Photo of A.J. Ayer
In “Philosophy’s Flights” in last Sunday’s Review (NY Times,
7/1/12), Jim Holt asks “Is Philosophy Literature?” He’s talking about analytic
philosophers, philosophers of language like Bertrand Russell and later Thomas Nagel, Phlippa Foot (of trolley problem fame), Harvard’s Hilary
Putnam, Kwame Apiah, and Colin McGinn who all ultimately came to the fore as a reaction against the unverifiable propositions of metaphysics. Of course today there
are philosophers like Derek Parfit whose On What Matters attempts to bridge the gap between the limitations of the subjective (utilitarian) mind and broader ethical considerations. By the way, Holt’s piece is a selection from a
longer series called The Stone, which
can be found on the Times blog. Holt answers his own question with a
resounding yes but not before he makes the following qualification (in the
longer version) which is reminiscent of those commercials for new urine flow
medications on CNN that offer a list of disclaimers. “Today analytic philosophy
has a broader scope then it used to...it’s less obsessed with
dissecting languages; its more continuous with the sciences (this partly due to
the American philosopher Willard Quine who argued that language really has no
fixed system of meanings for philosophers to analyze). Yet whether they are
concerned with the nature of consciousness, of space-time or of the good life,
analytic philosophers continue to lay heavy stress on logical rigor in their
writings. The result, according to Martha Nussbaum (herself a sometime member
of the tribe), is a prevailing style that is ‘correct, scientific, abstract,
hygienically pallid’—a style meant to serve as ‘a kind of all-purpose
solvent.’” In this little passage Holt takes back what he giveth away and it’s
funny that missing from his list is the ne
plus ultra of all language philosophy A.J. Ayer’s wondrous Language, Truth and Logic which does for
analytic philosophy what Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style did for grammar. Still there are two exhibits that Holt offers in
defense of analytic philosophy as literature, Quine’s article “On What There
Is” which Holt comments “can be read over and over again, like a poem” and Saul
Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, a
compendium of three Princeton lectures which don’t contain “a dogmatic or pompous
word...and not a dull one either” that seem de
rigueur for anyone interested in his initial query. And then there are the first
and last lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “The world is everything that is the
case” and “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wasn’t
Wittgenstein the master of philosophical haiku?
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Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Philosophy's Flights
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