Jorge J. E. Gracia

Recent discussions of this issue have centered on the definition of the of philosophy in American public life and the ways of increasing philosophy's influence in the public arena.' This emphasis is prompted by the fact philosophers are worried about the future of the profession. After a tremendous expansion in the sixties, there has been a steady decline in the number college-teaching positions open to newly graduated philosophers. The market is bloated and Ph.D.'s in philosophy have increasing difficulty securing permanent jobs. The American Philosophical Association has tried to address this situation in various ways and discussions of the state and future of the profession, once rare, are becoming common. I am quite sure that part of the motivation for this panel involved these reasons. Today, however, I am not going to address the issue of jobs, or the ways which we can increase the influence of philosophy. Rather, I am going concentrate on only two questions: First, Does philosophy have a place contemporary American public life? Second, Should philosophy have a place American public life? Because my answer to the first question is going to be negative, I am also going to discuss some of the reasons why I believe philosophy does not play a role in American public life.

IN A PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS I believe the speaker is allowed more latitude than in a more ordinary speech. There is more freedom to explore and perhaps even preach. So I am going to do a bit of both. My chapter and verse, some of you will be surprised to know, is a passage from the preface to Foucault’s The Order of Things, in which he argues that categories are a matter of invention. This text has had enormous impact on the issue I wish to address today, and in many ways has helped to define it and to establish as definitive, in the minds of many of our contemporaries, the view that categories are invented.

At the time of his death in 1982, at the age of forty-five, and after a short career of only fifteen years, Jan Pinborg had established himself as one of the most important historians of medieval philosophy of the past quarter of a century. His contributions, scattered in more than ninety publications, including books and articles, were primarily in the areas of logic, semantics, and linguistics. This volume is a fitting memorial to his achievements both because it reflects the areas where Pinborg made contributions to the history of medieval philosophy and because the ten articles it contains illustrate the various historiographical genres to which Pinborg contributed: translations, editions, comprehensive historical accounts of the development of certain issues and concepts, general expositions of the overall philosophical doctrine of a particular author, specific studies of the positions of individual authors on a given problem, and detailed analytical discussions of pointed philosophical problems or texts.

For many years I have maintained that I learned to philosophize by translating Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputation V from Latin into English. This surely is a claim that must sound extraordinary to the members of this audience or even to most twentieth century philosophers. Who reads Suárez these days? And what could I learn from a sixteenth century scholastic writer that would help me in the twentieth century? I would certainly be surprised if one were to find any references to some of Suárez’s works in any of the works of twentieth-century major philosophers. One of the reasons for my claim is the great difficulty I had in figuring out what Suárez’s text means and how to render it understandable to English readers. Translating the text forced me to think in ways that were quite different from those I was used to think in Spanish, my native tongue, or English, my adoptive tongue. In fact, the translation I produced after having completed many drafts continued, and still continues to this day, to appear to me unsatisfactory, and that dissatisfaction was the key to understanding things I had understood very differently before. I hope to make clear why in what follows. The thesis that I defend is that semantic equivalence between texts of philosophy in different languages is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to achieve and, therefore, that it is a mistake to restrict doing analytic philosophy to English, as Gustavo Rodríguez-Pereyra argues we should do in a recent article (2013).