Barry Allen

Solipsism is the strangest creature in philosophy’s menagerie. It seems just that its defense should be so simple and reasonable. As similarity or difference in the length of things presuppose their commensurability in respect of spatial extension, so similarity and difference between conscious subjects presuppose the commensurability of their experience. But comparing what I feel with what I fail to feel seems worse than inconvenient. Like location and duration or color and quantity, these seem strictly incommensurable. Yet just as a fact of the matter about things’ length presupposes their commensurability, so a fact of the matter about others’ experience presupposes intersubjective commensurability. If, then, it is not merely difficult but a priori impossible to compare experiences, there seems but one explanation: the grand and solitary thought that I alone am the unique subject of experience.

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.

Locke's introduction of the word semeiotikē is well known. His claim that what he calls ideas are "signs or representations" of things outside of the mind has been interpreted as an early insight into the original cognitive role of signs. But the most unexpected claim to be made about Locke by a contemporary semiotician is that his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is formally inconsistent in what it says of ideas as signs, the claim of John Deely in several writings. For Locke, ideas are the first or direct objects of understanding, thought, and perception. What makes this inconsistent, Deely thinks, is that Locke also says ideas are signs. According to Deely, that is a contradiction and cannot be true. However, it is a reasonable principle that outright contradiction in a text is less likely than misinterpretation. This need not always be the case, of course, but the principle is sound, and there is a presumption against Deely's claim. I shall show that the presumption is not discharged by his arguments, and that the allegation of inconsistency in Locke's semiotic is implausible and unproven.

Instead of following the behaviorists and abandoning the concept of experience, Dewey wanted to reconstruct it. Dewey was an ardent Darwinist, so whatever experience is, it has to be an evolved, presumably adaptive power. “Experience” became for him one word for the multiplex relation between the evolved, adapted organism and its environment. Human environments include groups and social relations mediated by language. But “experience” is not centered there, or restricted to the use of language. Experience comprises our total interaction with the environment. It is with this experience that knowledge begins and where its value is proved.

Putnam’s work of the last ten years or so shifts concepts and problems from metaphysics to ethics, reconceiving of objectivity and truth in terms of an intersubjective, dialogic rightness in our relationships with others. The timelessness of metaphysics, however, is a quality these concepts and problems lose in the new setting. Like Putnam I too hope there is a future for the practice of philosophy as a discipline. But he abandons himself to wishful thinking when he says that ‘philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity’ (PP.247). He may say that ‘the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place’ (PP.247). But he has no alchemy to transmute this negative proposition into a proof of something eternal for philosophers to contemplate.

Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic of knowledge, the direction of inquiry itself? Might not the best ethics of knowledge teach that certain directions of inquiry are forbidden, like a trespass against personal privacy?

A. PHILLIPS GRIFFITHS ed. The Impulse to Philosophise. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992. Pp. viii + 240. ISBN 0-521-43981-7 (paper). Is metaphilosophy a profitable subject for philosophical discussion? It is exceeding difficult to say anything worth while on the subject. None of the contributors to this collection appreciates this difficulty. Most are satisfied with anodyne cliches about `critical reflection' and clearing up muddles. Yet this metaphilosophy is not quite what it seems. The contributors (all British) do not indulge in what Frederic Raphael calls the `vindictive modesty to which British practitioners were much disposed in the 1950s' (62). In other words, they no longer claim that the muddle is the philosophers' own doing, so that the best philosophy would (as Wittgenstein said) let one stop `doing philosophy' when one wanted. Instead, we human beings just have confused concepts. They're everywhere. `Conceptual confusion is deadly,' Mary Midgely writes, hopefully. `A great deal of it affects our everyday life. It needs to be seen to' (142). We `live in a constant, and constantly increasing, conceptual mess,' and `unless we acknowledge the resulting shameful confusions and do something to sort them out, none of our projects, whether grand or mundane, is likely to come to much' (150). Why confusion is shameful rather than stimulating is not explained. Neither is the assumption that a distinctly `conceptual' sort of confusion is a serious impediment to good works. Lots of projects have succeeded in the eons of history, and it is unlikely that `conceptual confusion' and not, say, lack of cash or solidarity, stands in the way of more of the same, grand or mundane. Midgely says, `the alternative to getting a proper philosophy is continuing to use a bad one. It is not avoiding philosophy altogether, because that is impossible' (147). It is impossible only if the word `philosophy' is tacitly construed in vague and global terms as, say, `how things hang together.' But whatever we doctors of philosophy learn in graduate school, it is nothing that makes us especially good at revising the Weltanschauung. Everybody does a little of that. How much conceptual plumbing one does and how well has nothing to do with one's relationship to the historical discourse of Western philosophy, or one's commitment to the practice of philosophy as a discipline, or with the problem of its self-understanding in the institutional setting of the contemporary research university. None of the contributors has a fresh idea about what it should mean to practice philosophy as a discipline today. They intone comfy bromides about clearing away `conceptual confusion,' `getting clear,' the `struggle to reflect on ourselves,' and so on. Nobody asks hard questions. For instance how one tells conceptual from other kinds of confusion, error, or infelicity. Can one distinguish reliably and without ideology or polemic between somebody's `conceptual confusion' and a difference of belief about a subject? Can one speak of `conceptual' confusions at all without falling into problematic dichotomies like analytic/synthetic, scheme/content, apriori/aposteriori, necessary/contingent? And what does the doctor of philosophy really know that makes her or him so good at doing something constructive with confusion? Despite my skepticism about their impulsive metaphilosophy several of these essays are enjoyable to read. Most contributors begin or end by deploring our confused concepts, thanking goodness for philosophers to clarify them, then using most of their time to say something interesting about whatever they've been working on. Anthony Palmer states the obvious — `there is no single reason why people are led to philosophise' (161) — and then unfolds an interpretation of representation in the Tractatus. As an engaging introduction to a fundamental problem in the theory of rational choice Martin Hollis's `Trouble with Leprechauns' is a pleasure to read. As an attempt to show that `philosophy flourishes on the border between closed and open questions' (25), it makes no advance on the problem of the institutional and disciplinary integrity of philosophy. Stuart Brown connects Wittgenstein's idea of `family resemblance' to the practice of philosophy itself, drawing a conclusion contrary to Wittgenstein's own metaphilosophical pronouncements: `philosophy is a large family of pursuits, variously though not all closely related to one another' (42). What unity there may be in these pursuits is historical. `We do not really understand what philosophy is unless we have come to terms with how it has been conceived in the past. For philosophy would not be what it is apart from that past' (45). But neither would physics, or poetry, or theology, or pop music be what they are apart from their past. I'm afraid that if we turn to `how it [philosophy] has been conceived in the past,' we shall find only more banality: `the pursuit of truth,' `theoretical knowledge,' `science,' `wisdom' — these are the terms in which the philosophi have always described their enterprise. Aristotle and Descartes cannot be expected to see the difference we do between their research in anatomy and their proof of god. The way the universities and the whole production of knowledge are presently organized makes this insouciance about `philosophy' difficult today. If we cannot say what we philosophers particularly do, our niche in the research university is threatened. But it is no good looking to the past to find hints about how to conceive that institutional and disciplinary identity. We would be looking for answers to a problem that no one grappled with before the rise of the modern research university earlier in our century. Colin Radford writes, `when we do philosophy we are engaged in reflective, critical thought. We are puzzled — or merely intrigued — by some matter, and trying to understand and sort it out' (1). How does that differ from `doing physics' or `doing history' or `doing a novel'? Physicists engage in critical reflection on their concepts. Historians propose and evaluate arguments. Novelists try to understand and sort out what puzzles (or merely intrigues) them. Brenda Almond says of philosophy, `its single core element is the use of argument' (215). Philosophers love that argument. But argument obviously happens right across the disciplines. Professional philosophers have neither a special talent for it, nor privileged criteria for evaluating it, nor (if truth be told) an especial respect for it. Unless we can do better than the banal reassurances these essays proffer the practice of philosophy will continue to lack a self-understanding of its disciplinary integrity. BARRY ALLEN McMASTER UNIVERSITY.

Gilles Deleuze has a growing readership in English philosophy, where for long he was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original and fascinatingly intricate philosophy. He worked with integrity and genius to do something different in philosophy from everything he was hearing in contemporaries. None of the familiar labels—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics—apply to him. One thing he shares with all of these movements, however, is a conviction of Nietzsche’s importance, and his Nietzsche and Philosophy is second only to Heidegger in influencing how we understand Nietzsche’s accomplishment. The passion for Nietzsche sets Deleuze apart from another quasi-outsider whom he somewhat resembles—Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is another original, who wanted to do something new and different in philosophy, and not become mired in a polemic about “metaphysics” and whether it is finished. Shaviro thinks philosophy would be a lot different if Whitehead had enjoyed the attention the last century lavished on Heidegger and continues to lavish on Nietzsche. He epitomizes their difference in terms of their guiding question. Heidegger asks, What is the meaning of being? Whitehead asks, How is it that there is always something new? For Heidegger, metaphysics has always said the same, a monotonous litany of the names of Being. Whitehead is interested not in what metaphysics has always said, but what it has never yet said, even denied and rejected: the body, emotion, inconstancy, change, contingency, perspective. Deleuze writes appreciatively of Whitehead, but learns more from Bergson (whose current renaissance is largely his doing). Deleuze’s books are terrifically hard to read. There is nothing like them in our philosophical literature. He expects serious readers to struggle, and seems almost maliciously to exacerbate the encounter. Skeptics may wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Increasingly, though, an English readership is finding that it is. Shaviro’s book is more about Whitehead than Deleuze, but that is because he thinks that if we like Deleuze we should like Whitehead, too, and forget about Heidegger and Nietzsche. When he quotes Whitehead, saying “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true,” I wonder if he might not be half right.

The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know.

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought the conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic cliches: Males are passionate, armed, and ornamented, females coy and drab, conflict inevitable and ubiquitous. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as “pure ideology.” “A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect.” All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation, meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and much underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by Evolutionary Psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that “sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough,” and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology “is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export.” If you research any field affected by the claims of Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology, or the Selfish Gene, you may want to study this book.

There is a difference between the marginal and the specialized. Both are little groups, often hard for others to understand. The difference is that specializations successfully reconstitute themselves as new centers. They are not marginal; they are specialized. Specialization is chosen and active; the specialists themselves choose to go off on their own. Who chooses marginalization? The margins cannot reconstitute a new center. Imagine writing a proposal for a Center for Marginal Philosophy! It is the activity at the center that makes the margins marginal. There is a difference, too, between marginal philosophy and the marginally philosophical. Marginally philosophical work says nothing new and excites no one except the ill-informed. The work has no philosophical creativity, and experienced readers feel so and, therefore, turn away. The marginally philosophical does not go very far. By contrast, marginal philosophy has gone too far — too far astray from the center.

ABSTRACT Richard Rorty transforms classical American philosophy in a way that overcomes some of the ideological limitations of the first pragmatists, and responds to contemporary currents in European thought. Odo Marquard is not a well-known name in English-speaking philosophy, despite two well-translated collections of philosophical essays. Rorty knew Marquard and his work, but to my knowledge he never discussed it in print. Following four themes in their work—skepticism, contingency, the value of philosophy, and the relation of knowledge and myth—I develop some of their agreement, without neglecting the differences that comparison brings to light, and which also allow us to gauge Rorty’s concessions (if that is what they are) to European postmodernism. Rorty is as historicist as Marquard, but he does not extract the same skeptical lesson. For him, skepticism is a means to an end, a way of getting over philosophy, to clear the way for something unimaginably different. For Marquard, skepticism about matters of principle is a place to stay, a philosophy to live with. I would expect Marquard to be skeptical, perhaps gratefully skeptical, that Rorty’s pragmatism can perform as advertised, and really make philosophy pass into the past.

Wikipedia currently exists in 270 languages, with more than 20 million articles. The English-language Wikipedia has 2.5 billion words, sixty times the size of Britannica. It may be the largest collaborative initiative in history, and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Wikipedia’s distinctive feature is the non-expert, non-professional, non-certified, non-formal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at that, even as more of us acknowledge Wikipedia, support it, and use it in teaching. And why should we not warm to it? The rules of Wikipedia discourse are modeled after an ideal academy. Arguments, not personal attacks or status, carry the day. It may be the most scientific encyclopedia ever; it is as self-correcting as anything in science. Purposeful, enduring bias, departing tendentiously from dominant beliefs of the academic community does not prevail. Peer control is high, procedures many and fanatically enforced. There are no back channels. Every editorial act is recorded and archived and remains on the record forever. Since its inception Wikipedia has promoted itself as an encyclopedia anyone can edit, and some three hundred thousand editors contribute each month. Some of them are not even human beings. In 2002, an algorithmic bot added thirty thousand articles in one week on US cities and towns. However, there is evidence that Wikipedia is not as welcoming of new editors as it once was and as its ideology still enjoins. Despite the policy of consensus, conflict fuels Wikipedia growth. Conscious collaboration is rare, most interaction among editors occurs when they disagree. Jemielniak, an editor and administrator with six years experience on both the English and Polish Wikipedia, has many tales about “edit wars,” when even the smallest inconsistency unleashes waves of uninhibited criticism. Why does Wikipedia work? In theory, it should not. In practice, it seems to be a new paradigm of organization, whose breezy anti-credentialism tosses traditional hierarchies of knowledge production to the wind.

Derrida proposes "to restore the original and non-derivative character of signs, in opposition to classical metaphysics." One effect is "to eliminate a concept of signs whose whole history and meaning belongs to the adventure of the metaphysics of presence." The formula "nothing outside the text" registers this effect. "Nothing outside the text" does not mean "prison-house of language." Neither does it mean that everything is a sign. But to differentiate signs ontologically from something which is emphatically not itself a sign, something which would have a being of its own, a self-identity or nature unconditioned by the artificial contrivances of nomenclature, is untenable, or at least arbitrary. It has no obvious, self-evident basis in uncontroversial facts about the phenomena of verbal meaning.

According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for Analytic philosophers, with their snuffy ideas about their own rigor, and their complacent indifference to anything unfamiliar or difficult. Derrida emerges as a same-sayer, saying the same as Quine, who says the same as Davidson, who says the same as Wittgenstein. The same old same old. Analytic philosophers should find this comforting. Others may worry that it might be true.

Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of performance art, especially dance.

Similarities between Daoism and Chan (Zen) are often merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of a vocabulary that seems Daoist only to a point, and then departs in a predictable way. What makes the departure predictable is the completely different understanding of emptiness in Chan and Daoism, supporting a no less different understanding of the value of knowledge. Daoism remains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Buddhist wisdom exhausts life, extinguishes it, does not nourish it, and therefore cannot satisfy the Daoist conviction concerning the value of knowledge.