Barry Allen

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

From Laozi to Bertrand Russell via Nagarjuna, Lucretius, the nonexistent Saint Katherine of Alexandria, and many more, each of Sorensen's twenty-two chapters pairs a philosopher with an expression of nothing. It may be the nonexistence of the planet Vulcan, which never did exist; of Socrates, who is no more; or the discombobulating, semi-nonexistence of shadows, reflections, vanishing points, borders, and holes. Infinite void surrounds the Stoic cosmos, and infinite void separates the atoms of Epicurus. Sartre found enough in nothingness to write a whole book about it, or at least half of one (L’être et le néant). Parisians queued at the Louvre to see the dusty space where Mona Lisa once existed. The painting was stolen in 1911. Even Franz Kafka made a visit to see what was not there, or to see its absence. Sorensen recounts how a nonexistent scientific article, unpublished in a nonexistent journal, has been cited over one thousand times. So it may be his private joke that this book contains a discomfiting quantity of letters that do not exist where they should—otherwise known as typos—one every eighteen pages on average. The first one that I noticed makes looking for others fun. Here is a line exactly as printed on page 104: “In 1440 Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation of Constantine could have been written in the fourth century.” The missing word is “not.” Nobody's perfect.

This paper discusses arguments from my recent book, Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene (2021). I discuss the origin of empiricism in ancient Greek medicine, and its merger with experimental research in the modern period. I also discuss the arguments of recent critics of empiricism, including W. V. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. I introduce a distinction between theorematic and problematic empiricism and show how this difference divides the various empiricisms of history. My conclusions are: 1. Knowledge requires experience; results have to be tested, which takes experience. 2. The “experience” of empirical philosophy is the experience from which we learn. 3. Experimental values are many, but truth is not one of them. 4. Empiricism began as an antidote to rationalism, and that remains its vocation today.

Kant empahtically denied that living forms unfold according to a mechanical law. Yet if living nature were not law-like, natural science would be futile. The justification for a concept of purposiveness is to ensure “the lawfulness of the contingent” against the last exception. It was not until we learned to think about contingency without effacing it that natural history crossed the threshold of a science, Darwin leading the way. While his theory of evolution proposes mechanical explanations for a wide range of natural historical phenomena, the explanations do not overcome but actually presuppose life’s ultimate contingency.

This thesis offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and its connection with the Tractatus. I argue that sameness ontologically as well as epistemologically depends on the existence of standards. I defend an interpretation of Wittgensteinian criteria as such standards. I criticize the interpretation of criteria as noninductive evidence, and the idea that the difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations is that between realist and anti-realist semantical theories. I argue instead for continuity between Davidson and the later Wittgenstein. ;I then argue that a concern with intentionality is at the center of Wittgenstein's early philosophy by showing how an underlying conception of intentionality, and the conditions it imposes on representation, motivate the principle features of the Tractatus. From this perspective continuities with Kant's first Critique are developed. I then argue that one main concern of the Investigations is to criticize the tractarian conception of intentionality. Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following uses the criterial dependence of sameness to attack his earlier thesis that representation requires an identity of form between the object and the content of an intentional act. This leads him to conclude that the central problem of the Tractatus does not admit of coherent formulation. ;Three final chapters draw out some implications of this interpretation. Chapter 6, on Kripke's Interpretation of Wittgenstein, dissolves the skeptical problem Kripke attributes to him. Chapter 7 replaces Malcolm's reading of the private language argument with a decisively different one. Chapter 8 defends the role of expressive behavior as criterial for the capacity for feeling; attacks the idea of the incorrigibility of the mental; and answers Wittgenstein's question about what is left over from arm-raising less the rising arm by way of explaining a distinction between basic and nonbasic action-descriptions in the context of a Davidsonian philosophy of action.

The claim that chimpanzees make and use tools stands on two feet. One is a simplistic conception of tool; the other is a range of field observations, whose interpretation is not always as ingenuous and objective as their advocates suggest. An important difference little attended to by friends of the chimpanzee’s tool concerns how little their way of life seems to hang on their so-called tools. For us nearly everything does. Without tools, chimpanzees would find other things to eat. But without our tools we are not a naked ape thrown back on its animal nature. We are an nonviable species rapidly heading for extinction. Tools belong to the very ecology of our evolved form of life. The myth of the chimpanzee’s tool has already proved damaging in the history and philosophy of technology. It obscures the unique contribution of technical culture to human ecology, which has no counterpart among chimpanzees. The myth has also inspired the bizarre idea that there is something arbitrary about technical culture — that in a sense we could do without it. That is certainly a mistake, and more serious than a specialist’s error, because any decision about the chimpanzee’s tool is replete with implications for understanding our humanness.

What is truth? The all-time stumper question. I don't see why people find truth enigmatic though. It is not especially difficult to say what truth is. First, truth is a logical value, a value assigned to the propositional contents of beliefs or statements. And truth is an economic value, a matter of currency. As for money or prices, so also for truth: to be is to circulate, to be exchanged. Philosophers have amused themselves by wondering whether, in the complete absence of human practice, it would still be true that, say, there are mountains or mammals, or that water is H2O, or hydrogen more common than gold. You might as well wonder whether bread would still be cheaper than aircraft. Absent our economy, there is no residual determination for true and false. These values have no determination or reality apart from a formal, logico-linguistic order we impose on signifying action, speech first of all. Two or three hundred million years from now, it will no longer be true that two and two are four. It will not be false either, since we will not exist. No truth is eternal. To the great disappointment of rationalists everywhere, death trumps logic.

“A Pluralistic Universe” began as James’s Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, 1908. He repeated the lectures at Harvard and they were published the following year. Writing from Cambridge, and alluding to his last experiment with public lectures, recently published as Pragmatism (1907), he told his friend that the new commission “doom[s] me to relapse into the ‘popular lecture’ form just as I thought I had done with it forever.... I find that my free and easy personal way of writing, especially in ‘Pragmatism,’ has made me an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds, and I am rather tired of awakening that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably destine me to increase.”

Samuel Butler is usually remembered for Erewhon, widely considered among the best English satires. He also contributed to philosophical biology in works that collectively compose the nineteenth century's finest statement of the evolutionary argument associated with the name of Lamarck. In writing on evolution, Butler was not presenting science for a popular audience but deliberately intervening in the scientific argument about Darwinism. Surprised by the success of his first venture in philosophical biology, Life and Habit, Butler committed himself to the project of developing an alternative to Darwinism, which he did in three additional volumes, and these are the works canvassed in this “delayed book review.”

From Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl to Albrecht von Haller, Germans of the eighteenth century calved off an experimental physiology from medicine and made this research a centerpiece of their new model university, first under Haller at Göttingen, then under von Humboldt at Berlin. Haller made Göttingen the most important center for the advancement of Enlightenment science in Germany, but that is not where Johann Herder went looking for new ideas in psychology, turning instead to France, avidly studying Condillac and Diderot, and meeting the latter in Paris in 1769. Herder wanted to use French psychology in his theory of how the history of art recapitulates the development of the senses. To work out his ideas he found it necessary to ignore Kant's careful distinction between life and matter. Kant made life an inexplicable boundary for mechanical explanation, though with Herder it became the key concept for interpreting nature. That all the forces in the physical world are held to express one organizing, integrating vital principle is what excited Goethe about Herder's work and provoked the Naturphilosophie that Schelling invented at this time in close collaboration with Goethe.

This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers’ interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result was to define a pragmatism saturated with nominalism and suppressing the most original qualities of the sources that he celebrated.

Living in Time is a book about the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), once the most famous philosopher in the world, though now seldom considered, especially not in Anglophone philosophy. This is regrettable, as Bergson is a great philosopher, and this book explains why. There is a chapter on each of Bergson’s four major works, explaining his theories of time, perception, memory, and panpsychic consciousness, his innovative concept of virtual existence, his objection to Darwin, his controversy with Einstein, his philosophy of creative evolution, and his social philosophy of closed and open society. Bergson is without doubt the most profound thinker about time since antiquity. In referring to time we refer to duration, which is always an interval, never instantaneous, and therefore always marked by differences of past and present. This duration is real, that is, not imaginary or subjective, and it is effective, a power for change, as we see in geology and the evolution of life. Classical arguments for determinism fallaciously apply spatial concepts to consciousness. Once we take time seriously, which means acknowledging its reality as duration and its difference from space, the arguments for determinism become insupportable. Bergson’s ideas on time and evolution open a context for a comparison with Nietzsche, which the book develops in detail, exposing both philosophical concurrence and systematic difference. The conclusion discusses the question of Bergson and naturalism and summarizes the ontology of the virtual that emerges as the book’s argument unfolds.

In Difference and Repetition, Charles Darwin was the philosopher of individuals and the priority of individual differences. His theory of evolution inaugurated ‘the thought of individual difference’. (DR 248) For Darwin, the individual and its differences come first. Species-specific characteristics do not exist until natural selection does its work on individual differences over geological time. It is not the individual that is derivative in relation to the genus of the species, which was the conclusion of Aristotlean science. Rather, it is the species that ‘is an illusion—inevitable and well founded, it is true—in relation to the play of the individual and individuation.... It is the individual which is above the species and precedes the species in principle’. (DR 250) Twelve years later, in A Thousand Plateaus, a neo-Darwinist theme intrudes. Individuals are described as effects of populations. Species-identity (‘form’) depends on codes, and codes apply only to populations, not individuals. ‘Organic form depends on an autonomous code’, a neo-Darwinist mantra they repeat four times in less than ten pages. Individuals are coded because they emerge amid populations that are coded, and changes in code primarily affect populations by affecting the ability of the code to propagate, which requires the agency of individual organisms. No code is impervious to decoding, organically expressed as mutation, genetic drift, and the re-purposing of redundancy. Fragments of code transfer across forms symbiotically. All organic forms become machinic, interlocking partial objects in an ecological economy. Forms depend on populations, populations imply codes, codes undergo decoding and displacement, natural selection does its work, and the rest is history.

Dewey was a pragmatist, and pragmatism is an empiricism. I think Dewey would insist that his empirical orientation in the theory of knowledge is not independent of his democratic orientation in social philosophy. In my discussion today, I shall pursue three questions. One is how Dewey saw the connection between empiricism and democracy. Another question is whether there is a comparable empiricism in Chinese tradition. A third question is whether ideas of knowledge and ideas of government are really as close as Dewey, American Pragmatism, and indeed Western philosophy as a tradition tend to assume they are.

The work of French philosopher Raymond Ruyer (1902–87) is making a belated appearance in English translation with the publication of these two works. Ruyer is a philosopher of science who continues a French tradition of finding Lamarck neglected and Darwin overrated. Ruyer is also among those who think the best hints for problems of evolutionary biology come from the theory of development. He advances arguments seldom aired in Anglophone philosophy, including a rehabilitation of biological teleology, a reformulation of the problem of consciousness, and a new statement of panpsychism. Finalist or teleological action advancing life-cycle goals is a primitive characteristic of life, and for Ruyer it is the primary expression of consciousness. He departs from default positions in Anglophone philosophy when he declines to equate consciousness with either mental representation or neurological action. Consciousness comes with organic form and is coextensive with life and even surpasses it, as Ruyer finds the activity characteristic of consciousness in all natural physical forms. This is his new panpsychism: nature is full of consciousness. Bergson lit the fuse of neofinalism when he dismissed biological finality as an inverted mechanism no less defective than its specular counterpart. What makes Ruyer's finalism new is its replacement of a Platonic-Christian teleology with a new theory based on a Stoic model, which includes the idea of a universe that is one ultimate domain of finality—a kosmos, with all finalist activity harmoniously one finalist activity: deus sive natura.

We tend to think of art and technology as having no important connection. What starker opposition than between the Artist and the Engineer: the irrational dreamer and the rigorous realist, the indulgent devotee of subjectivity and the austere technician? We tend not to think that engineering might be enhanced by the love of beauty, or that it is impossible to be a really good engineer without understanding art. Yet we depend on essentially aesthetic, artistic skills in engineers, the capacity to feel technically and construct aesthetically. The creativity, the innovation, the invention of seriously new alternatives, is an aesthetic moment in art and technology alike. No design is ever determined by calculations or technical necessity. Choice pervades technological design, and is made, ultimately, on the basis of aesthetic invention, supplemented, of course, by careful tests. Engineering design is the analytical and imaginative synthesis of perception and technique that is also the ideal, the point, the idea of art. There is art in good engineering and good engineering in art. To stand up and last it has to be no less well put together than a bridge.

Simondon is scarcely known to English-language philosophers, though with these translations that may begin to change. They have been a long time coming. Simondon writes a complicated academic prose in French and calls on an unusually wide range of expertise, but reading his books is worth the effort. Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information (1964) is a dense and at times technical contribution to the philosophy of biology, though there is little in metaphysics that is not implicated in his argument. Science and philosophy are enjoined to pursue knowledge of individuation, a genetic process, rather than starting with individuals of any sort. Individuation, the process, is primitive, and individuals a relative reality.On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) is the best work ever in the philosophy of technology. Contributions by Heidegger and others pale in comparison. Simondon analyzes a wide variety of technical objects with a mastery of engineering science. Heidegger would not know a diode from a triode. He thought meditation on ancient Greek words would take philosophy closer to “the essence of Teknik” than anything learned from science and engineering. Simondon shows why this view is mistaken. In this one, very technical difference (diode and triode), which is replicated ubiquitously in modern technology, he discerns what makes something technical rather than natural or accidental. He applies his thesis about the priority of individuation. Technical objects are phases of a technical individuation that he calls concretization, by which their operation becomes more internally resonant, as for example in the step from diode to triode (to pentode, to transistor and integrated circuit). There is much, much more of value in this book; for instance, his argument is implicitly anti-Marxist. Workers’ alienation is not attributable to economy. Industrial technology alienates workers because machines do what used to be the most satisfying, skillful (and expensive) part of industrial production, leaving workers with only regulative and custodial functions—which is alienating to people born, as we all are, to the technical life.

Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has enlivened recent discussion of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Yet it is quite possible to disengage his interpretive thesis from its supporting argumentation. Doing so leaves one with an intriguing sceptical argument which Kripke first powerfully advances, then tries to halt. But contrary to the impression his argument may leave, Kripke's solution and the position it concedes to the Sceptic are deeply allied. Here I shall demonstrate their common assumption, and on that basis argue that Kripke's solution begs the Sceptic's question. Furthermore, I believe we can live with the Sceptic. The sceptical argument can be turned into a reasonable contribution to a kind of nominalism in the philosophy of meaning and truth.