Inquiry

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What Philosophy Might be About: Some Socio-

philosophical Speculations

Stan Godlovitch

To cite this article: Stan Godlovitch (2000) What Philosophy Might be About: Some Socio-
philosophical Speculations, Inquiry, 43:1, 3-19, DOI: 10.1080/002017400321343

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 Inquiry, 43, 3–20

What Philosophy Might be About: Some

Socio-philosophical Speculations
Stan Godlovitch
Lincoln University, New Zealand

What is philosophy about? Has it a content all its own? A method? This paper
examines a few responses to these questions . At the extremes are the Proper Content
and the No Content views. The former identiŽ es philosophy with a delimited set of
core issues. The latter, abandonin g any proper subject-matte r for philosophy , identiŽ es
it with a core modus operand i. Neither of these is especiall y compelling . More
dynamically conceived is the Vanishing Content view which sees philosophy as
continuall y and inevitabl y abandonin g its business to newly emerging sciences, acting
largely as an explorator y initiator of inquir y which is ultimately eliminable. Though
promising, this view underrates the resilienc e and adaptabilit y of philosophy ,
especiall y its current drive to forge alliances with and ultimately amalgamate itself
into newer areas of study. This tendency is explored via the Partners-for-Progres s
view, which foresees philosoph y becoming dependentl y indistinguishabl e from the
theoretica l wings of various autonomous disciplines . Finally, I examine the Family
Inheritance view, which suggests that philosoph y cannot merely vanish into the
sciences because of idiosyncrasie s in its very institution s which are self-sustainin g
and, more than most, deeply beholden to its own past which it keeps ever present.

I
Much philosophical work is devoted to answering questions variously
expressed as:

· What is X?

· What is the fundamental nature or essence of X?

· How is X to be understood or conceived?

· What makes for something’s being an X?

What are philosophers doing when proposing answers to such questions?

What is philosophy about? Two questions arise: one about method and one
about content. We may not get very far along with either query. The questions
are probably self-referring, and any proposed answers possibly circular and
self-defeating. Does one need a philosophical method to examine what
philosophical method might be? If not, how could we determine what other
method might be Ž tting for the job? But if one needs a philosophical approach
# 2000 Taylor & Francis
4 Stan Godlovitch

to determine such Ž ttingness itself, one is sucked right back into the vortex. Is
the method of philosophy itself part of its content? Perhaps one can do no
better than to join Wittgenstein on his ladder, or grasp some other
philosophical skyhook from which to get another view. More hopefully, we
can tackle the issue via a few stories – descriptive, prescriptive, and
explanatory. Some promise signs of light.

II
Any method must appropriately match its content. You don’t shovel coal with
a teaspoon. So we are advised to sort out questions about philosophical
content. This paper is about just that. Socrates and Plato provide helpful clues
through their identifying philosophy as a member of the domain of typical
goal-directed enterprises, including medicine, sculpture, or cabinet-making,
each of which is distinguished by its special content, methods, skills, and
ends. The methods of music-making must be appropriate for music-making,
as must the methods be for the proper content of ornithology or dentistry.
Baldly put, the end of philosophy is to achieve insight, understanding, and
clarity about a certain range of issues. This end can putatively be reached by
means of certain techniques. What are these issues? Upon what does
philosophy exercise its methods? The Proper Content view asserts that
philosophy is that enterprise exercised over a number of items proper to itself,
the Xs above. What then does ‘X’ range over? A purely extensional approach
provides a start, but not a Ž nish. History indicates that ‘X’ can stand for any
number of things, and yet philosophy has had its traditional favourites, some
drawn from long-standing pre-occupations and others of a more recent origin.
Among the Xs reliably included are the following: truth, beauty, goodness,
justice, existence, reality, rationality, value, mind, matter, consciousness,
knowledge, belief, causation, time, space, substance, properties, necessity,
reference, meaning, inference, perception, desire, intention, emotion,
persons, action, agency, will, freedom, rights, obligations, virtue, art, science,
nature, and culture. But there’s more. What more? Can we complete the list,
close it off? Is there some ingredient each qualifying X has or must have? 1

III
Ryle was once asked how one could tell whether a problem was
philosophical. With playful evasiveness, he replied: ‘You can smell ‘em!’
For the olfactorily-challenged, how does one tell when we’re onto something
the nature of which falls properly to philosophers? Catching Ryle’s beat, John
Wisdom puckishly wrote that one can philosophize about anything whatever
 What Philosophy Might be About 5

– about lozenges, Tuesday, the Pound Sterling, and Philosophy itself. His
view, favoured among Wittgensteinians and contrary to the Socratic credo,
was that there was no subject-matter especially proper to philosophy. More
radically, philosophy proper had no subject-matter whatever, but was instead
a purely methodological enterprise which happened to focus upon certain
topics to no one of which was it critically bound. Let’s call this the No
Content view.

IV
Wittgensteinian afŽ liations aside, survey the territory and one might be
convinced that philosophy is at least open-endedly receptive to that to which
it is drawn. The list above is easily expanded once one gets down to details.
Each member of the list spins off its own blood lines. A few examples should
sufŽ ce. In exploring the nature of science, say, philosophers want then to
know what explanation is, or scientiŽ c law, or conŽ rmation, evidence, theory,
observation, or prediction. Moral philosophers look beyond goodness and
justice, and examine moral agency, rules, principles, sentiments, and
motivation. Interest in Virtue revives ancient curiosities about the variousness
of the virtues and vices, about prudence, practical wisdom, courage, malice,
and so on. Aesthetics runs riot with ‘what is’ questions which emerge in
inquiries about individual art forms; questions about representation,
expression, metaphor, symbolism, interpretation, imagination, not to mention
what sorts of thing artworks are themselves.

V
Though no Ž rm principle of closure emerges, though there’s no saying what
philosophy cannot legitimately take as its own, philosophers haven’t been
quite as expansively curious as their licence to practise seems to permit. There
doesn’t seem to be any passion or, indeed, evidence for the No Content view.
The philosophy of lozenges and the logic of Sterling don’t enjoy any brisk
philosophical debate. Further, the unity of method championed by the
Wittgensteinians was never consolidated. That said, there are reasonably
constant campaigns to extend the list, what with efforts at creating
philosophical interest in economics, the environment, sport and leisure,
biology, management, medicine, computers and technology, sex and love,
business, geography, and more. Some of these catch on. Some don’t – but not
obviously because they are demonstrably less philosophical than the success
stories.
(1) Some people, adherents of the Proper Content view after a fashion,
6 Stan Godlovitch

occasionally scoff at these expansive ambitions. They ask: ‘Why should

philosophers proper bother with these areas? What can possibly be of
philosophical interest outside the classic concentrations? How much more
than Ž ve minutes philosophical attention can attach to these proposed new
zones? Surely, open-endedness does not sanction rampant open-mindedness.’
But such dismissals seem largely to re ect a conservative inertia. At least,
while presupposing notions of propriety and closure, these don’t seem to have
been clearly enunciated. It’s as if some common genetic links must be present
to sanction any acceptable extension. In that respect, such attitudes share
much with closed-door immigration policies which would restrict admission
to those who walk our walk and talk our talk, to bona Ž de relatives of
residents. More self-consciously tolerant defenders of the Proper Content
view acknowledge the newcomers but only as second-class citizens, thus
creating and then entrenching a philosophical class structure which identiŽ es
certain old philosophical families as Core. On this variant, not only are these
new extensions subordinate and peripheral to some fundamental philosophi-
cal enterprise, they are and remain dispensable. They can die off and yet leave
Real Philosophy intact. This can get very short-sighted if one fails to see past
one’s own immediate kin and ignores the skeletons in the closet.
(2) The Proper Content view, it seems, accepts that there may be
philosophical drop-outs, once Core areas which just cease to have serious
philosophical standing. Philosophy’s abandonment of theism is a classic case
if we consider that, for centuries, at the Core of the Core were questions about
the nature and properties of God. Philosophers sometimes deal with this by
re-touching family photos, old Kremlin-style. Revisionism is afoot in
discussions of Berkeley in which one would never suppose God to have
been an ineliminable part of Berkeley’s ontology and epistemology. In a
similar vein, we routinely label Descartes a dualist, as if God were either a
forgettable minor irritant or just another manifestation of res cogitans or res
extensa. For Descartes, it’s unclear whether God could have been either. His
ontology might be irreducibly Triadic. Similarly awkward are the unmodern
tones of Plato’s mystical spiritualism, Aristotle’s angelic planet-pushers,
Leibniz’s worlds within worlds, Kant’s eery, other-worldly Noumenal realm,
and even Wittgenstein’s speechless farewell. The impatient highly visible
hand of Hume has got to be acknowledged here, not to mention the
heavier hands of latter-day logical empiricists. The clean-up proceeds apace.
Some modern visionaries regard our well-worn pre-occupation with Mental
Stuff as deserving the oblivion that has befallen philosophical theism. Like
everything else, the Core enjoys and suffers ongoing modiŽ cation, however
much the revisionists insist that the past must be dressed to look just like what
some now declare as Core. Further, this de-contaminating spirit appears to
endorse a reduction in philosophical capital, about which there is more to
come.
 What Philosophy Might be About 7

VI
Why do certain Xs get left out? Philosophers these days would not take the
question ‘What is the fundamental nature of lithium?’ to be a philosophical
question, let alone a philosophically interesting question. Perhaps they steer
clear of the nature of lithium because it’s just not fundamental enough a
question. But this just spawns unhelpful and possibly question-begging
convictions about the nature of fundamental questions. Besides, no one thinks
that questions about the fundamental nature of chemical elements as such any
more philosophical than those about particular elements. (Beguilingly, some
do think that the fundamental nature of biological species falls squarely
within philosophy’s ambit, even though there is no such interest in the nature
of particular species like Passer domesticus.) Anyway, questions about the
fundamental nature of musical works, say, or about piety are scarcely tapping
any deep core of things – and yet these are questions which philosophers
explore or have explored avidly. More likely, philosophers leave lithium
alone because it’s best left to chemists. Once we have heard out the chemist
on lithium, there is nothing unembarrassing left for any philosopher to say.2

VII
Perhaps there is some tacit principle of closure, but not necessarily one which
lives in harmony with even a restricted, however liberal, sense of prospective
new frontiers. Philosophy’s domain is closed not only because it is delimited
but more importantly because it is shrinking. This shrinkage, further, is a fully
Ž tting, because inevitable, historical process which will play itself out until
nothing whatever is left for philosophy to do. Call this the Vanishing Content
view. J. L. Austin was said to have speculated that philosophical prey was
what was left over once one had eliminated the domains captured by science. 3
As I recall, he portrayed the domain left to philosophy as a ragged headland
subject to the battering waves of science which incessantly erode away and
thus diminish what is left. The implication was that philosophy had
increasingly less to concern itself with, and would eventually disappear after
having been relieved of its stopgap role once the special sciences assumed
responsibility for telling us about the present remainder – such as the mental,
the ontological, the moral, the aesthetic. Chemical elements get left out
because they are already well spoken for; and so for a host of topics now
competently overseen by physicists, biologists, anthropologists, psycholo-
gists, and experts in other special domains. Thus conceived, philosophy
becomes a form of proto-science, or, better, a form of anticipation of or
temporary placeholder for science; one which, having clumsily and
speculatively revealed problems and notions ultimately worthy of proper
8 Stan Godlovitch

scientiŽ c expropriation, moves aside once a science is mature enough to take

over. Philosophers are akin to the Ž rst explorers of an uncharted terrain who
map it only roughly and send back reports of opportunities-in-waiting, only to
be superseded, displaced and largely forgotten by subsequent waves of land
developers, farmers, and other more focused entrepreneurs who settle,
subdue, and utterly re-shape the land for permanent purposeful occupancy.
(1) There is much appeal in the Vanishing Content view. Professional
philosophers so-called seem to have less to do these days if only to judge by
the current quaintness of the phrase ‘natural philosophy’. More currently, we
can see in the growing maturity of linguistics, information theory, and
cognitive science the staking of claims about language and mind once thought
to fall exclusively within the philosopher’s province. It is, further, hard to
believe that any philosopher, still drawn to the prospect of universal theory,
can remain forever immune to the disclosures of anthropologists, psychol-
ogists, and others in the social sciences. Quite possibly, the very ambitious
advance of these areas has made some philosophers far more receptive to
them and to the need to come to terms and comply with, and Ž nally
amalgamate the empirical within their theories. Such has been the party
platform from Peirce to Quine, who sought to cure some of philosophy of its
self-proclaimed aprioristic isolationism. Taking Austin’s perspective, and
asking what remains for philosophers to do, we might reasonably conclude
that philosophy’s beach-head has taken quite a few hits in our time, ones
easily as dramatic as those which saw philosophy give up its claim on what
became modern astronomy, chemistry, physics, and biology in the period
from 1600 to 1900. The study of mind, Descartes’ privileged dominion, is
beholden and succumbing to the neurophysiologica l and computational
sciences. Epistemology is making room for and giving way to psychology and
information theory; the study of meaning and reference to linguistics and
communication theory; the examination of goodness and justice to social
science, social history as well as decision- and game-theory. What few self-
subsistent and stubborn outcrops remain appear to represent bits of
metaphysics, but even these have been rounded and softened by ontological
pressures from outside. No latter-day Leibniz can seriously speculate about
monads at the bottom of it all, and doctrines of ultimate substance are
answerable to the purview of physics.
(2) All said and however self-deluded this sounds, Austin’s erosion-
displacement picture seems to have been unprepared for the peculiar
resilience philosophy has shown. Increasingly many philosophers have
hitched their star to the winners, as the explosive growth in the philosophy of
phenomenon suggests. Further, the campaign to ‘naturalize’ various aspects
of philosophy bespeaks an accommodating move to ‘scientize’ them. Like the
cetaceans, philosophy has in part rescinded its land-based stronghold and
gone back to sea, not so much in retreat as in adaptive advantage-seeking .
 What Philosophy Might be About 9

And like any parasite, philosophy has acknowledged and exploited its
dependence upon a series of newcomer hosts for its nutrients. If science
proper is for scientists, philosophy of science cannot be their proper business
– and so similarly for the philosophy of physics, biology, social science,
psychology. Even more aŽ eld, if law is best left to lawyers, philosophers still
have philosophy of law. As for the normative sphere, philosophy is currently
invading the bloodstream of medicine, business, environmental policy, and
other practical domains. Call this resourceful entrepreneurial opportunism the
Partners for Progress view. One consequence of this crafty attachment to
robust self-sufŽ cient hosts is that philosophers have increasingly learned to be
better informed and more mindful than in the past about where their meals
come from. Another consequence involves a variation on Wisdom’s theme.
Just as for Wisdom, anything whatever is fair game for philosophy, so for
philosophical host-seeking, anyone, especially those central to the hosts
themselves, can count as doing philosophy. It’s not, for instance, that some
biologists may have something of philosophical interest to say, as if, in that
capacity, they were drifting into non-biological territory and happening
almost inadvertently to attract the attention of philosophers proper. Quite the
contrary, as biologists proper they are, at times, also doing philosophy proper,
and, as such, deserve full voting rights in the philosophical community along
with those ofŽ cially designated as philosophers. Witness the widely mixed
company in discussions about the nature of biological species or genetic
engineering or information. One prognosis is that, in tracking their hosts and
becoming more dependent upon them, many philosophers will simply meld
permanently and indiscernibly into their hosts and be re-christened as
‘theorists’ proper within their hosts’ environment, e.g., as evolutionary
theorists, theorists of information science, cognitive science, linguistics, and
so on. (This melding will also occur in the so-called ‘policy’ Ž elds, those
going under the template ‘X-Management’ – where ‘X’ ranges over
‘business’, ‘wildlife’, ‘resource’, ‘personnel’, ‘hospital’, and more. Such
Ž elds tend to be given over to what they view as operational rigour. The
theoretical wing of the so-called ‘policy sciences’ is beholden to any of the
social, biological, and information sciences from which they can derive their
models. Nor should we ignore the outburst of Ž elds under the ‘X-Studies’
banner which are scientistic emulations under the regime of social science.)
Note, this community relationship is not symbiotic as with the lichen where
the algae and fungi set up house together. It tends more towards the way it’s
speculated that eukaryotic cells got going with the current intra-cellular
bodies having invaded or otherwise been absorbed into the bio-polity by their
prokaryote hosts. This is not so much a loss of territory and the displacement
of philosophy as it is a form of permanent emigration and the assumption of
new citizenship. Security and everlasting life are bought by trading off
autonomy and self-identity. In some ways, this has the feel of Aristotle’s
10 Stan Godlovitch

universal learning about it in that the business of philosophers draws upon and
eventually becomes one with the business of anyone in business for
themselves.
(3) Though the Partners for Progress view shares much with the Vanishing
Content view, there is this twist: while the latter has philosophers en route to
redundancy and the null club of alchemists and village smithies (rather in the
same boat as contemporary mail-sorters and piano-tuners), the former
bespeaks professional re-tooling and administrative re-structuring, the loss
being the designation ‘philosopher’ but not its designees. The job nominally
disappears, but its content survives hugely transŽ gured as an integral part of a
wide corporate venture be it called ‘Theoretical X’ or ‘Y Studies’ where ‘X’
and ‘Y’ now range over the reigning spheres of newly legitimated enterprise
in the worlds of learning, commerce, and public service.

VIII
So far, I’ve dabbled with three different outlooks concerning the proper zone
and direction of philosophical attention, viz., the Proper Content, the No
Content, and the Vanishing Content views. The Ž rst two seem unhelpful
because they misrepresent the philosophical enterprise. That should come as
no surprise. Each derives from its own preferred conception of philosophical
practice and is effectively prescriptive (if not exhortative) rather than
representative. To suppose that philosophy is constituted by its proper
enshrined Core Questions or that philosophy primarily constitutes an
enshrined modus operandi is to take philosophical sides from the start. The
reality is much messier than either suggests. The Vanishing Content view at
least has the virtue of standing outside the fray and trying to capture the
domain of philosophy dynamically as part of an historical intellectual
development in relation to other concurrent developments. In view of the
historically unlikely outcome of the Vanishing Content account, I modiŽ ed
the dynamic in the Partners for Progress view, which offers a different
ending to the story. What may happen to philosophers once philosophy ceases
to exist as an autonomous, self-sufŽ cient practice, once the demand for
philosophy can do without philosophers ofŽ cially so-called? In contrast to
Austin’s picture of the doomed heroic defence of an ever-crumbling cliff, I
saw philosophers diving off into the waters in a self-protective and even self-
satisŽ ed mood of ‘If you can’t Ž ght ‘em, join ‘em’. This captures, in part,
certain recent trends which accommodate ‘in-house’ philosophers in formerly
foreign enclaves, and in the increasing tendency of philosophers to market
their wares as putatively crucial to the self-interests of higher- ying outsiders
in, say, commerce, healthcare, and environmental management. Many of
these phenomena re ect changes of emphasis within academic institutions
 What Philosophy Might be About 11

which, until very recently, were alone in providing status and standing to
philosophers proper.
These vocational exigencies do not completely explain the tendency of
philosophy to melt into the broader picture. Part of the ease with which these
mergers can take place has, I surmise, much to do with upsets within
philosophical methodology itself. At one time, philosophers counted on some
allegedly obvious distinction between conceptual and empirical questions.
The former made up their home turf. The latter was the province of empirical
disciplines. But such reliance upon the conceptual/empirical divide isn’t very
secure. It doesn’t demarcate an obvious zone of attention and a proper form of
inquiry. ‘Cobalt’ or ‘recessive gene’ is no less a concept than is ‘mind’ or
‘meaning’. For Aristotle, as for Boyle or Bacon, ‘cobalt’ would have been as
fair game as was ‘birth’, ‘justice’, ‘force’, or ‘knowledge’ when it came to
tracking philosophical game. Further, some contemporary philosophers (like
Chomsky, Fodor, or Dennett) offer putative philosophica l theories which are,
by design, empirically testable. Such presumably sits well with the
pragmatists for whom the divide between the empirical and the conceptual,
the a priori and the a posteriori, the analytic and the synthetic, matters of fact
and relations of ideas merely signals stages along a continuum of conŽ dence,
entrenchment, and commitment. If philosophy has no privileged role in
articulating foundations for anything (let alone everything), if there is no First
Philosophy, if philosophy is no more the Queen of the Sciences, philosophers
seem to have no interestingly distinctive role to play at all – whether at the
Ž rst-, second-, or nth order. Such an eventuality may explain why those of a
philosophical bent need scarcely go extinct defending their dwindling cache
of privileged a priori investigations. The very dwindling of the conceptual-
empirical or a priori–a posteriori divide removes the last excuse anyone needs
to bother safeguarding anything intrinsically philosophical. More directly, if
these divides are abandoned, no one has any longer to suppose or, worse,
pretend that philosophers are engaged in doing something no one else in the
sciences or policy Ž elds does or can do. (And, fortuitously, one may add, it
cuts both ways.)
(1) Old attachments die hard. Surely there is something left to philosophy
proper which just cannot sink noiselessly into the swamp of human business.
What of scepticism, for instance, of philosophy’s own home-grown anti-
philosophy? On this, a few words. (i) Honest, full-strength, universal
scepticism leads inexorably to the forced silence that comes with the
suspension of belief and the  ight from assertion. In one mighty suicidal
blow, scepticism undoes more philosophy at a stroke than centuries of gradual
loss to the sciences, for, once embraced, scepticism defeats further
philosophical discourse. Philosophers have been ever uneasy about this
menace, and the history of philosophy is replete with an in-house campaign to
smite the foe. (ii) Though modern scepticism and empiricism came tightly
12 Stan Godlovitch

bundled via Hume, the ascendancy, tenacity, practicality, and raw success of
the latter have made the former seem increasingly quaint, as quaint as
anxieties about whether we inhabit a benign universe. It’s hard to take serious
scepticism seriously given that we’re vastly less unnerved by our native
fallibility than some philosophers once were. Hitched to Peircean
pragmatism, empiricism looks to what we have assuredly achieved and
dismisses thereby any Ž xation upon ‘paper doubts’ as merely pathological.
(iii) Locally practised, scepticism counsels epistemic caution and emerges as
a sensible operational antidote to credulity and sloppy inference. No one
sincerely interested in getting to any interesting truth worth believing will
ignore such counsel. Science preaches this message incessantly without
supposing itself to be championing any particularly philosophical wisdom.
It’s good scientiŽ c business to keep up your sceptical guard, but you also
learn when to drop it once danger is past. To keep up your guard permanently
smacks of paranoia. To keep up your guard permanently on principle is just
eccentric.
(2) If blueblood scepticism allows too few things to be true, the sovereignty
of philosophy is no better served by its nemesis anti-anti-philosophy, a.k.a.
universal relativism, which lets too many things be true. On this, a few more
words. (i) Full-strength relativism leads inexorably not to silence but to a
universal racket in which the voice of philosophy is lost in the din. Once
articulated, such a stance defeats any sense of a philosophical stronghold by
allowing anything to count as philosophy proper. Herein lies an ironic twist
on the philosophy of lozenges. (ii) Although not nearly as antiquated as
scepticism, universal relativism can tend to parade itself, particularly in its
epistemic guise, as an invitation to wilful ignorance. Why? Because, those
espousing such relativism thereby systematically excuse themselves from
having to inquire whether any approach to the world might, just might, have
an edge, and not just a perceived edge, over any otherwise preferred
alternative. If the ‘can’t-say-anything’ sceptic verges on severe doxastic
disorder, the card-carrying ‘must-listen-to-everything’ relativist  irts con-
stantly with the nihilism of indiscriminate tolerance. This carries operation-
ally the same risks as scepticism. For, if the sincere sceptic might just as well
walk off a cliff as not, thinking it unresolvable as to whether one will die, so
too might the sincere relativist. (iii) Though indiscriminate tolerance does not
logically follow from relativism, the principal motive for and attractiveness of
relativism has been to stimulate the expansion of tolerance. Were this
prospect not to  ow thematically from relativism at all, the position would
likely never have been sympathetically entertained simply because no one, in
the face of any substantive disagreement, is ever forced or so overwhelmed as
to conclude that all parties must somehow be right in their own way. Nor does
coming to that conclusion forcibly constitute any insight about truth of any
sort. Rather, taking disputants to be right in their own way is more a
 What Philosophy Might be About 13

functional ploy, a localized pragmatic strategy to kick-start the process of

resolution and reconciliation in the face of obstructive, intractable, and
uncooperative deadlocks. Local relativism is the modus operandi of
diplomacy and con ict resolution. It gives (because it is so meant to give)
those who are at odds to believe they’re equally noteworthy. Having placated
the combatants with the concession of equal respectful regard, the strategic
relativist can get down to the real business at hand; namely, the signing of a
treaty or the distribution of an estate. The alternative is war or the courts –
which no one needs. Philosophers certainly weren’t there Ž rst in this
paciŽ er’s game, nor have they any privileged wisdom to add to why it’s
sometimes good sense to let everyone think they’re right.

IX
Someone is bound to object: ‘Look, all you’ve done so far is  agrantly take
for granted a palpably philosophical position; namely, a ramshackle brew of
pragmatism and empiricism heavily dosed with naõ¨ve scientiŽ c realism.
You’ve simply used these ex cathedra to snuff out the opposition, and then to
conclude that philosophy as philosophy has nothing left to do.’ Allow me a
few rejoinders. First and most wimpishly, I warned at the outset that my
inquiry could well be self-defeating. That’s cold comfort, I admit, but it
leaves the puzzle as to why questions about what philosophy is about should
founder so. More pertinently, I have not so much used the position described
above and thereby counted on its truth as I have tried to show what the
Partners for Progress account requires of any surviving philosophical content
so-called in the amalgamation ventures which swallow philosophy up. The
speculation dovetails with the historical dynamic, i.e., if philosophy endures
transŽ gured as dependent upon typical scientiŽ c (or neo-scientiŽ c) ventures,
it will have no other survival option but to take on the scientistic guise of its
hosts. Whereas, from the vantage-point of an autonomous philosophy, that
guise would seem to express but one epistemological option among others,
from the inside of the protective host that guise is none other than the very
surrounding environment, the amniotic  uid, outside of which there exists no
credible philosophical point of view. Less colourfully put, philosophical
content itself necessarily becomes an expression of such an empiricist
pragmatism because that is precisely what makes the sciences what they are.
In a way, the Partners for Progress view is just an historical scenario for the
dissipation of an autonomous philosophy along lines that may have been
applauded by the likes of Peirce or Carnap, however otherwise distant their
convictions. Unlike the dissolution predicted by the late Wittgenstein and the
Ordinary Language School which sought to expose Philosophy as a
misbegotten confusion grounded on linguistic rigmarole, Partners for
14 Stan Godlovitch

Progress merely asks that philosophy abandon its pretensions to sovereignty

by assuming its subordinate function. Locke’s picture of the philosophical
underlabourer comes to mind. The idea is: Science, at least, can neither
tolerate or afford to accommodate philosophical aporia, nor, more
importantly, is it remotely warranted in doing so. The moral: Whatever
works for the advancement of science is all that there is needed for anything
we know to be workable to work, philosophy included; and whatever we Ž nd
does so work is neither beholden nor answerable to some imaginary
independent bureau of investigation once called ‘Philosophy’.

X
Anyone left listening should by now have lost patience. The cynical might
scoff that we’re doing just Ž ne so long as no one else notices or calls our hand.
Cynicism aside, there is manifestly lots to do even if it may not promise
permanent employment. Aren’t many issues unmistakably philosophical?
Don’t they demand attention from philosophers proper, not just in-house
theoreticians on hourly wages? Look at the facts; notably, the ever-growing,
never-slowing mountain of literature. What is this literature about? What
makes it philosophical literature?
In the remainder, I consider the Family Inheritance view which states that
what makes for philosophical content at any time is its being heir to its own
philosophical heritage.4 One way to approach this is to note that philosophical
literature is largely if not entirely about itself; more accurately, about what
other recognized philosophers proper have had to say. Though other practises
live in the present by directly addressing their own past, philosophy’s self-
re ective self-dependence runs deeper in that it has nothing but its self-
acknowledged past on which to feed. Unlike geochemistry, which addresses
and derives partly from the Earth itself, philosophy at a time comes directly
and utterly from philosophical tradition, from its own past. We have here an
historically-grounded practice which is self-sustaining, self-acknowledging,
self-satisfying, self-monitoring, self-regulating, and self-perpetuating – a
kind of intellectual perpetual motion machine. It’s evolved almost as if to
ensure that it doesn’t seem to matter very much whether anyone outside
notices or, indeed, whether Nature says ‘No!’ Scepticism, relativism,
apriorism, and the populous clan of idealisms always lie waiting in reserve
to shut out external complaints.
We do not so much discover, uncover, sniff out, or invent philosophical
questions or content as we inherit them. We may re-cast and re-deŽ ne this
content for own time, cleanse from it the tincture of the old-fashioned, just as
we may follow up on new questions bred from this content, but we never have
to and, indeed, cannot start anew. Something-out-of-nothing was Descartes’
 What Philosophy Might be About 15

splendid self-deception. The questions and the very way we take them to be
questions of a philosophical stripe are passed down to us by our philosophical
predecessors, who, in turn, were funded by their forebears. When Ryle smells
a philosophical problem, his nose has already been trained much like those of
the beagles at Auckland International. A Ryle, though, may be special in
having a particularly acute sense of smell, and we’re wise to follow the scent
he whiffs. We always start out as philosophical beneŽ ciaries. As with any
inheritance, what we receive may be squandered and lead to various bankrupt
ventures, or it may be fruitfully invested and give rise to new opportunities
which we in turn pass on. Among bankrupt ventures we may now identify
theistic in uences, say, or faith in the ubiquity of purpose. We may now count
among the good investments the formalization of logic, consequentialist
ethics, and certain strands of realism. Our inherited capital may languish
unspent and lose value just because of information in ation raging all around
which it fails to protect itself against. Such may seem the fate of philosophical
models which start to look outmoded; for example, any superannuated
devotion to an Aristotelian substance-property ontology or to hard causal
determinism well into a century which has undergone and accepted massive
scientiŽ c revisions in the conception of matter. By parity, one day, moral and
political philosophers really will have to take Darwin and physical
anthropology seriously lest their work inauspiciously seem to rest on the
premise that we humans just sprang up here ex nihilo and extempore.

(1) Have I picked on philosophy unfairly as singularly constituted and

sustained by its use of its own past? Surely, any long-standing investigative
practice feeds and grows upon its own past, learns from its own mistakes,
regulates its own future, re-writes its own history by writing out its former
dead-ends and writing off its miscreants. All this is true, but philosophy
distinguishes itself in one respect. It seems, like Art in its purest forms, to
operate as if unaccountable to anything but itself. It lacks anything like the
nagging external pressure driving the chemist to ask just how many elements
exist on Earth or the botanist to wonder why one complement of plant species
supersedes another. The reply that this merely distinguishes empirical from
non-empirical investigations is itself inimitably and self-servingly philo-
sophical. It segregates the empirical as a separate species of inquiry, and so
sheds its association with anything against which it need be pegged other than
second-order re ections about the empirical domain itself. Of course,
philosophy isn’t mere anarchic make-believe. Philosophers scarcely allow
each other that much freedom. But philosophy has a deep fondness for
methodological idealism, for self-construction, and this binds its practitioners
utterly to their own collective self-made enterprise. A scientist no one ever
listened to can have been a great scientist all the same, all along, just because
Nature was always there to be unveiled. A permanently unsung philosopher
16 Stan Godlovitch

just doesn’t properly exist as a philosopher. One cannot, contra John Wisdom,
philosophize qua philosophe r about any more than what philosophical
tradition and one’s standing philosophical community counts as philosophy.
If philosophy has abandoned any Ž rst-order ambitions, to identify
philosophy as inherently a second-order discipline detaches philosophy’s
accountability to the world partially revealed by science. What is left?
Thoughts and their objects and relations with one another – but not just any
thoughts and any objects. What remains are precisely, exhaustively and
exclusively, the thoughts of others who are just like us for having made us just
like them by virtue of seeding the very thoughts we have about what they have
passed on to us. No science could develop exclusively on such fuel. One
happy bonus is that philosophy, unlike science, cannot possibly fail as a
venture. Where we can concede our most fundamental scientiŽ c enterprises
as having got things mostly wrong for much of history, philosophy
systematically eludes that risk. Why? Because of its absolute authority in
determining what it is to be about, what form that takes, and to what it will not
succumb.

XI
The tradition of inheritance is both oral and written, sustained by reading,
writing, teaching, talking, and has across time, from the Academy through the
Church to the tertiary education sector, been institutionally cast, maintained,
and legitimized thereby. Philosophy exists and persists as a succession of
Schools. Philosophical problems are those matters which those who are
ofŽ cially recognized within a School to be philosophers proper tend to be
worried about in their capacity as philosophers proper. One gets to be a
philosopher proper by being so ofŽ cially anointed by philosophers proper.
One stays a philosopher proper by exercising one’s philosophical worries
within the context of those institutions which legitimize one’s activities as
properly philosophical. It could have developed otherwise. It could have
prevailed as cabinet-making has prevailed, or gardening, or cookery. Human
practices transmit information and authority by various media. Philosophy is
inherently bookish, and bookish practices have their own bookish causal
nexes.

(1) How are philosophical communities constituted? How are they structured,
and how do they perpetuate themselves? These are huge questions and I can
here only hint at an opener. In previous work, I distinguish between strongly
hierarchical virtuoso-led communities (such as those in the performing arts)
and professional communities, which demand, however unsuccessfully, equal
proŽ ciency from all their practitioners (like medicine and engineering).5
 What Philosophy Might be About 17

Philosophy falls into neither camp, because philosophical training does not
wilfully aim to preserve an elite corps of extraordinary practitioners, nor does
it aspire to make every one of its practitioners equally accomplished, and,
optimally, the best there can be. At Ž rst blush, philosophy, like music
composition, relies on its standing pantheon of undying titans, but their
continuing worth, unlike in composition, is as much a function of their ever-
instructive captivating mistakes as it is of their eternal insights. Philosophy
encourages giant-killing as much as it sanctions alliances with one titan or
another. Great philosophers have to be greatly imperfect. By contrast, no
living composer would seek to be labelled Mozartian nor would any self-
 atteringly so label themselves. No one would praise Bach for having been
instructively in error. Perhaps the most one can say is that great philosophers
are those who have been institutionally sustained as greatly in uential while
being deemed to be worthy of continuing in uence. We think Humean
thoughts because we still read Hume; and we read Hume because we still
think Humean thoughts. The philosophical community is buttressed by and
almost suspended from its very refusal ever to break ties with its self-
perpetuated lineage of magniŽ cently errant forebears. Philosophy’s special
claim to ever-lasting life derives, perhaps, from its being so structured as
never growing up or having to. Those bits of it that do grow up leave home
and become biology or physics or psychology – and never look back too
seriously.

XII
This account is socio-philosophical with a mildly Socratic seasoning. It says:
Seek not for the content of philosophy outside the practice of philosophers,
and, further, seek not the practice of philosophers outside the conventions and
institutions which make and have made that practice and its transmission of
content both possible and reliable. Unlike both Wittgensteins, who saw the
Ž tting end of philosophy as self-annihilatory – kick away the ladder once one
achieves escape velocity or dissolve all puzzles in the universal solvent of
table-talk – this account takes philosophical content to be stably, because
wilfully, self-perpetuating. Philosophy cannot run out of things to do because
it cannot run out of or use up its own past; and the longer that past gets, the
more assured we are that there will be more in it to revive and talk about. The
family just keeps getting bigger. No matter that we may often speak
uncharitably of our ancestors. We need them all the same. Unlike scientists,
philosophers never quite bury all their dead. At least, there always appears to
be just enough life left in most temporarily superseded views to ensure many
of them a comeback when enough of a climate change permits it.
18 Stan Godlovitch

XIII
I have centred much of this discussion on liberal elaborations of insightful
speculations of John Wisdom and John Austin; in brief, that philosophy is all
method and no substance, or that philosophy is substance alright, but
irreversibly diminishing substance. Wisdom’s account breathes everlasting
life into philosophy at the expense of its having more to say than it could
possibly have to say. Austin’s account foretells the inevitable demise of
philosophy because it must become increasingly silent about an increasing
number of substantive issues which once were under its dominion. These
stories respectively overshoot and undershoot the way things seem to work.
Many issues are not properly philosophical, so one cannot philosophize about
anything whatsoever without seeming silly. And, some issues which were
once the proper object of philosophy just aren’t any more for good reason.
Austin helps us understand some of what has happened by seeing
philosophy as losing ground to science and other organized practices, and so
becoming outmoded in various of its branches. But Austin failed to anticipate
how well philosophy could capitalize on its losses and re-emerge as a
dependent provider of theory to these practices, thus ensuring its lifespan to
coincide with that of its new hosts. By way of preserving some sense of
delimited but adaptively changing content and, at the same time, acknowl-
edging that philosophy’s persistence is both autonomous and indeŽ nitely self-
sustaining, I resorted, not to any speciŽ cs about content, not to any hard Core,
but to a continuous and dependably consistent historical process of
transmitting pedigree, i.e., to a variant on the ‘Turtles-All-the-Way-Down’
syndrome with an admixture of stray mutant variation and territorial
opportunism. This seems evasive because it leaves the question of
determining philosophical content entirely at the mercy of the shifting winds
of intellectual fortune. But not quite, since I located philosophy entirely
within institutional conŽ nes. These institutions can be studied both
historically and structurally. So, whatever we wind up identifying as
philosophical content proper can only, at best, be historically and
institutionally explained, not demonstrated or deŽ ned, by appeal to factors
relating back to those institutions themselves. This hardly promises a saga of
the relentless realization of Absolute Spirit, but appeals instead to yet another
complex of social, political, and intellectual tendencies which make a practice
the practice it has become.
Isaiah Berlin remarked that, once the dust had fallen away from our time,
we would see philosophy’s greatest twentieth-century achievements to have
been formal logic and the history of ideas, neither of which is especially
philosophical. To these one could add the attractively distracting star-hitching
stratagem, surely one of the cleverest gambits beŽ tting those who have
plotted all along to keep the family going just as it’s always been.
 What Philosophy Might be About 19

NOTES

1 Certain themes which seem to Ž t squarely in the list of favourite s have largely been
ignored. Among such bypassed topics, one might include Luck (or Fortune), though interest
in this may have been expressed indirectl y through concerns about Freedom and Fate. More
oddly, no special interest has been shown in Life, not at least in the Western tradition , even
though Mind has been all-absorbing . Correlatively, Death has been off the list for centuries.
Similarly, though Rationality has been a mainstay at least since Plato, Sanity and Madness
have enjoyed negligibl e attention . Nothing intrinsicall y non-philosophica l besets such
notions. Historically , however, they just seem not to have interested those of the standing
patriarch y currently honoured as having set the agenda. What makes this agenda the proper
one is precisely the present puzzle.
2 Consider this gruff dismissal of philosopher s meddling in the domain of the scientist: ‘[A]
discussio n of the philosophica l signiŽ cance of the discoveries of physical and mathematical
science must be left to the theoretica l physicist s and to the mathematicians . They alone, in
view of their wide knowledge of facts and their mastery of the rigorous mathematical mode
of thinking, are in a position to coordinat e the apparently disconnecte d results furnishe d by
experience and by reason. If, then, a super-philosoph y is to be attained, it would appear that
the most successful results would ensue from a work of collaboratio n between the scientist s
of the various branches of knowledge’ (see A. d’Abro, The Evolution of ScientiŽ c Thought,
2nd ed. [New York: Dover Publications,1950] , p. 354). Though d’Abro’s optimism may
now seem old-fashioned , the sentiments expresse d about the near impertinence of
philosoph y as practised by philosopher s have not quite abated in many circles.
3 Consider the following robust take on the issue: ‘Some philosopher s (Dewey, for example,
and maybe Austin) hold that philosoph y is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough
to solve it by doing science. Others (Ryle, for example, and maybe Wittgenstein ) hold that
if a philosophica l problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows that it wasn’t really
philosophica l to begin with. Either way, the facts seem clear enough: questions Ž rst mooted
by philosopher s are sometimes coopted by people who do experiments ’ (see Jerry A. Fodor,
‘Propositiona l Attitudes’, in Representations [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981], p. 177).
4 In this, I happily acknowledg e being in uenced by the ‘historical deŽ nition’ approach to
Art taken by Jerrold Levinson and James Carney. For Levinson, ‘an artwork is a thing that
has been seriously intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art , i.e., regard in any way pre-existing
artworks are or were correctly regarded ’ (see Jerrold Levinson, ‘ReŽ ning Art Historically ’,
Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 47 [1989], pp. 21–33). For Carney, something is an
artwork if and only if ‘it can be linked by those suitably informed, along one or more
various, speciŽ c dimensions, to a past or present general style exhibited by prior artworks’
(see James Carney, ‘The Style Theory of Art’, PaciŽ c Philosophical Quarterly 72 [1991],
pp. 273–89). See also, Stephen Davies, DeŽ nitions of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991) and Robert Stecker, Artworks: DeŽ nition, Meaning, Value (University Park:
Pennsylvani a State University Press, 1997) . Unlike Levinson and Carney, however , I take
the continuit y of philosophica l heritage to explain rather than to deŽ ne what makes for
philosophica l content proper at a time.
5 Stan Godlovitch, Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study (London/New York:
Routledge, 1998), esp. ch. 2.

Received 28 May 1999

Stan Godlovitch, Lincoln University, P.O. Box 84, Canterbury , New Zealand. E-mail:
[email protected]