The history of philosophy

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That is the title of a book by A.C. Grayling. On page 417:

in all other areas of philosophy–ethics, theory of knowledge, political philosophy, aesthetics–the history of the subject continues to be a resource which enriches contemporary thinking. But in the philosophy of language there is relatively little, other than in the way of some suggestions and insights, that is not original to the twentieth century itself, and to its second half in particular.

Grayling seems to score this as a point for twentieth century philosophy, as his section on Analytic Philosophy covers 131 pages (out of 585 total), which is as much as he devotes to Plato and Aristotle plus everyone from Bacon to Hegel, put together. For me, that was like encountering a history of the New York Yankees that pays as much attention to the 1970s squad as it does to the Ruth, Dimaggio, and Mantle eras combined.

The book displays an amazing breadth of Grayling’s reading. I can see it as a monumental reference work. But as an actual history of philosophy it did not work for me.

UPDATE: Michael Huemer offers praise for Analytic Philosophy. Comparing it with continental philosophy, Huemer writes,

analytic phil is better. These things:

Clear theses
Clear, logical arguments
Direct responses to objections

7 thoughts on “The history of philosophy”

  1. I cannot pass up the occasion to link to Deogolwulf’s old essay on Prof. Grayling and the Enlightenment, which begins as follows:

    It is not often that a philosopher plays the role of fish in a barrel, and still rarer that one who does has a name that is most appropriate to the sport; so it is with the keenest sense of opportunity that I aim a few shots at the esteemed Professor A.C. Grayling as he disports himself in the clear waters of simplicity. Now, be it said that when philosophers are wrong, they are usually — as a matter of professional pride — wrong in the most complicated manner imaginable, but since we are speaking of roles, we might note, as a possible excuse for his simple wrongness, that Professor Grayling is not merely a philosopher: he is also a public intellectual, a man of the press, a book-flogger, a political communicator, even a terrible little simplifier — the sum of which, though embulgent to wallet and influence, can be most dangerous to a philosopher’s speech, not to say to his intellect, and which, in the case of the clever Professor Grayling, might account for his piscine disportment.

    The simple wrongness of which I speak concerns a view of the Enlightenment, and — if we are to get straight to the heart of the matter — it concerns Professor Grayling’s professed claim that men of his kind, that is to say, modern liberal-leftists, are its rightful heirs at the exclusion of other claimants.

  2. Michael Huemer followed his praise of analytic philosophy with a critical essay.

    [M]ost questions that are amenable to typical analytic-philosophy methods are just not very interesting.

    • That’s certainly true. However, my impression is to the extent something was potentially interesting (heh, “and what does ‘interesting’ really mean?) it was like a profit opportunity that got mined and gobbled up by specialists in other fields, with the analytically-tractable residuals becoming increasing uninteresting.

      For example, we used to have “natural philosophy”, but now we call any particular issue in it by the name of some scientific discipline, and not ‘philosophy’.

      If you’re going to ask a Big Question (i.e., an interesting one) in Philosophy, then to the extent it’s plausibly answerable in any way that is not perceived as “pure” philosophy, there will be a group of experts dedicated to answering those kinds of questions, and who don’t call those efforts “philosophy” anymore.

      In military intelligence everyone knows about “actionable intelligence”, but it’s not quite a binary distinction. It’s more like a category 1 range of “usable right now in a way that’s obvious to most people, either for action or analysis” (e.g., “the enemy location”), a category 2 range of “likely but not confirmed complete collections of puzzle pieces” – “a collection of information that would likely be useful in aggregate if a clever person can discover patterns or see how they all fit together to infer a conclusion that gets promoted to category 1, and category 3 of recording everything possible in massive reference databases, and about which no one could be interested except out of curiosity because otherwise ‘unusable’, but in the hopes that parts of it, if supplemented by additional specifics might in combination get promoted to higher categories.

      If someone figures out how to mine the data to consistently promote things to category 2 or 1, that inevitably gets formalized in an organization, office, or institution dedicated to doing that, and whatever fruit might be left is even higher handling and more likely unusable.

      Has this happened with philosophy? One hears about “economics imperialism” encroaching on the turf of a lot of other fields examining human behavior, and perhaps philosophy has been the victim of the imperialism of lots of fields.

      Consider these poachers: Mathematics (especially logic, game theory, decision theory, probability-based epistemology), Linguistics, Economics, Computer Science, Psychology (especially evolutionary psychology), Physics (that of fundamental particles and interactions, and also Cosmology).

      Another way of looking at it is Hume’s split between Is and Ought. The Is domain has been fully colonized by other fields with a lot of progress and success.

      Arguable, so has the Ought, but with the opposite result. Anything dealing with morality and ethics tends to get tangled up with “results-oriented contemporary political ideology” and a hopeless mess with no reliable method of generating agreement as to fundamentals.

    • I agree with much of what Handle said but I think I’d add that detailed analysis of any kind is in itself uninteresting. Aristotle reads like a bad high school science text book while Plato’s dialogs read like an engaging novel. There is a place for both and we are forever using movies and other references from popular culture as widely understood metaphors in our analysis.

      On Kling’s wider interest in Philosophy, I think the academic pursuit has become more a history of thought than an arena of exploration. Language is a subcomponent of mind and the study of how the mind works requires a much broader set of analytical tools. Having said that, I do enjoy reading Rebecca Goldstein so maybe I should turn my analytic lens inward.

  3. I do not give philosophers the same respect I give to specialists in positive subjects like physics or mathematics or even bad economics.

    On any issue I care about that they claim to make fundamental modern contributions — whether it be the existence of God, morality, politics, or ideology — I find their arguments to be self-referential gobbledygook relying on fundamental claims I often reject. They have no way to convince me otherwise.

    Perhaps I am simply an idiot but it seems to me their arguments are only persuasive to those who have drunk the Kool Aid and utterly unhelpful in persuading those of us who are skeptical of the subject.

    At least Plato is entertaining. Modern philosophy is irrelevant, pointless bollocks.

  4. I forgot to add that as Hanneken said, on anything anaytic phils can say something true, the questions are uninteresting.

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