This is a response to a several things, but, first of all, to a project of Andrea
Sangiacomo’s, as reported in this article.[1]The article, which is clearly based on
an interview with Sangiacomo, is available in both English and Dutch, but there
is no indication I can see as to the relationship between the two versions nor as to
the language(s) used in the original interview. I will mostly rely on the English
version, for obvious reasons. As usual, I am ill-informed: I don’t know anything
about Dr. Sangiacomo’s work besides what the article contains, and,
given that such sources are not always very reliable, I can scarcely be
said to know even that. I don’t know, for example, whether Sangiacomo
has been accurately quoted, or whether his words, even when they are
his, may have been taken out of context. So my remarks here should
not be understood as criticism of Sangiacomo’s project, still less of him
personally.
If not that, though, then what are they? Sangiacomo is reported to have said
something to the point:
Many colleagues still consider philosophy to be purely a job for
humans. And do not get me wrong, I generally agree with that.
The most relevant philosophical insights are still being generated
by people who reflect deeply.
The difference between human and non-human is not, as such, of much concern to
me in this regard: if horses, oxen, or electronic computers can aid in the
generation of relevant philosophical insights, then I am more than happy to
share the glory of such with them. What does concern me is the difference
between reflective and unreflective. To paraphrase Locke: I grant, AI’s will
not come to deep reflection till they be more like humans; and I add,
nor then, neither. Natural intelligence is fully capable of executing an
algorithm.
I introduce this word, “algorithm” (which does occur, but not very
prominently, in the article under consideration) with some hesitation, and not
only because, as Popper somewhere notes, the word should really be “algorism.”
What I want is a word for the thing non-human AI’s can definitely do, according
to Sangiacomo, because to do that thing — to implement or execute what I am
calling an algorithm — does not require deep reflection. “Algorithm” may or may
not be the best choice for this, and I certainly don’t intend to import any of its
technical content from theoretical or applied computer science. In what follows, it
should taken to mean: a process that can be carried on without reflection. This I
think an informative definition because, despite having read and been
thoroughly confused by a whole canonfull of philosophers who all use the term
“reflection” in various ways, I still find the definiens clearer than the
definiendum.
With only slight exaggeration, then, I would say: the present post expresses
a reflection prompted by the output of a certain algorithm. One stage
of the algorithm in question, namely the part that made Martin Lenz’s
link to the article come up on my Facebook feed, was implemented by
electronic computers. But, before that, I would guess it was a human
who decided that the University of Gronigen needed a story about this
under “About us Latest news News News articles,” and I know it was a
human, by the name of Jorn Lelong, who actually wrote the story.[2]I
find with some Googling that Jorn Lelong is a freelance journalist based
in Ghent, Belgium, who has authored various pieces (in English) about
developments in technology research for various different outlets, and who also
has a Twitter account (in Dutch). There is even a picture of him, so,
barring deepfakery, he is definitely an actual human being — a kind of
cool, cheerful looking young human being in a bright red hoody and dark
sunglasses. There is no credit for a translator. Perhaps this means that
Lelong wrote both the Dutch and the English versions. But I mean no
disrespect in saying that I doubt the humans in question required any deep
reflection to perform these tasks, and in fact I even imagine that the best
current AI might be trained up to do them tolerably well. Moreover, the
main factor in the decision to publish the story is presumably what gets
mentioned at the very end, namely that Sangiacomo has received an ERC
grant of €1.5 million for a follow-up research project. How much deep
reflection is involved in awarding such grants? I hope Martin will not be
offended if I add that, whatever reflection he may have engaged in upon
reading the article, it was likely not an essential part of his decision to post
the link. And, as for my own decision to follow that link: what chance
has reflection in the face of clickbait? In conclusion, then, Sangiacomo
(as reported) and I (as self-reported) agree thus far: we both hold that
philosophy requires reflection, and yet we both concede that the output of an
unreflective, algorithmic process can present a useful occasion for such
reflection.
The question, however, is whether some such algorithms are superior to others.
Sangiacomo, in conjunction with the Data Science team at Gronigen’s Centre for
Information Technology, has come up with a new algorithm to do this, and plans
to spend €1.5 million following up on this work, because he is unsatisfied with the
results of a different algorithm, namely, the one whose output he characterizes as
“a few great works by a few great authors.”[3]At least: these words are in
quotation marks in the article, which I think is supposed to imply that they are
due to Sangiacomo, rather than to Lelong. This algorithm, too, has various
stages which have been implemented on different hardware. The first and
longest part was carried out by what you might call a neural network —
anyway, it was a network of some kind, as Sangiacomo reportedly asserts.
In a section of the article titled “The importance of a network,” Lelong
writes:
Sangiacomo also found that social connections also have a
significant role to play in the popularity of certain philosophical
theories. As such, in addition to the shifts in meanings, he also
sought to trace the mutual relationships and networks of early
modern philosophers.
Working over the course of some centuries, this network has brought a few great
authors to prominence. The second and shorter part is carried out by the current
institutions of philosophy, as part of the process of professionalization:
students, professors, journal editors, etc., are trained up to recognize these
few great authors and to produce and respond selectively to the work of
philosophical scholars which is confined, in a certain way, to a few great works by
them.
That the first, long part of this process was algorithmic in the sense in which I
am using that term, which it to say, not properly reflective, is Sangiacomo’s point
when he (reportedly) goes on to say:
A priori, there are no obvious reasons as to why some
philosophical theories become much more popular than others.
Throughout history you sometimes see that really crazy ideas
become mainstream, while good ideas are side-lined. To explain
that, you have to look at social connections, because people
are the real driving force of history. In that respect, this
project provides a lot of information.[4]Again, these words are in
quotation marks in the article.
Now, the discovery that some ideas are “really crazy” (Dutch: erg gekke) even though
they have “become mainstream” (Dutch: mainstream worden), is, in other
words, enlightenment. As such, it requires, one would think, significant
philosophical insight, and must therefore depend on deep reflection. This calls
up the image of an alternate version of history: a history in which the
owl of Minerva gets up early in the morning and flaps around all day,
pecking out the really crazy ideas and making sure that the good ones
become mainstream. Sangiacomo, however, regardless of what he may or
may not imagine, nevertheless does not propose either to apply reflection
now, in order retrospectively to put such a history together, nor to try
and institute the rule of reflection from now on. Instead, he offers a new
algorithm.
But before considering Sangiacomo’s new algorithm: I have yet to describe the
second, shorter stage of the old one. This stage, as it happens, is well describe by
Martin Lenz himself in his own recent blog post:
People become enthusiastic if they recognise something. . . . I
think much the same is true of our talk of “great thinkers.” We
applaud recognised patterns. But only applauding the right kinds
of patterns and thinkers secures our belonging to the ingroup. . . .
This is why calling someone a “great thinker” is to a large extent
self-congratulatory. It signals and reinforces canonical status.
What’s important is that this works in three directions: it affirms
that status of the figure, it affirms it for me, and it signals this
affirmation to others. Thus, it signals where I (want to) belong
and demonstrates which nuances of style and content are of the
right sort.
The algorithm at this stage has a familiar purpose, one of the main things both
artificial and natural intelligences are trained to do. It is an algorithm for
recognizing patterns, and, more particularly, for recognizing places in a pattern:
figures that stand out against a ground, enclosing what is inner and excluding
what is outer. Some of the places, or topics, it is trained to recognize are great
thinkers of the past, whereas others (metaphysics, philosophy of mind, etc.) are
contemporary, but, one way or another, knowing how to recognize such topics;
how to market oneself as belonging to one of them (or to the “intersection” of
two of them); how, on the basis of this topic assignment, to enter into a
mutually beneficial group of researchers who own that topic, in which
everyone is bound to cite each other’s works; how (if one is a journal
editor) to determine the topic of a submission and ensure that it is refereed
by members of the group who own that topic — all this, and more of
the like, is what professionalization in academic philosophy currently
entails.
Or — and this will make a difference to our understanding of what
Sangiacomo proposes to do — is that description already somewhat outdated? In
using the term “topic” I allude, on the one hand, to Kant and, via Kant, to
Aristotle. More on that below. But I also, on the other hand, allude to Brian
Weatherson’s fascinating History of Philosophy Journals: Volume 1: Evidence
from Topic Modeling, 1876–2013. Unlike Kant and Aristotle, Weatherson cannot
be held responsible for the word: “topic modeling” is just the usual terminology
for the type of algorithmic technique he uses. But still, it is interesting to
inquire into what “topic” ends up meaning for him, i.e. what “topics”
the algorithm comes up with when applied to the contents of philosophy
journals during the indicated period. It is particularly interesting in the
present connection because, to quote the Wikipedia article just linked
to:
HLTA [a method of topic modeling][5]HTLA stands for
hierarchical latent tree analysis. Weatherson uses a different
method, LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation). For some technical
details and, should you be interested, links to more, see the
Wikipedia article in question and Weatherson’s chapter on
methodology. was applied to a collection of recent research
papers published at major AI and Machine Learning venues. The
resulting model is called The AI Tree. The resulting topics are
used to index the papers at aipano.cse.ust.hk to help researchers
track research trends and identify papers to read, and help
conference organizers and journal editors identify reviewers for
submissions.
So, in other words: the AI researchers themselves feel that their algorithm, when
implemented by artificial intelligence, can fulfill at least part of the function I
assigned to professionalized human philosophers above — or rather, it can fulfill
at least part of the corresponding function in that field. So an interesting
question would be: will Weatherson’s related technique succeed in finding the
corresponding kind of “topic” in philosophy, such that it, too, could be used for
those purposes? The interesting answer, as I understand Weatherson’s results, is
that his method can succeed in this respect, but only during a certain, relatively
short period of the history of philosophy (and of the history of philosophy
journals).
A perfect philosophical work, at whatever time and in whatever way
written and/or published, ought to have a topic, a place, in a formal
(logical) sense. That is: it ought to have some leading concept.[6]You
might think the condition should instead be that the work have a leading
judgment (a thesis). For Kant, however, such a unity of thesis depends on and
presupposes a conceptual unity: “A judgment is the representation of the unity
of the consciousness of different representations or the representation
of their relation insofar as they make up a concept” (Jäsche Logic, §17,
Ak. 9:101,5–7). For, as Kant says in the Amphiboly of the Pure Concepts of
Reflection:
One can call any concept, any title under which many cognitions
belong, a logical place [Ort]. Upon this is founded [gründet sich]
the logical topics of Aristotle.
(KrV A268/B324)[7]Kant, reasonably enough, treats
τόποςtopos as the equivalent of Ort, and reserves Topik for a
theory or system of such places (parallel to other terms such as
Logik and Physik). But I will stick, somewhat reluctantly, to the
more common practice of calling each individual logical place a
topic. (Hume, following a different interpretation of the Topics,
uses “topic” in yet another sense.)
The (logical) perfection of such a work would consist in the consequence of all its
parts from, and their joint adequacy to, that single leading concept:
In every cognition of an object there is namely unity of the
concept, which one can call qualitative unity, insofar as only
the unity of the comprehension of what is manifold in the
cognitions is thought thereunder, as, for example, the unity
of theme in a play, an oration, a fable. Secondly, truth with
regard to consequences. . . . This one can call the qualitative
plurality of the notes that belong to a concept as their common
ground. . . . Finally, perfection, which consists in this, that this
plurality, [taken] together, reduces, conversely, to the unity of
the concept, and completely agrees to this [concept] and to
no other, which one can call qualitative completeness (totality).
(B114)
I hasten to add (in fact, this is the whole point of §12 of the B edition) that these
three qualitative moments of quantity are necessary but not sufficient for
reference, i.e. for “cognition of an object”; in other words, even a work that is
logically perfect in this sense might lack a subject matter (what might be called
an objective or material topic, although Kant never uses such expressions, to my
knowledge). And then again, on the other hand, a work might be full
of objective content and yet lack formal–logical perfection. This latter
condition, roughly speaking, is what the methods of “topic modeling” assume:
namely, that a given article will contain a mixture (in some determinate
proportion) of the consequences (notes, characteristics) of various different
logical topics. Words are used as proxies for such consequences, and a
statistically recurring cluster of words is taken as the sign of an underlying
conceptual unity from which all (and, ideally, only) the members of that cluster
flow.
Even assuming, however, that all or most of the articles published in
philosophy journals have at least such imperfect logical locality, it doesn’t follow
that the topics located by topic modeling will be topics of the aforementioned
kind, namely the topics that guide the current algorithm of professionalized
philosophy. For one thing: if a topic is to be usable in that way, it must be, not
only a logical place, but also, so to speak, a social or political one. It is not
enough for it to comprehend, in a conceptual unity, what is manifold in
certain cognitions; it must also comprehend, in a political unity, what is
manifold in certain people. This is explicit enough in one part of the
function of such topics: if the editor is to decide, based on the topic of a
paper, who would be appropriate reviewers, or rather, to which reviewers
that paper is appropriate, then there must be an identifiable group of
people who have a right — in a broad sense, a property right — to the
topic in question. This is the external deference to or recognition of the
political structure which is owed by the journal editor; internally, the main
political tie, is, as I have mentioned above, the implicit covenant to cite
one another’s papers.[8]It came out recently, in certain infamous cases,
that the editors of some journals had not paid this political deference to
the owners of certain topics, e.g. trans studies, and, as a consequence,
had accepted articles for publication that failed to cite the literature. No
doubt these articles were also flawed in their content. I highly doubt they
were based on deep reflection or contained many relevant philosophical
insights. But people were quite right, in my view, to complain, not only
about problems in content, but about the merely procedural errors in the
acceptance process. This lack of deferral to experts was itself, indeed, an unjust
act, given the way other topics are currently treated. Following the usual
terminology, I will call such combined logico-political topics specialties. For
topic modeling to pick up topics of the right kind, at a minimum, the
constitution of professional philosophy — the constitution under which the body
of writing to be analyzed was produced — must involve division into
specialties.
In the absence of such a constitution, the method may well detect some topics,
but these topics will not be specialties. It might still pick up the logical topics of
individual works, even though, since these topics are not specialties, the
information will not be usable by journal editors etc. in the contemplated
ways. On the other hand, however, it might detect political topics directly,
even though these are not specialties, i.e., not correlated with logical
topics. A group of people who selectively read and mention each other,
and selectively control one another’s ability to publish and otherwise
flourish, will naturally develop some linguistic markers of their own. They
would do so, I’m certain, even under an imagined constitution in which
political topics were formed arbitrarily, say by lot, which means that
topic modeling could easily discover even such purely political topics.
Philosophy has never been so constituted, and I hope it never will be.[9]Some
systems of academic patronage can contain elements of such a constitution,
however. This may be what Sangiacomo has in mind when he (reportedly)
talks about “the network of a well-known male author,” and also when he
(reportedly) says that “people are the real driving force of history.” It’s not
what you know but who you know, as they say. But philosophy has very
often, in fact almost always, had another constitution that might produce,
so to speak, an even stronger political signal. I refer to the system of
philosophical schools, also known as sects: αἱρέσειςhaireseis. In this system,
a few great authors — authors in the original sense, authorities — are
treated, not as logical topics, conceptual themes that a philosophical work
might be about, but rather as heresiarchs, mythical or historical originators
and successive rulers of political topics that preserve themselves through
time.
Maybe it seems that there is little to choose between our constitution of
specialties and this older one of sects. Isn’t the latter just an alternate way of
dividing up the same territory? But actually everything is different, because no
sect ever owns its authorities. If anything, it is the other way around,
although sovereignty should not be confused with property. In any case:
this relationship, however it should be described, leaves the authorities
still available to anyone else. The ancient Peripatetics and Stoics could
not prevent, and had no right to prevent, the Neoplatonists from using
Aristotle or Epictetus for their own purposes. The German Idealists might
have many things against Schopenhauer, or the Marburgers against the
Phenomenologists, and vice versa, but no one could coherently complain: Kant is
ours. If Natorp gave a talk, and Husserl raised his hand during the Q&A,
he would not have to begin his question with an apology: “This is not
my field, but …”. The authorities were no one’s field. They remained a
commons.[10]This is not to say that there can’t be problems about property rights
to authorities. Problems will come up when we want to use an authority,
e.g. Confucius, who belongs to an entirely different tradition, a tradition that
has its own institutions of teaching and writing and need not necessarily
welcome being appropriated by the Western academy (descended from
Plato’s Academy). In general, a commons belongs to the village, not to the
world.
And, sure enough, Weatherson does pick up at least two sects as “topics”:
post-Kantian idealism (dominant in the earlier years of his journals) and ordinary
language philosophy (peaking sometime in the 1950’s). Weatherson is
well aware that these are not “topics” in the same sense as most of his
others: he does call idealism a “school,” and he says of ordinary language
philosophy that “what the model is finding is a style as much as a content,”
although I think “school” (or “sect”) would be more appropriate in that case,
as well. He explains here that, while the particular model that forms
the basis of his book did not detect another sect, pragmatism, this sect
did appear as a topic in many other runs. Since the reign of Analytic
philosophy began with the capture of most of these journals by a single
sect,[11]As discussed by Weatherson, ibid., referring in turn to an article
by Joel Katzav and Krist Vaesen. most of the well-defined sects in the
postwar period do not appear in his model, or at best have a very small
signal.[12]Clear examples of this would be Straussians and Cavellians, both of
whom tend to publish elsewhere. Continental philosophy, while it could be
regarded from the outside as one big sect, also continued to have a stronger
sect-based constitution internally during much of this period, but, again,
their publication mostly did not appear in these journals. The nature and
evolution of Continental philosophy’s internal constitution are beyond my
scope here, and in part beyond my knowledge (though I do have some
ideas).
But — and this needs to be emphasized because, even though the main events
happened within living memory, they have already become hard to imagine, let
alone recall — this does not mean that his method detects mostly specialties
from, say, the late 1940’s on. On the contrary: no specialties yet existed,
or at most very few (ancient philosophy might be an example). What
we had instead was, to begin with, a single sect, Analytic philosophy,
which then began the process of breaking into subsects. Ordinary language
philosophy was an early and ultimately abortive example, but it is not
hard to imagine an alternative future for our mid-to-late 20th century
past in which Anglophone philosophy would have been divided up among
followers of such figures as Popper, David Lewis, Dummett, Putnam, Rorty,
etc., with none of those sects coming to own any logical topic. In other
words: we might have Popperian logic, Lewisian logic, etc.; and likewise for
metaphysics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of
language, philosophy of mind — each of these figures felt free to write about
any of those logical topics, and so might all of their followers have felt
free. In fact, Lewis, writing around 1988–9,[13]“Academic appointments:
Why ignore the advantage of being right?,” first published in Ormond
Papers (Ormond College, University of Melbourne, 1989), based on a
lecture given at Ormond College in July 1988; now available in Papers in
Ethics and Social Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN
978-0521587860), pp. 187–200. I have discussed this article, which
abounds in relevant philosophical insights, at greater length elsewhere.
seems to confidently assume that such a future is in store: the implicit
bargaining between the members of his lucky philosophy department concerns
which school[14]Lewis in this article conceives schools doxastically, as
groups of people who happen to agree about certain things, rather than
politically, as I do here. I take this as a piece of characteristically Lewisian
irony. will get a new hire, not, as generally happens now, which AOS will
get it. Allowing for Lewis’s perceptions of the profession to be a little
out of date,[15]If that is really the explanation. He had perhaps already
acknowledged Leibniz as a historical specialty earlier: “Anything I might say
about Leibniz would be amateurish, undeserving of others’ attention,
and better left unsaid” (On the Plurality of Worlds (Blackwell, 1986,
ISBN 978-0631139942), p. viii). Alas, what I wouldn’t
give to know Lewis’s amateurish thoughts on Leibniz! this agrees well
with my own sense that the rise of specialties occurred sometime in the
1980’s. It also agrees with Weatherson’s characterization, here, of his Era 3
(1966–1981): “where the classic works of contemporary analytic philosophy were
written by writers like Kripke, Lewis, Putnam, Rawls, Thomson, Singer and
Frankfurt.” “Classic works of contemporary philosophy” (as I have had
occasion to point out recently on Facebook) is, like “Classic New Coke,” a
contradiction in terms. But we can all understand Weatherson’s meaning:
since this was the era of the last authorities, the most influential works
of this era — the ones that would have become central texts of newly
emerging sects — are, so to speak, frozen in, as both “classic” and, at the
same time, permanently “contemporary.” And this also explains why
he describes his Era 4 (1982–1998) as “the one I have the hardest time
conceptualising.” This era, being the era in which empire of specialties
arose and grew to its maximum extent, is the era Weatherson (at least
subconsciously[16]I don’t know Weatherson personally, nor have I read his
extensive other professional publication, but his writing in this book is thoughtful
(perhaps even contains some deep reflection and relevant philosophical
insights), so I don’t want to suggest that he is unaware of the matters
I bring up here. I should emphasize, as well, that he does not aim (at
least, in what he has published so far) to study the change I am talking
about; I am putting his work to a use somewhat different than what he
intends. In particular: the author of an article is not among the data that
his algorithm works with. Still, I think it not too unfair to say that his
work is animated by a background feeling that division into specialties a
normal state for philosophy.) imagines extending over the whole history of
philosophy. How could he differentiate it in the way conceptualization
requires?
I have one last matter to consider from Weatherson, before getting back to
Sangiacomo and, by way of him, back to Kant (and Hume). This is the nature of
his Era 5 (1999–2013), which he describes somewhat anticlimactically as
“dominated by a number of distinctive topics, such as reasons, vagueness,
contextualism and Williamsonian epistemology and metaphysics.” I suppose Era 5
is all of that, but it is also the period which saw the appearance of the “bad
topic” he discusses here and again here. This bad topic (“bad” in the sense that it
is not the kind of result Weatherson wants) does not appear in the list he
eventually settled on; it resulted from an attempt apply too many iterated
“refinements” to the same underlying model — I refer you to the above
linked text for technical details. Here is Weatherson’s description of what
happened:
One signature problem with the kind of text mining I’m doing is
that it can’t tell the difference between a change of vocabulary
that is the result of a change in subject matter, and a change of
vocabulary that is the result of a change in verbal fashions. . . .
So after 100 iterations, we ended up with a model that wasn’t a
philosophical topic at all, but was characterized by the buzzwords
of recent philosophy.
To be specific, the words the over-refined model gave most weight in identifying this
topic were: accounts, role, commitment, commitments, account, proposal,
constitutive, practices, challenge, typically, claims, worry, approach, relevant,
project, focus, features, issue, appeal, provide. I blush to say that I have relied on
some of these myself in the past and that, even after having seen the list, I
sometimes find it difficult to avoid them. Weatherson hesitates between two
possible explanations of why a bad topic like this only appeared towards the end
of his period:
- There has been a linguistic revolution over the last
generation, and philosophers now write in a very different
style to how they wrote a generation ago.
- This is an artifact of model building, and if you stopped the
model at any time, and ran the same study I did, you’d get
results like this. That is, doing what I did will get you weird
results whenever there is linguistic drift, and there is always
linguistic drift.
But, although I have not a shred of that meticulous empirical evidence which
Weatherson requires and could supply, I don’t doubt for a moment that the
answer is (1). This certainty of mine you should probably distrust: the old
are always affronted by the language of the young, after all. I can only
say how it seems to me. The rise of these buzzwords, namely, seems to
me a sign that it is not only Weatherson’s algorithm that can’t tell the
difference between subject matter and verbal fashion, but that, rather, the
algorithms of professionalization themselves are beginning to have the
same problem. We are beginning to train up producers and detectors of
buzzwords.
Back to Sangiacomo, then. In place of the algorithmic — that is, as I am using
the term: unreflective — process which has brought up a few works by a few great
thinkers for our consideration, he offers a different algorithmic process which will
bring up different pieces of text. Granted, there may be little reason to
suppose, with Hegel, that the old algorithm, the algorithm of history,
was suffused with the cunning of the spirit, such that it could be trusted
always to output exactly what deep reflection requires. Whatever Hegel
means by “the end of history,” it probably is not the kind of end we face
now. Still, it would be reasonable to ask: what was wrong with the old
algorithm, and how will the new one improve on it? Sangiacomo (reportedly)
explains:
Our entire understanding of early modern philosophy is based on
the works of five authors.
[17]The five (or six) authors he counts,
in the order in which Lelong lists them, are: Spinoza, Descartes,
Hume, Locke, Newton “and, at least according to some, Kant.” A
few other names, e.g. Leibniz, could probably have been added
to this. So naturally, that is an incredibly distorted view. But
what is the alternative?…
I realized that I would never be able to gain a complete picture
of that period. Because if it turns out that there were actually as
many as a thousand philosophers active during that time, what
would be the advantage of adding ten to fifteen names to the
existing canon? We need new tools.
How he arrived at the figure of (as many as) a thousand “active” philosophers, I can
only guess. But I can say a few things about this. First of all, if the knowledge we
need about our history, in order to make reflection possible, consists in knowing
the views of as many as a thousand different people, then there is no hope for us,
because there is no way we can possibly know that. Secondly, and worse: as
philosophy is now constituted, we, the thousands upon thousands of philosophers
who are said to be active now, are very far from knowing the views even
of those five authors. Each of these authors constitutes a specialty (or
rather, as things now stand, a relative specialty, which is a generality
to the various specialties lying under it). The owners of a specialty are
alone authorized to say, to one another, in the journals, what each one
of these authors said, and always on the condition that they cite one
another. The rest of us are authorized, more or less, to supply caricatures
of them for the purposes of jokes at department meetings, lectures to
undergraduates, and chronically unfunny comic strips. Adding ten or
fifteen new history AOS’s would only make this situation worse. To be
added to the canon, under our present constitution, is to be culturally
appropriated: removed from the commons and brought under the corporate
control of a specialty. After canonization, the figure in question is no
longer known by us: from our point of view, they have been canceled.
Canonization is appropriation is cancellation. Only those who are (still)
too obscure to be claimed by any specialty can still be known by us at
all.
What is the true fear, the true uneasiness, that finds expression as the fear
that “our” “view” is “incredibly distorted”? There is an inconsistency between the
way we understand contemporary philosophy (the classics of Weatherson’s Era 3,
plus the vast output or Eras 4 and 5) and the way we — that is, the specialists
among us — understand the history of philosophy. To know philosophy now, to be
a professional, means (1) to know to which specialty one belongs, who else belongs
to it, when to cite them, and so forth; and (2), increasingly, to be up
on the latest verbal fashions, to know what buzzwords to emit. But no
one knows anything parallel about philosophy before Era 3. It would be
impossible to know (1), since specialties did not yet exist, but some historians,
so-called contextualists, now supply a simulacrum by pretending that, say,
Descartes, spent much of his time eagerly scanning the latest literature by
every (active) member of his “field” (which was …?), as if he lay under our
obligation to read recent things so as to able to spew a list of name–date
pairs into the appropriate footnote. But this leaves (2) unaccounted for,
and (2) is what Sangiacomo’s algorithm promises to supply. Along with
his collaborator, Christian Marocico, and others at the CIT, he “used
ShiCo (Shifting Concepts through Time), an open source tool developed
by the Netherlands eScience Center and the University of Utrecht, to
analyse shifts in words in a historical context.” Here is how it worked
out:
Of course, the tool needed a little tinkering. ShiCo was developed
to record conceptual shifts in 20th-century newspaper reports.
Data scientist Marocico adapted the model so that the algorithm
was able to analyse 70,000 letters exchanged between philosophers
and academics during the 17th and 18th centuries. . . . They
investigated which word associations were formed for certain
scientific concepts, and how this changed over the years.
Sometimes this produced remarkable results. “For example, we
found that in the 17th century the English word ‘spirit’ was used
in both a chemical and a religious context. In the 18th century,
however, we see that the word has lost its chemical meaning. It
illustrates how concepts change.”
It may not be obvious that this result is remarkable, that is, worthy of
remark.[18]Contrast it with Locke’s story about a related word: “I was once in a
Meeting of very learned and ingenious Physicians, where by chance there arose
a Question, whether any Liquor passed through the Filaments of the
Nerves. The Debate having been manag’d a good while, by variety of
Arguments on both sides, I … desired, That, before they went any further on
in this Dispute, they would first examine, and establish amongst them,
what the Word Liquor signified. . . . They were pleased to comply with
my Motion, and upon Examination found that the signification of that
Word, was not so settled or certain, as they had all imagined; but that
each of them made it a sign of a different complex Idea. This made them
perceive that the Main of their Dispute was about the signification of that
Term; … a thing which when considered, [they] thought it not worth the
contending about.” (3.9.16) But we can appreciate what might make it
remarkable by comparing it with what Weatherson (somewhere in here)
says his algorithm has detected in its “bad topic”: “talking about the
‘commitments of an account’ rather than the ‘consequences of a theory’ is a way
to mark one’s philosophical writing as being up to date with modern
terminology.” This is the kind of thing a professional ought to know about
the present, and so it must be important to know it about the past, as
well.
Whether deep reflection, of the kind essential to philosophy, can ever be
prompted by knowledge of verbal fashions — either contemporary verbal fashions
or the verbal fashions of the 17th century — I honestly don’t know. The spirit, as
that term is used in a Hegelian context, rather than a chemical or a religious one
— the spirit, whose perfections non comprehendere, sed quocunque modo attingere
cogitatione possumus, is always more cunning that we expect; it always overflows
our concepts, shift them as we might. It is said to have revealed itself in
cracked turtle shells, in images on toast, in words written on subway
walls and tenement halls, in riddle games in the dark at the roots of the
Hithaeglir, in comic strips, in superhero movies, in Facebook memes,
in a brutal command to wipe out Amalek — perhaps, who can say, it
reveals itself in philosophical buzzwords, as well. But, if we are to act on
God’s apparent, presumptive, antecedent will, rather than his secret,
decisive, consequent one, I would have to say that this method does not look
promising.
What about the old algorithm, then — let’s say, the old algorithm as it
operated (or: in one of the many ways it operated) before the rise of our current
specialties? What reason is there, Hegel’s reasons aside, to expect anything useful
from that? “Why,” to quote the title of Lenz’s blog post cited above,
“would we want to call people ‘great thinkers’?” To tell the truth, although
I have often used that phrase in the past, I am growing tired of it. To
present day ears, at least, it sounds like an award we are giving to some
people, as if we were doing something for them, rather than: that they did
something for us, namely, made us possible. I am pleased to find that Justin
E.H. Smith makes some remarks along the same lines in a newsletter I
received as I was writing this, which I will quote, since he writes so much
better than I do. Speaking of demands that we diversity our canon, he
says:
An implicit premise … is that it is a good thing for a thinker to
end up on a course syllabus, a sort of posthumous prize handed
out to the dead by the living. Thus it is presumed that to study
the old canon, as we inherited it, the canon of dead white men,
is to honour these dead white men.
But scholarship is not a fan club, and to read Descartes or Kant
is an undertaking that is entirely neutral with respect to whether
they are praiseworthy as thinkers (a fortiori whether they are
praiseworthy as people). When we study the history of philosophy
we want, first, to know what happened, and second, to know
how what happened shaped the world we inherited. This is not
a celebration, but a solemn duty.[19]I received this essay as an
edition of Smith’s newsletter, to which I urge you to subscribe,
but for now you can see it online without a subscription here.
I disagree with some of this,[20]I agree that at least some of the complaints about the
old canon arise from a thought like this: that assigning someone’s book is like
building a monument to them (which, however, does rather undermine the meme
about, “Won’t they be surprised to hear that we can learn history from books?”).
But I doubt that all or most of the impetus for a new, more diverse canon can be
traced to same source. What students want to see on the syllabus is not
someone to whom an award is due, but someone who “looks like them,”
who reminds them of themselves. And, in some sense, as I will go on to
say, that is exactly what they should want. I can’t think that what is
really desirable in this respect is to find someone in the reading list the
same color or gender as yourself, but I can see that feeling alienated by
the color and gender you exclusively do find might be an obstacle. We
all face such obstacles, but some more than others. We should try to
remove them if we can. and with some of the other things Smith says in his
essay, but I agree with the main point: canonization is not a reward. So,
although I continue to think that most of the canonized, if not all, were
indeed praiseworthy, and in particular that they were praiseworthy as
(finitely!) wise and good — wiser and better than me, at any rate — I
would rather avoid calling them great anything. Let me call them my
authorities.
How can reading an authority prompt deep reflection? What is “reflection”? It
is reflective, reflex. I recognize a pattern, all right, something familiar, but the
pattern, the παράδειγμαparadeigma, is familiar, not because I have previously
picked it up with my buzzword detector, but because I myself am its
image, ut esset tanquam nota artificis operi suo impressa; nec etiam opus
est ut nota illa fit aliqua res ab opere ipso diversa. This kind of pattern
recognition is called recollection, ἀνάμνησιςanamnesis, and it cannot be
performed by algorithm: not because machines, in the end, really only
know how to count; not because πᾶν τὸ πρὸς ἑαυτὸ ἐπιστρεπτικὸνpan to
pros heauto epistreptikon ἀσώματόν ἐστινasomaton estin; not (if I may
allude to a certain harasser) because recollection depends on the actual
physical–chemical properties of actual human brains — but simply because
recollection is reflection, and, as you will recall, I have defined an algorithm as a
process that does not require reflection. To see an electronic computer
perform ἀνάμνησιςanamnesis would surprise me no more than to see a
human being do so, which is to say: it would surprise me a great deal, and
always again surprise me even if I were to see it always and everywhere I
looked (although, sadly, there is little prospect of that). But I would also
know, of the computer or the human, that they could have performed
this recollection only thanks to a reminder. The sign, the trace that can
remind me in this way leads always beyond my shifting concepts, לעילא לעילא מכל ברכתא ושירתאle-ʿeila le-ʿeila mi-kol birchata ve-shirata, and is hence
everywhere beyond needing any praise from me. But I need everything from
it.
I close by coming back to Kant, and from Kant to Hume. What did Kant
think was wrong in Hume? Not, alas, that he was a racist: Hume’s racism, if
anything, thanks to its tentative, empirical nature, would scarcely have seemed
racist enough for Kant. But he did think Hume had committed an error or two.
The worst one, as it happens, was his failure to reflect, or rather, his failure to
reflect in the right way. Reflection (I will assert here without evidence) is the
(logical) topic Kant takes up in the Analytic of Principles, in its third Hauptstück,
Of the Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and
Noumena.[21]The distinction itself between phenomena and noumena is also a
local distinction: it distinguishes what is within the bounds of experience
(phenomena) from what is without (noumena). These two places constitute what
Kant calls transcendental topic — or, in the terminology I have adopted here:
they are the two transcendental topics (only, of course, that the second
one is empty). Accordingly, he begins there by raising a question about
everything that has preceded. Granted that everything you say is true,
Kant, why tell us? (For, it must always be recalled: there is a negative
duty not to lie, not, absurdly, a positive duty to say everything that is
true.)
If, then, through this critical investigation, we learn no more
than what, even without so subtle an inquiry [Nachforschung],
we would anyway have executed [von selbst wol würden ausgeübt
haben] in the merely empirical use of the intellect, then it seems
that the advantage which one draws from it is not worth the effort
and the preparation. (A237/B296)
Leaving aside the conclusion, where does the premise of this objection come from?
Who says that we would have done the same thing, anyway, without this subtle
inquiry? Who indeed. Who says, for example, that we would have employed the
law of causality, that every event must have a cause, even if we not only could not
demonstrate the truth of that judgment, but could not even show title to the
concepts it contains? The answer is: Hume. Hume says that. So what does the
whole apparatus of the Transcendental Analytic contribute that was missing in
Hume? If we must, anyway, use the concept of a cause (when, for example, we
speculate, rightly or wrongly, about the causes of certain historical–geographical
trends), what good to us is a demonstration of the Second Analogy? Kant
answers:
the intellect when occupied with its merely empirical use,
which does not reflect [nicht nachsinnt] upon the sources of
its own cognition,[22]Nachsinnung is not the official equivalent
Kant later gives for reflexio (rather: Uberlegung — see
A260/B316). But I feel the translation is justified,
given that he is talking here about what he goes on to call
“transcendental reflection”: investigating the relation of one’s
cognitions to the faculties that are their “sources.” can indeed
progress very well, but there is one thing it cannot achieve,
namely, to determine of itself the limits of its use, and to know
what may lie within or without its whole sphere.
What Kant thinks Hume failed to do — or perhaps did incorrectly, so as to obtain a
negative (skeptical) result — was transcendental reflection; and he adds that
Hume was therefore led to say (as, indeed, Hume does say quite clearly) that
reason cannot set its own limits (i.e., transcendentally locate itself). Which,
from Kant’s point of view, is an infinitely bad error, both theoretical
and practical: reason’s theoretical self-limitation is the destruction of
knowledge that makes room for faith, and reason’s practical self-limitation is
self-legislation, autonomy. For Kant, Hume is guilty, not of making some
particular moral error, but rather of asserting that morality, as such, is
impossible.
So why would Kant want to call Hume a “great thinker” (or words to that
effect)? Or, as I would rather say: why would Kant take Hume as an
authority?
Because Hume is perhaps the most ingenious [the richest in
spirit, geistreichste — not, one assumes, in the chemical sense]
among all skeptics, and incontrovertibly the most eminent with
respect to the influence which the skeptical procedure can have
upon the awakening of a thoroughgoing rational self-examination
[einer gründlichen Vernunftprüfung], it may well be worth the
trouble to represent, insofar as it is appropriate to my aim, the
course of his conclusions and the strayings [Verirrungen], which
nevertheless began on the track of the truth,[23]It is difficult to
translate this passage correctly. The idea is that, when we follow
the course or path (Gang) of Hume’s reasoning, we will find that,
at certain points, he takes off after the tracks or traces (Spur) of
the truth, but nevertheless goes astray (verirren). of so insightful
and estimable a man. (A764/B792)
Hume supplied the place — the authoritative topic, so to speak — of Kant’s
awakening.
I freely confess: the recollection [Erinnerung] of David Hume
was just that which, many years ago, first interrupted my
dogmatic slumber and gave to my investigations in the
field of speculative philosophy an entirely different direction.
(Prolegomena, Ak. 4:260,6–9)
Hume himself — wrong, infinitely wrong as he may have been — was for Kant the
trace of truth, the trail, the spoor, the path that leads right inward. In Kant’s
terminology: one might say that Hume, in his life and thought, constituted a
symbolic, indirect exhibition of the transcendental idea of freedom. The
recollection of Hume was, then, for Kant, the recollection of his own true self, of
his transcendental ego. To name a tower after such a one, even a monument as
high as the moon; to put him on a syllabus, or even, like some notice about the
plagiarism policy, on every syllabus; to hire a fantastic young scholar who
specializes in his work, or even to hire a whole army of such young scholars, each
more fantastic than the last — all this is nothing, not the smallest part of what
we owe him, or, rather, what we would owe him, if he needed anything from the
likes of us.[24]Here I am speaking about what we might owe Hume in
common, not about what is owed to him by those specialists who have
appropriated him and used him as a means, extracting the value of his labor to
further their own careers. But these latter will have to make their own
reckoning.
But do we need him! What have I just been saying, all this time,
but that our dogmatic slumber now appears terminal? “Any prospect of
awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times
and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and
indescribably pleasant to all our senses” (Walden, 5.9). He is, incontrovertibly,
the heresiarch most eminent with regard to what we require. We cannot
receive him now, cannot receive anyone: Hume and all the others were
already canceled the moment they were transformed from authorities into
specialties. To quote someone else who had a morally wrong view here and
there: only a god can save us. But, if and when the day should come, it
has already been prophesied: et servus meus David princeps in medio
eorum.