'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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analytic philosophy
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July 5, 2008
In his The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation Nicholas Capaldi states that by "the Enlightenment Project" he means "the attempt to define and explain the human predicament through science as well as to achieve mastery over it through the use of a social technology". Analytic philosophy has been a dominant intellectual movement in the 20th century and a reflection of the cultural pre-eminence of scientism. The central element in the analytic conversation has been the Enlightenment Project: the appeal to an autonomous human reason, freed of any higher authority and channeling itself through science as its privileged tool.
Capaldi argues that:
Metaphysically, analytic philosophy adheres to a monistic naturalism/scientism. It views the world as self-explanatory, considers metaphysical truth to be equivalent to the structure revealed by the philosophy of science, and maintains a continuity between human beings and nature that allows the use of grammatical criteria to identify fundamental realities. In its scientism, analytic philosophy considers science to be intellectually autonomous and self-legislating: the whole truth about everything; basic science to be physical science; the world to be ontologically purposeless, mechanical system composed of discrete entities, atoms, hat retain their character irrespective of context, interact according to natural laws in ways that can be understood as a serial, causal sequence; science to be a unity whose subjects are a special kind of objects, that views world-understanding
as fundamental, self-understanding as derivative, and models social science after the physical sciences; scientific explanations to be superior to all others (because they uncover an objective, realist, structure that exists independently ofthe observer, express that structure’s necessary causal relations, relate deductively, and can be empirically verified); and explanations to be eliminative reductions or exploratory hypotheses about reality’s hidden substructure.
What we have is a deconstructed, mechanized, unteleological naturalism that claims to be able to abstract the hidden structure of reality and to make mental acts intelligible. It assumes the universe to be a materialist system.
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It sounds like an interesting book. But in fairness, much Analytic philosophy has become effectively post-Analytic, and has started to reject the scientism that originally afflicted that whole model of philosophical inquiry. (Leaving Rorty aside, MacDowell and Brandom both seem to be resuming/rediscovering themes and seams of thinking from the continental traditions long since styled as the "enemy", though, it's true, with some of the old naivete about timeless arguments). The project(s) of an Analytic philosophy do seem to me to be afflicted with a drive to construct a systematically self-consistent naturalism, which strikes me as wrong-headed, both with respect to an uncritical drive to systematicity, and with respect to a self-consistent naturalism, which strikes me as less true to the "facts" than an inconsistent one. And the Analytic project of "perfecting" arguments through the development of logical techniques, at the expense of recognizing the complicated interpretive embeddedness of arguments not only misses much of the issues at stake and substitutes misprisions in the name of precision, but has the effect of confining the addressing of arguments to the circle of fellow qualified Analytic initiates, (though that is a general defect of all philosophical "schools"). Still, Analytic philosophy has been on a recovery program from Quine for quite some time now, (though why such regression in thinking was necessary in the first place is beyond me), and Analytic philosophy now just amounts to a style of philosophic inquiry and activity, at least in its better representatives, rather than maintaining an "absolute" divide from "continental" styles of thinking, or from the ethical impetus and animus of the traditions of philosophical thinking in general.