Meta-Philosophy

Reflections on Balkanization I

There is, of course, no such thing as a ”causal chain.” When you look to the antecedents of any event, you discover not only whole flocks of previous events, but entirely different orders of events. Just my typing the last word in this sentence is going to involve rafts of chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, institutions, politics, and heaven knows what else, and now I'm almost too tired to do it.

This is why a book like Scott Soames’s, which omits all orders but one--the argumentative philosophical order—is not a work of history. To capture wie es eigentlich gewesen with analytic philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Soames would have had to include discussion of political pressures on philosophers, personality disputes (à la Wittgenstein’s Poker), religion (a not-so-subterranean force in much analytical philosophy), accidents of language, and so  forth. This doesn’t denigrate his achievement; it is a matter of seeing what sort of achievement it is. If I read my Aristotle correctly— Poetics 1451b—the proper name for what Soames has produced is “poetry.” It is like a Platonic dialogue in which the Forms themselves are doing the talking.

So the balkanization of philosophy, which is probably its dominant trait these days, cannot be given a linear explanation—it cannot be the product of a single causal chain (any more than anything else can). It cannot, therefore, result solely from the increase in size of the profession, as Rescher and Soames suggest. Indeed, the figures I adduced in my previous postings have suggested that the increase in size of the profession may not be nearly large enough to have played any significant role at all.

So what do you do, as an historian? You make as complete a list of possible causal factors as you can, and you try to weight them. What other things might we put on our list of causal factors in the balkanization of philosophy?

• Institutional pressures: employment in academia depends upon a dossier that can fit on a dean’s desk. It is largely, then, a matter of letters of recommendation from prominent figures in your field. The smaller your field, more likely it is that you know its prominent figures personally; the easier it is to get letters; and the more effective those letters are likely to be. Balkanization is found across academia because it is such a good survival strategy.

• Lack of good unifying ideas: mainstream American philosophy has suffered a number of blows since the early 70’s. Kripke, according to Soames, showed that the main philosophical problems turned, not on how language works, but on what reality is like. Rorty, according to me and others, showed that the dominant paradigm, being foundationalist, was little more than faith-based. Mainstream philosophy now appears to be caught between an old paradigm widely recognized as untenable, and a new paradigm that hasn't shown up. The better part of wisdom, perhaps, is for philosophers just to trickle quietly away into safely specialized backwaters

• Proliferation of Journals: More intriguing, however, may be this possibility: Consider the two areas in which there has been an undeniable explosion, in the number of grad students and the number of journals. It is clear that a 60% increase in the number of philosophical journals would certainly give the impression of an explosion in philosophy as such, certainly to someone who (like a good historian) is trying to keep up with what is published in journals.

And the explosion of journals is not unconnected with the explosion in grad students, because the real demand for journals comes not from readers, but from prospective contributors. Grad students need jobs; they therefore need to publish; and they have no time to write books. They, and their older siblings in the junior professoriat, are the real market for new journals.

It used to take money to start a journal, but online publication and other new technologies have obviated that. Now it takes primarily two things: a staff, basically a few philosophers who care enough about the prospective journal to devote some time and effort to it; and another group of philosophers, hopefully larger, to be your potential contributors. If those two problems can be solved, everything else—including library subscriptions—will follow.

It is easier for a group of like-minded friends to start a specialized journal than to get together the kind of more diverse group needed for a more general journal, and it is easier to ask your friends for articles than to try and get submissions from strangers. So journal publishing goes together with balkanization. Perhaps the proliferation of journals, resulting from the proliferation of grad students, is one factor producing the impression of growth and balkanization to which both Rescher and Soames appeal.

Journals encourage balkanization in another way. A book is out there for sale on the shelf of a bookstore. It shares that space with very different books; my book on Hegel will be a matter of inches away from Christopher Peacock’s A Study of Concepts. Michael Williams’ Unnatural Doubts may be right next to Marianne Williamson’s commentary on A Course in Miracles. Any of these books thus runs the risk of being picked up and thumbed over by someone profoundly unsympathetic to its subject matter and approach, let alone its theses.

Journal authors, however, have an added layer of protection from this. Someone who is into Peacock is not going to be looking into Hegel-Studien. A Heidegger scholar won’t bother with Mind. And so specialized journals disseminate their authors’ views primarily to the like-minded. Books do this too, of course—but not with the same comfort level.

One final thought. Let us assume that an average journal publishes 15 articles in a year. In 1994-5, according to what I posted previously, the 166 philosophy journals would thus have published 2490 articles. Since there were 11184 “philosophers” in that year, this works out to .23 articles per philosopher per year. Ten years later, 267 journals would have published a total of 4005 articles, written by 12703 “philosophers—“ .32 articles per philosopher per year. With half again as many articles coming out per philosopher, isn't some lowering of quality inevitable?

Further Statistics on the Philosophy Profession

In his 2006 “The Transformation of American Philosophy” (available through the APA web site), Nicholas Rescher refers to the enormous growth in the philosophy profession:

The discipline presently has more than 8,000 members, and the comprehensive Directory of American Philosophers for 2004-05 lists some 14,000 philosophers affiliated to colleges and universities in the USA and Canada, while in the late 1930’s, on the eve of World War II, the membership of the American Philosophical Association stood at some 750.

These numbers are a bit tricky. We don’t know how large a proportion of  philosophers belonged to the APA in the Thirties (I know many that don’t today), and we don’t know how many Canadian philosophers did (Rescher’s second figure includes Canadians; the number of American philosophers in 2004/5 is given by the Directory as 12,703). Moreover, strictly speaking this latter figures represent philosophers affiliated to philosophy departments in colleges and universities; there is evidence that more and more philosophers are being housed outside such departments. But the trend is clear.

Toward the end of his 2003  Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Scott Soames makes an observation superficially similar to Rescher’s:

In my opinion, philosophy has changed substantially in the last thirty or so years. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publication has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied. Not only is the broad field of philosophy today far too vast to be embraced by one mind, something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields (Soames,  op. cit. vol. II p. 463).

Both maintain that as one result of this increase in size, “balkanization reigns supreme” in philosophy today (Rescher’s words). One result of this, Rescher notes, is democratization within the profession. With so many more philosophers working in so many more subfields, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a few individuals and departments to dominate the whole. Another result is that American philosophers do not influence the larger society; for the Balkanization is such that they cannot even influence each other. A third result, referred to both by Rescher and Soames, is that a history of American philosophy is impossible to write. As Soames puts it, such a history

…would look, not like one linear and integrated story but like many distinct and overlapping stories…It is, I think, a mistake to look for one big picture of analytical philosophy in this era. What we need is a collection of more focused pictures, each giving a view of the major developments of related lines of work, and each drawn with an eye to illuminating the larger lessons for work in neighboring fields (Soames, vol. cit. p. 464).

Though both Rescher and Soames refer to a huge increase in the size of the philosophy profession, they date it differently. Rescher is referring to the whole 65 years from just before World War II until the 2004/5 edition of the Directory of American Philosophers. Soames is just referring to the 30 years before his writing, or 1973-2003.

Figures I have developed from the Directory of American Philosophers tell a somewhat different story than Soames’, and a more nuanced one than Rescher’s.

In 1964-5, the first year of the Directory I could get, the number of philosophy faculty members was over 4755 faculty members.

(Pause for explanations: “philosophers” is active faculty plus grad students plus emeriti. For various reasons, I believe that the Directory's category of faculty members, those holding permanent positions in philosophy departments, is a better indication of the size of the profession than is "philosophers." The Directory’s numbers, as I mentioned in a previous post, are at best approximate; it is the trends they indicate which count. Even these are not always accurate: early on, the Directory had problems getting people to return its questionnaire, which is one reason why its then-editor, Archie Bahm, was careful to say “more than 4755.” Still, 4755 is the figure we have, and the only figure we are likely to get. Same for the others)

By 1972-3, when Soames’s time period begins, faculty had risen to 6870—a 44% increase in just eight years. This presumably reflects the booming job market of the 60’s. By 2004/5, the number had increased to 8567, a further increase of 26% in 30 years. In other words, the rate of increase after 1972/3 decreased by a factor of slightly more than 5.

The enormous increase in size of the philosophy profession thus occurred before Soames dates it. Indeed, during the last ten years of Soames's thirty year period (plus one year--i.e. 1972-3 to 1994-5), the number of philosophy faculty shrank by a couple of hundred (perhaps more, depending on the identity of the 1919 “unknowns,” as noted in a previous posting). The increase in the overall number of “philosophers” from 11,184 (1994/5) to 12,703 (2004/5) occurred entirely within the ranks of emeriti and graduate students. The latter have had a particularly “explosive” 163% increase in the last ten years.

I’ll have more later, but right now I want to pose a question. In 1973, philosophy faculty amounted to 6870 tenured or tenure track professors. The discipline was unified in that there were several figures whom you had to be acquainted with in to be a credible member of it: people like Quine and Davidson, among logicians/philosophers of language; Rawls and Nozick among social philosophers. A central debate, over Kripke’s theory of reference, was rocking the entire profession; but it was conducted, in the main, by only a couple of dozen philosophers.

Can the total Balkanization which reigned by 2004/5 be assigned to the presence among the philosophy faculty of just 1697 more members—an average growth of about 57 people per year? Or is it reasonable to suspect that other factors might be in play?

Some ten-year comparisons

I've been comparing the statistics for the profession given in the Directory of American Philosophers for 2004/5 with those for ten years earlier. The comparison is below (sorry the columns won't line up!):      

                          A. 1994-1995        B.2004-5         C. B as % of A

Philosophers                11184              12703                   114%

Active Faculty               8756                8567                    98%

Prof.                             3506              3023                     86%

Assoc. Prof.                   2022               1796                     89%

Assist. Prof.                  1696                1626                     96%

Unknown                      -----                 1919                      –––

Grad Students               1547                 2519                   163%

Journals                         166                  267                    160%

[Book?] Publishers           235                 183                     78%

Of the top twenty departments on the most recent Leiter Report (actually 22 because there is a three-way tie for 20th place), 10 grew;  9 shrank; and 3 stayed the same size. Of those which grew, the mean growth was 5.7 faculty. However, there was wide variation: one Department is reported as adding 15, another 10, and another 9
.
The mean shrinkage was 1.9; the largest shrinkage was by 4.

Aggregate growth in faculty at these 22 Departments was 40, or 10%. Subtracting the three departments named above, however, reduces that to 6.

During this decade, according to the web page of the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment in postsecondary degree granting institutions rose from 14,300,000 to 17,500,000, or 22%.

According to the MLA, enrollment in modern language courses rose from 1,096,603 to 1,522,770, or 39%.

No data on philosophy enrollments is available, but departments seem to be swamped, at least in lower division courses.

Caveats: as George Leamon, the Editor of the Directory, has pointed out, the figures it provides are not transparent. In particular:

(1) Are the “unknowns,” tabulated in 2004/5 but not in 1994/5, people whose status is so murky they cannot be assigned a rank—visitors, instructors, etc.? Or are they simply people who didn’t fill out that section of the form?

(2). Cross appointments are not tabulated, but would obviously reduce the figures here.

However, to the extent that the figures were obtained in the same way for both editions, we do have indications of some trends. I will reflect on these in a future post.

The Spears Conundrum

Britney Spears was rushed to the hospital last night "under the influence of an unknown substance."

As a Serious Philosopher, I don't like dwelling on celebrities, and specially not on those in as much trouble as ms. Spears--not unless there is an ontological lesson to be learned.

Question One: what's the deal? All substance is unknown--all we can know is properties of substance. This is why Locke called substance "x I know not what," and even doubted its existence--a doubt he retracted after being rebuked by Stillingfleet.

Which leads to Question Two: if the substance is unknown, how can we know that it has affected Britney?

We must be able to know something about this substance (viz. that it influences Britney), without knowing "what" it is. Which brings us to the Socratic "ti esti" question, the only possible answer to which is some kind of essence. So, clearly, Britney was under the influence of an unknown essence.

And this leads to Question Three: if an essence is unknown, how can we know that it is an essence?

At this point, an Hegelian (such as myself) would end what is clearly a fruitless chain of thought by saying that if the substance in question affects Britney, and that is all we know about it, then that (provisionally, of course) is its essence.

Let us, then, face this truth: There is a kind of thing whose essence it is to influence Britney Spears.

The price of accepting this is giving up the fixity of essence: the identification of anything as the essence of something else is only provisional, made by us for present purposes.

I am not claiming that Britney Spears is an Hegelian. But I am saying that her problems are to some degree ontological; and, like everyone else's ontological problems, they cannot be fully understood without Hegelian strategies.

Moral Philosophy 101

Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post has a conundrum today, Dec. 18.

Barry Bonds' records are going to be asterisked because he was juiced on steroids when he hit all those home runs. Yet home run # 568 was off pitcher Kevin Brown, who was also juiced on steroids at the time. That leveled the playing field, so to speak.

Shouldn't the asterisks be removed from all records set by one steroid user against others?

The Ballad of Orpheus Quine

I will sing to you of Orpheus Quine, not the ancient Greek lyrist but his modern American counterpart. Orpheus Quine dared to love, not Eurydice (“wide-judging”), but Sophia (“wisdom”) herself. When Sophia languished under two heavy fetters—the Dogmas of Empiricism—he rescued her. When she was lost in the tortured labyrinth called The Ways of Paradox, he found her and her free. On sparkling summer days he chased her up the Tree of Logic, quoting and disquoting like a madman—but Orpheus Quine was hardly mad; he was a logician.

Now there were many other fetters on Sophia, and these were fetters which Orpheus Quine could not even see. There was the Fetter of Bivalence, which held that if you don’t get things wholly right you get them wholly wrong (so don’t say anything whatever unless it is perfectly certain to be true); the Fetter of Whimsical Problems, which held that there is no way to tell which issues are worth discussing and which are a waste of time (so you may say something, perfectly certain of course, about anything whatever); the Fetter of Reference, which held that talking about a thing doesn’t change that thing; and many others. These fetters were unseen by Orpheus Quine, but they weighed Sophia down. She slipped away beneath the earth, to the Underworld of the Philosophical Dead, where she was taken prisoner in the awful Palace of Night.

Orpheus Quine followed her without hesitation. For three days and nights he ran along the edge of mighty Ocean, until he came at last to a giant cave—the gaping mouth of the Underworld of the Philosophical Dead. He entered and followed the cavern down to the very center of the earth, where the rocks groaned and the dankness dripped and the fearsome doors of the Palace of Night yawned like a freshman in a Kant class.

The Palace of Night had originally been built by Parmenides; but like the rest of the Underworld, it was now ruled by a horrific creature with three heads on a dog’s body. One head was Hegel; one was Heidegger; and one was Sartre. A more awful creature for a logician to confront could not be imagined (not that Orpheus Quine had a lot of imagination; for as I say, he was a logician).

Orpheus demanded that the horrific creature release his dear Sophia; but all three heads snorted. “You push symbols,” said Hegel head—“what do you know of wisdom?” “Logic is technology,” said Heidegger head. “What do you know of wisdom?” Sartre head said nothing, for in truth it was not snorting but snoring, having fallen asleep on an overdose of antihistamines.

Orpheus Quine addressed the Two Wakeful Heads. “Wisdom is no stranger to logic,” he said; and when the Two Wakeful Heads snorted again, Orpheus Quine called for a blackboard and chalk.

You may say that the sounds of a Mozart are beautiful, and you may say that the colors of a Botticelli are lovely—but what, then, would you call the symbols of Orpheus Quine? The chalk smoked and whistled as his fingers raced around the blackboard, proving and proving and proving yet again. Frege and Goedel rose and fell; words and objects flashed past; variables were properly bound (O fortuna! Velut luna!); quantifiers dodged in and out of opaque contexts. When it was all over, Orpheus Quine had covered three blackboards with his theorems, and the Sun of Reason had begun to shine into the Underworld of the Philosophical Dead.

“You may take your Sophia,” said the Hegel head heatedly, and the Heidegger head nodded in bewildered exhaustion. “Only do it before the Frenchman wakes up.”

Hegel head continued: "Sophia will follow you to the surface of the earth, but you may not look back at her or speak to her until you have reached, not merely the surface, but the first human habitation. As soon as you come to a place where mortals live, suffer, and solve their problems, you may look upon your Sophia, and hear her wisdom. But not before.”

Pleased with this arrangement, and (I say again) with little imagination, Orpheus Quine began walking back upwards. On the path behind him he soon heard dainty feet—his Sophia! On and on they walked, until they came to the gaping entrance, and passed through. Once they were out in the open air it was harder to hear the delicate steps behind him and Orpheus Quine began to be disquieted. But still he walked on and on, and on.

In the quiet dusk of the third evening they found themselves walking in a warm drizzle along a beach. Fog was on all sides and the ocean stretched blankly into it, like a silver floor. Orpheus Quine was not sure where they were. In the three days since leaving the cave he had not seen a single human habitation. He began to fear that they had wandered away from mortal dwelling, and that if they kept going like this he would never be able to turn around and look upon dear Sophia. And now he could not even say for sure that he heard her in the sand—perhaps the gossamer footsteps behind him were only the rhythm of the waves….

He could stand it no longer and he turned around, intending  to steal just a glance at his beloved, to let the merest corner of his eyes reassure him that she was there. But his pupils froze in horror, for he saw behind him, not his Sophia at all, but—himself! Yes, Orpheus Quine stared backwards, back into where he had been, and there staring at him was…Orpheus Quine!

As he stood with frozen eyes, he saw this other Orpheus Quine, this allos autos, begin to dissolve. He saw horror surge across its face, and it exactly matched the horror he felt on his own visage. As the other Orpheus, bygone Orpheus, slowly became one with the mist, Orpheus Quine felt the evil fog invade his own extremities—and then his somatic cavity…his eyes…his mind….And Orpheus, too, faded inexorably away into nothingness, even as did his avatar. For no one can exist without their past.

The next morning, when the skies cleared and the local people ventured forth from the nearby houses, for in fact there were many houses nearby, they found on the beach two piles of fetters.

Attack ads on philosophers

Terry Pinkard sent me to the most vicious attack ad I've seen in some time, here. What makes this ad so vicious, of course, is its philosophical nature.

Larry Hatab, to whom I forwarded the ad, pointed out that you could do a whole history of philosophy on that basis--as a 2500-year-chain of attack ads. I don't have anything like the expertise for that, but came up with a few slogans:

Plato--promised us truth, gave us empty words (Aristotle, Metaphysics 991a21).

Rene Descartes--he thinks he is, and that just isn't good enough!

David Hume: just where does the skepticism stop?

Hegel--isn't that "systematic comprehensivenes" just a… wide stance?

Jean-Paul Sartre: "freedom is great....for me!"

W. V. O. Quine: too good for analytic/synthetic?

Jürgan Habermas: quasi-transcendental? Or just quasi?

Martin Heidegger:

Let's Reflect on the APA

We're supposed to be reflecting on the institutions and practices of contemporary philosophy. the two main sintitutions are (a) the department, and (b) the professional groups which link philosophers from different departments with one another.

Let's start at the top. Does anybody out there think the American Philosophical Association is not doing its job?

What, in fact, is its job? I can think of four reasons for having a national organization of philosophers (or of members of any discipline).

(1). To provide meetings at which all members of the discipline can get outside their departments and meet with one another at a national level.

(2). To provide advocacy to outsiders on behalf of the profession.

(3).  To publish articles and comments of interest to all philosophers.

(4).  To provide a fair and effective job market.

is there any reason to think the APA is not up to snuff on any of these?

Analytical/continental: again and agin

It has become fashionable recently to declare that the analytic/continental split has no meaning because analytical and continental philosophy cannot be defined clearly enough to be distinguished from one another. We are directed to the massively heterogeneous discourses conducted, particularly, in the name of analytical philosophy today. What could conceivably be excluded?

Plenty. The problem is not with defining analytical and continental philosophyâ€--that'€™s easy--€”but defining them in ways which do not show how lame they are. If we are willing to look, not with a sincere eye but with a coldly honest one, the nature of each is plain. (I discussed all this in more detail a couple of years ago in Continental Philosophy Review and also in my Reshaping Reason, now out in paperback).

No definition to be sure, is without counterexamples; there are always borderline cases and sports. But in general, if you are an analytical philosopher, you believe something like the following:

(1). The goal of all philosophical inquiry is truth;

(2). Truth is a property of certain Saetze (English has no equivalent for this term, so essential to Frege and the Logical Empiricists; I can't even get the umlauts to work here.It includes propositions, sentences, and beliefs).

(3). Therefore the goal of all philosophical inquiry is a set of Saetze.

These all incorporate substantive philosophical commitments, to which (with a few honorable exceptions) analytical philosophy adheres without argument. Lame!

In particular, what is and is not a Satz is a matter of grammatical structure: Saetze are Saetze in virtue of their form. That form, being basic, is unchanging. So analytical philosophy, seeking what the Germans call Satzwahrheit (another concept for which English, so conveniently impoverished, has no word), reduces things to invariant structures. This, then, means abstracting away from their pasts and their futures and treating them sub specie aeternitatis.

Which, given the nature of our cognitive apparatus, is not merely an abstraction but a falsification--€”if we include under "€œfalsification"€ abstracting away from necessary features of a thing. For there is nothing we know which we do not come to know. Search your mind and heart as you will; everything you find, every thought you have, and every awareness, has its history. There is no cognitive content which does not have, in Hegel’s words, a Before and an After which differ from its Now.

Analytical philosophy, reducing both thought and objects to invariant structures, thus pursues Wahrheit within the framework of a prior falsification. Lame indeed. But easily defined.

There are, of course, people who are identified as analytical philosophers who do not hold the above three claims. Donald Davidson is a prominent example. But there are not many like him, and I would say that they are mis-identified as analytical philosophers, just as crocodiles can be misidentified as alligators.

There is one analytical philosopher that I know of who is upfront about his adherence to these three claims, and about his reasons for it, and that is Quine. The rest of them don’t even seem to know they believe them, or that they are substantive.

Continental philosophy can be defined, then, in opposition to this: as philosophy which is committed to the view that everything that philosophers deal with has a past and a future, and that rigorous philosophy can never forget this. That they are thus fixated on temporality often comes as a surprise to continentals, for the focus has been disguised by partiality: continentals focus either on the past (Hegel) or on the future (everybody else), but never on both, and so it is not clear to them that they are focusing on temporality at all. Lame yet again.

It is, of course, no sin to be lame. I myself am lame in various ways, including physically. But sin, serious sin, lies in remaining lame by choice.

meta-philosophy is self refuting, but perhaps pragmatically useful

Dear all,

Below is a post cut and pasted from my home blog.  If I was capable of being more obnoxious face to face with people, maybe my posts would be less obnoxious.  I don't know; I'm trying to improve in both regards.  If I was writing the below now, I'd communicate my respect for Derrida and Rorty as philosophers more, but I'll just leave it as is.  Please feel free to bust me about what's there now, I won't dispute you.

I'm interested if anybody agrees that the "Theory Wars" in English should be better characterized as a war between two Heideggers, rather than as they are by the anti-theorists in Theory's Empire and by the pro-Theory people writing in the Chronicle (that's all I've read about it).  I'm also interested in what anybody has to say about the critique of the theory-theory in this context.

Jon

----------------------------------------------

Though recent controversial book Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (which you can order here) contains a wealth of very interesting critiques from writers all over the world, there really was one important lacunae.

One of the central debates in recent analytical philosophy concerns the extent to which people utilize tacitly known theories in interpreting one another.  Defenders of the "theory-theory" argue that we do.  On this view, when I understand a person's action I do so by subconsciously deriving predictions from an internalized theory about the way environmental factors, beliefs, and desires interact for humans.  The "simulation theory" denies this and holds that when interpreting others we put ourselves in the others' place and see what we would do.  Traditionally, the theory-theory's biggest weakness is the way it is implicated in the old school cognitivist belief that thought is essentially linguaform (for important critiques of this see, Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do, and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind).  [Note: the essay on this in Steven Stich's otherwise excellent (and sadly neglected by philosophers of language) Deconstructing the Mind is really unfortunate because he presents himself as defending a version of the theory-theory that does not have the reasoning processes be linguaform.  Since that is precisely what is most at issue between the two approaches, it is not really clear what he is defending.]

(1) Here is an interesting performative contradiction.  If the theory-theory is false about normal human interpretation, then it seems less likely that literary interpretation needs the kind of overarching theoretical foundation that Paul De Man and Stanley Fish convinced a generation of non-philosophy department humanities professors that it did.  The interesting thing here is that the theories encouraged by De Man and Fish came from French thinkers of the 1968 revolt, all of whom (according to Renault and Ferry's French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) were Heideggerians (and many English Department anti-theorists are not anti-theory per se, but rather just against the literary importance of this kind of theory, something articulated by the director of the literature program at the Sorbonne, in his essay).  Here is the strange phenomena; The best critiques of cognitivism (see above) also come out of the Heideggerian tradition, albeit one that completely bypasses Derrida and leads through Merleau-Ponty to Dreyfus and Varela.  So I think the theory debate in English Departments might be better cast as a debate between two Heideggers. 

(2)  Once I was in a conversation with a Lacanian, and he asked me if I was an "analyst."  First I thought he was asking if I did Freudian Therapy, a perfectly normal question for a Lacanian.  But it quickly became clear that he called everyone working in the tradition of "analytical philosophy" an analyst.  When I told him that my undergraduate training was in continental philosophy (mostly the Frankfurt School and Italian Marxism from Douglas Kellner and Harry Cleaver, but a fair share of other stuff too from Louis Mackie and Bob Solomon), but that with the exception of aesthetics, my graduate work was on analytical figures, the Lacanian jerk just said "you're an analyst."  When I said I didn't think there was any way the distinction could be made correctly, he just walked away (at least he didn't force me to have dozens of shock treatments like the real Lacan did to the hapless Antonin Artaud).

Here is something that is very interesting to me- as explicit, substantive theoretical commitments, nobody is a phenomenologist and nobody is an analytical philosopher. Ever since J.L. Austin, nobody has believed the original shibboleths of analytical philosophy, and ever since Heidegger (I'm not an expert, my take on this is almost entirely Dermot Moran's presentation of Heidegger's critique of Husserl) no one really accepts the original shibboleths of phenomenology (I can blog on both of these things if necessary, just go with me on this).

This suggests an anti-theory-theory take on the importance of theory.  There is no contentful recipe or algorithm for good interpretation, and any meta-philosophical attempts to devise them end up being ludicrously wrong.  From the standpoint of justifying one's interpretations they don't work because they are false and grossly simplify human (and literary and philosophical) interpretation into something linguaform, which it is not (incidentally, I think there is enough textual evidence to argue that Derrida was moved by this very point in his repeated unheeded injunction that deconstructionism was not a technique).  However, from the standpoint of discovering an interesting interpretation they can still be pragmatically useful. 

So analyticly trained philosophers in the U.S. learn really well to look at the world the way Bertrand Russell did, and develop the ability to use logic and learn to play really well Plato's definitions game. Continentally trained philosophers learn really well to look at the world the way Husserl did, learning how to do close readings as Husserlians should.  Both learn very early on that the respective philosophers were wrong, and that the way they were wrong shows that since their key doctrines are false, they do not justify the kind of interpretation being engaged in.  Nonetheless, in both cases being forced to think like those philosophers can be an extremely important part of philosophical development.  (1) Russell and Husserl's greatness in part consists in the fact that the way they were wrong opens up lots of new vistas for thought (they serve the role of Descartes' evil demon in this respect), (2) maybe spending a time thinking like them makes one philosophically stronger in some sense, (3) since most philosophy just isn't that good (we share a discipline with Kant for God's sake), maybe inculcating false meta-philosophical justifications allows those of us who are not going to shake the world, but who still need to teach undergraduates, to still do something marginally useful (i.e. great philosophy is sui generis, certainly lacking an algorithm for discovery or justification, but the mediocre philosophy that characterizes 98% of analytic and continental professors' writings may actually be made more worthwhile by those mediocre philosophers inculcating false meta-philosophy).

This is very interesting to me because a lot of our video game book is explaining how  video games show Bertrand Russell to be mistaken about so many things.  The way out of that morass lies with good philosophy of science, language, and mind exemplified by Mark Wilson and cognitive science in Merleau-Ponty's tradition (Alvin Noe and Herbert Dreyfus figuring very prominently, and Evan Thomson figures prominently in the next book we will right).  So to do a good job with the books, I find myself finally integrating the analytic and continental training I've had, and learning a lot more of continental philosophy in the process.  I know in the case of the writers I love (both analytic and continental) inculcating overarching meta-philosophical theories (that they explicitly reject!) are part of making them who they are in the sense of a context of discovering interpretation. But at the end of the day, I think the relevant theories can be justified or critiqued without reference to meta-philospohical theory.

Unfortunately, I left my copy of  Theory's Empire in Baton Rouge.  I'd really like to see to what extent the authors are arguing that exclusive focus on French philosophers of the 60's is pragmatically bad, rather than arguing that such philosophies are false.  If I'm right it might be beside the point for the purpose of many of these debates.  However in philosophy, learning the the history of the refutation of the linguistic doctrines supporting analysis is an essential part of being an analytical philosopher today.  And from Moran I gather that learning the history critiques of Husserl is an essential part of continental training.  Philosophers need to embody programmatic meta-philosophies at a point in their career, but then need to spend the rest of their career learning how to interpret given the falsity of these meta-philosophies.  I don't know if literary interpretation is analogous.

(3)  One more thing that this suggests for cognitive science.  The theory-theory is for some reason very psychologically plausible to people.  I think that there are probably evolutionary reasons why people are likely to construe their own cognitive processes in overly precise, linguaform ways.  So maybe the theory-theory correctly maps a bit of ideology humans tend to believe about the way they interpret, while also being a false description of they way they actually interpret.  This seems exactly analogous to schools of philosophy. What we really do is in some deep sense non-linguaform and non-algorithmic, but maybe to do this non-theoretical interpreting we need to have a false theory about what we are doing.