Metaphysics is back in fashion
January 29, 2017 12:45 AM Subscribe
Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, gives a lecture on speculative philosophy.
Here are some other lectures by Williamson on related themes:
On Naturalism
On Possibility
On Counterfactuals and Thought Experiments
On Wittgenstein's Meta-Philosophy
On Knowing and Intending
And here is an interview with Williamson (Episode 16 of Patterson in Pursuit) on the nature of logic.
Many of Williamson's papers are available on his website.
Here are some other lectures by Williamson on related themes:
On Naturalism
On Possibility
On Counterfactuals and Thought Experiments
On Wittgenstein's Meta-Philosophy
On Knowing and Intending
And here is an interview with Williamson (Episode 16 of Patterson in Pursuit) on the nature of logic.
Many of Williamson's papers are available on his website.
Prophysics really seems like the better word. I don't really see it providing anything of any substantive merit or use to the world. It's not even pretty. Outside of maybe mathematics and logic I'm not sure there is such a thing as a priori knowledge to be discovered in an embodied critter.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:53 AM on January 29, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 5:53 AM on January 29, 2017 [3 favorites]
Prophysics really seems like the better word. I don't really see it providing anything of any substantive merit or use to the world. It's not even pretty. Outside of maybe mathematics and logic I'm not sure there is such a thing as a priori knowledge to be discovered in an embodied critter.
Perhaps, but it's just a question of a continuation of a historical line of thinking that got its name from Aristotle's Ta meta ta physika or the "The stuff after the Physics". People think: literally after in the sense of further down the page, not "beyond the physical world" in any sense. (Indeed, Aristotle's Metaphysics is entirely grounded in real physical things, no souls without bodies, except maybe the divine mind).
But also, it's the existence of mathematics and logic that makes a priori knowledge a still pressing problem. How are eternal verities possible at all?
posted by dis_integration at 7:32 AM on January 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
Perhaps, but it's just a question of a continuation of a historical line of thinking that got its name from Aristotle's Ta meta ta physika or the "The stuff after the Physics". People think: literally after in the sense of further down the page, not "beyond the physical world" in any sense. (Indeed, Aristotle's Metaphysics is entirely grounded in real physical things, no souls without bodies, except maybe the divine mind).
But also, it's the existence of mathematics and logic that makes a priori knowledge a still pressing problem. How are eternal verities possible at all?
posted by dis_integration at 7:32 AM on January 29, 2017 [6 favorites]
I'm not sure if I understand metaphysics in the Williamson sense correctly, but I find the question 'how are eternal verities possible?' rather uninteresting. Metaphysics, as it has been understood in the history of philosophy since Aristotle, seems to rather ask how are external verities possible, i.e. how does our knowledge of our world constitute itself, how can it be explained that things are and how they appear.
To me philosophy of logic seems to withdraw from the 'juicy' philosophical questions by limiting philosophical inquiry to developing logical systems which can most extensively account for what can be said and thus reasoned. Does Williamson go into the question of how logic relates to experience and world?
posted by 3zra at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
To me philosophy of logic seems to withdraw from the 'juicy' philosophical questions by limiting philosophical inquiry to developing logical systems which can most extensively account for what can be said and thus reasoned. Does Williamson go into the question of how logic relates to experience and world?
posted by 3zra at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
I find the way this is framed very funny because Williamson's view could not be possible without the antecedent of David K. Lewis work as far back as the seventies, which was very much metaphysical and speculative and very much in fashion (iirc, Lewis is the most cited author of the 20th century, I think). Metaphysics has always been a central topic in "analytic philosophy" in one shape or another, with the arguable notable exceptions (logical positivism and the "conceptual analysis" schools -- both of which are very much not in fashion). As fas as I can tell, current philosophers are very much aware of the metaphysical dimensions of philosophical issues.
posted by fmoralesc at 7:58 AM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by fmoralesc at 7:58 AM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
3zra: I find the possibility of developing alternative logical systems a rather fascinating issue for how we conceptualize experience in the world. If they generate logical truth which in no way seems to contact what is true in our world, what does that mean, at all?
Williamson seems to hold a very realist view on this issue: his modal metaphysics presupposes the correctness of a fairly strong (albeit also fairly standard) modal logic, and he takes the correctness of this logic as evidence for his modal metaphysics.
posted by fmoralesc at 8:02 AM on January 29, 2017
Williamson seems to hold a very realist view on this issue: his modal metaphysics presupposes the correctness of a fairly strong (albeit also fairly standard) modal logic, and he takes the correctness of this logic as evidence for his modal metaphysics.
posted by fmoralesc at 8:02 AM on January 29, 2017
I find the way this is framed very funny because Williamson's view could not be possible without the antecedent of David K. Lewis work as far back as the seventies, which was very much metaphysical and speculative and very much in fashion
Yeah it's more the case that Continental philosophy stopped pursuing "metaphysics" after Heidegger but is getting back into it in the past 10 years now that phenomenology has run out of steam as the dominant research program. That being said, the general trend of the ordinary language school and the Wittgensteinians was against metaphysical speculation, so while nobody really does old fashioned language analysis anymore (thank god), I definitely had some profs in grad school who had worked on that stuff for their dissertations and still thought the Kripke-Lewis trend and the resurgence of analytic metaphysics was an aberration.
posted by dis_integration at 8:15 AM on January 29, 2017
Yeah it's more the case that Continental philosophy stopped pursuing "metaphysics" after Heidegger but is getting back into it in the past 10 years now that phenomenology has run out of steam as the dominant research program. That being said, the general trend of the ordinary language school and the Wittgensteinians was against metaphysical speculation, so while nobody really does old fashioned language analysis anymore (thank god), I definitely had some profs in grad school who had worked on that stuff for their dissertations and still thought the Kripke-Lewis trend and the resurgence of analytic metaphysics was an aberration.
posted by dis_integration at 8:15 AM on January 29, 2017
I find the way this is framed very funny because Williamson's view could not be possible without the antecedent of David K. Lewis work as far back as the seventies, which was very much metaphysical and speculative and very much in fashion (iirc, Lewis is the most cited author of the 20th century, I think).
I took the title of the post from the opening line of Williamson's review of Unger's Empty Ideas (pdf). I think it is consonant with a theme running through the collection of lectures. But I'm not sure I really disagree with you that metaphysics has been fashionable for a while now. (I think it is a little tricky, since it is often hard to distinguish when people are -- by their own lights -- doing conceptual analysis, explication, and so on, which need not be telling us anything about the world, or doing full-blooded metaphysics, which is supposed to be adding to our positive knowledge.)
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 8:25 AM on January 29, 2017
I took the title of the post from the opening line of Williamson's review of Unger's Empty Ideas (pdf). I think it is consonant with a theme running through the collection of lectures. But I'm not sure I really disagree with you that metaphysics has been fashionable for a while now. (I think it is a little tricky, since it is often hard to distinguish when people are -- by their own lights -- doing conceptual analysis, explication, and so on, which need not be telling us anything about the world, or doing full-blooded metaphysics, which is supposed to be adding to our positive knowledge.)
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 8:25 AM on January 29, 2017
I definitely had some profs in grad school who had worked on that stuff for their dissertations and still thought the Kripke-Lewis trend and the resurgence of analytic metaphysics was an aberration.
Well, it might still be! For example, one might argue (pace Williamson) that it still lacks decisive epistemic support. As Van Inwagen (who otherwise was not reluctant to metaphysics) said about modal epistemology, there's a difference between what we are really entitled to say, and what we are enabled to say by peers (I'm paraphrasing). I find these things to be unsettled, both in what the best general approach should be, and in the specifics.
On the other hand, I think the idea that philosophy has to yield knowledge about the world is a mistake Williamson falls into. He fails to distinguish how we should think of philosophy descriptively and prescriptively. His argument is prescriptive: if some research doesn't yield positive knowledge, then it doesn't further philosophy's aim. Philosophy's aim, however, is given conventionally. While it is unclear how far we can stretch the idea of philosophy, I find it hard to believe that seemingly anti-cognitivist thinkers such as the Pyrrhonian sceptics and Wittgenstein fail to do philosophy. Descriptively, I think the Wittgensteinians had it right: philosophical activity yields understanding. Whether that understanding is or should be knowledgeable is another matter altogether (pace some philosophers who think that, precisely, understanding is knowledge).
posted by fmoralesc at 8:43 AM on January 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
Well, it might still be! For example, one might argue (pace Williamson) that it still lacks decisive epistemic support. As Van Inwagen (who otherwise was not reluctant to metaphysics) said about modal epistemology, there's a difference between what we are really entitled to say, and what we are enabled to say by peers (I'm paraphrasing). I find these things to be unsettled, both in what the best general approach should be, and in the specifics.
On the other hand, I think the idea that philosophy has to yield knowledge about the world is a mistake Williamson falls into. He fails to distinguish how we should think of philosophy descriptively and prescriptively. His argument is prescriptive: if some research doesn't yield positive knowledge, then it doesn't further philosophy's aim. Philosophy's aim, however, is given conventionally. While it is unclear how far we can stretch the idea of philosophy, I find it hard to believe that seemingly anti-cognitivist thinkers such as the Pyrrhonian sceptics and Wittgenstein fail to do philosophy. Descriptively, I think the Wittgensteinians had it right: philosophical activity yields understanding. Whether that understanding is or should be knowledgeable is another matter altogether (pace some philosophers who think that, precisely, understanding is knowledge).
posted by fmoralesc at 8:43 AM on January 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
Outside of maybe mathematics and logic I'm not sure there is such a thing as a priori knowledge to be discovered in an embodied critter.
Interestingly, that's a great question for metaphysics! (Or epistemology.) I'm not being (overly) snarky, but if the question happens to be you're right, that's one formal place in which it is worked out.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:02 AM on January 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
Interestingly, that's a great question for metaphysics! (Or epistemology.) I'm not being (overly) snarky, but if the question happens to be you're right, that's one formal place in which it is worked out.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:02 AM on January 29, 2017 [2 favorites]
Yay! All the sciency people that I always talked to in the past about metaphysics, suck it.
posted by New England Cultist at 1:01 PM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by New England Cultist at 1:01 PM on January 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
On vagueness, he holds a position known as epistemicism, which states that every seemingly vague predicate (like "bald", or "thin") actually has a sharp cutoff, which is impossible for us to know. That is, there is some number of hairs such that anyone with that number is bald, and anyone with even one more hair is not. In actuality, this condition will be spelled out only partly in terms of numbers of hairs, but whatever measures are relevant will have some precise cutoff. This solution to the difficult sorites paradox was considered an astonishing and unacceptable consequence, but has become a relatively mainstream view since his defense of it. Williamson is fond of using the statement, "no one knows whether I am thin" to illustrate his view.Jaw agape, may I respectfully state that I might be of no fixed opinion in regards to this matter but, as a matter of fact, must remain silent before what I know not.
posted by y2karl at 11:55 PM on January 29, 2017
iirc, Lewis is the most cited author of the 20th century, I think
If by author you mean analytic philosopher, then maybe, but in general, not even by a long shot. The actual most cited author is Thomas Kuhn, almost all of it for his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in the human sciences in the broad sense it's either Foucault, Bourdieu, or Derrida.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:52 AM on January 30, 2017
If by author you mean analytic philosopher, then maybe, but in general, not even by a long shot. The actual most cited author is Thomas Kuhn, almost all of it for his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in the human sciences in the broad sense it's either Foucault, Bourdieu, or Derrida.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:52 AM on January 30, 2017
Pyrogenesis: Well, I just didn't remember correctly, and I assumed a limited scope. Apples and oranges, and all that.
posted by fmoralesc at 4:31 AM on January 30, 2017
posted by fmoralesc at 4:31 AM on January 30, 2017
Metaphysics has always been a central topic in "analytic philosophy" in one shape or another
Seems to me like it's been predominantely anti-metaphysical, and preoccupied with epistemology and language, to me. With some big exceptions, like Russell's atomism, and the absurd metaphysics of the Tractatus.
posted by thelonius at 5:46 AM on January 30, 2017
Seems to me like it's been predominantely anti-metaphysical, and preoccupied with epistemology and language, to me. With some big exceptions, like Russell's atomism, and the absurd metaphysics of the Tractatus.
posted by thelonius at 5:46 AM on January 30, 2017
Well the first recognizably "analytic" philosophers are maybe Russell and Moore, who are reacting against spacey speculative metaphysics like "Cambridge idealism," and are both anti-metaphysical. Then this tradition melds with the also anti-metaphysical bent of the Vienna positivists.
A possible historical pivot is the Quine-Carnap debate, circa 1951. Quine and Carnap are both anti-metaphysical, too, but Quine wins and his way of being anti-metaphysical winds up leaving the door open. Those entities that are indispensable from our best scientific theories of the world are (metaphysically) real. This is an austere standard for metaphysics, but it is metaphysics, and in the '70s when David Lewis starts popularizing metaphysical realism about possible worlds, he makes explicit appeal to Quine's criterion. Lewis is an extremely productive and smart scholar and his papers create whole research programs that newer philosophers then take up.
Casual history but imo this is how a foundationally anti-metaphysical school comes around to producing reams of speculative metaphysics. Of course, I am reading "analytic philosophy" somewhat narrowly, as the school that starts approximately w/ Russell and Moore (you'd have to decide how to fit in Frege). If we take "analytic philosophy" to include all the people the analytics retrospectively regard as part of their tradition, from William James and John Stuart Mill back through Kant and Plato, then the tradition is not anti-metaphysical overall; the anti-metaphysical backlash of the 20th century can be seen as a reaction against the more historically usual pro-metaphysical trend (perhaps).
posted by grobstein at 8:18 AM on January 30, 2017
A possible historical pivot is the Quine-Carnap debate, circa 1951. Quine and Carnap are both anti-metaphysical, too, but Quine wins and his way of being anti-metaphysical winds up leaving the door open. Those entities that are indispensable from our best scientific theories of the world are (metaphysically) real. This is an austere standard for metaphysics, but it is metaphysics, and in the '70s when David Lewis starts popularizing metaphysical realism about possible worlds, he makes explicit appeal to Quine's criterion. Lewis is an extremely productive and smart scholar and his papers create whole research programs that newer philosophers then take up.
Casual history but imo this is how a foundationally anti-metaphysical school comes around to producing reams of speculative metaphysics. Of course, I am reading "analytic philosophy" somewhat narrowly, as the school that starts approximately w/ Russell and Moore (you'd have to decide how to fit in Frege). If we take "analytic philosophy" to include all the people the analytics retrospectively regard as part of their tradition, from William James and John Stuart Mill back through Kant and Plato, then the tradition is not anti-metaphysical overall; the anti-metaphysical backlash of the 20th century can be seen as a reaction against the more historically usual pro-metaphysical trend (perhaps).
posted by grobstein at 8:18 AM on January 30, 2017
If by author you mean analytic philosopher, then maybe, but in general, not even by a long shot. The actual most cited author is Thomas Kuhn, almost all of it for his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in the human sciences in the broad sense it's either Foucault, Bourdieu, or Derrida.
I've heard John Rawls had a huge impact factor because he's always quoted in articles about Law and every political articles has at least one criticism against his views. One should check on Web of Science but I imagine Brian Leiter wrote about that.
David K. Lewis was quoted in many different fields, not only on counterfactuals but from causation to semantics of natural language. He was the most important English-speaking philosopher at the beginning of this century.
posted by Phersu at 1:52 PM on January 30, 2017
I've heard John Rawls had a huge impact factor because he's always quoted in articles about Law and every political articles has at least one criticism against his views. One should check on Web of Science but I imagine Brian Leiter wrote about that.
David K. Lewis was quoted in many different fields, not only on counterfactuals but from causation to semantics of natural language. He was the most important English-speaking philosopher at the beginning of this century.
posted by Phersu at 1:52 PM on January 30, 2017
David Lewis's wide-ranging influence is an interesting topic all itself, which we've talked about a bit before (my comment and below -- I learned a lot from people's comments here and I've learned more about David Lewis since I wrote my comments too).
posted by grobstein at 8:41 PM on January 31, 2017
posted by grobstein at 8:41 PM on January 31, 2017
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