Brandon points to a collection of posts at Feminist Philosophers on the subject of "philosophy as a blood sport". Apparently the phrase comes from this article. The latest discussion seems to have been occasioned by a post by Brian Leiter who is not particularly known for his civility, and apparently thinks this is all a big joke. In this post, I will not focus on the question of whether this has anything to do (either as cause or effect) with philosophy being male dominated. The reason for this is that that question would only be relevant in very specific circumstances, and I do not think these circumstances obtain. Specifically, the question would be relevant if the following were the case:
However, having said all that, what I really want to argue in this post is that "blood sport" is a degenerate form of the adversarial method, and the adversarial method is one of the most effective methods of pursuing philosophy. I certainly know women who have no problem whatever with the adversarial method and when it is pursued in the ideal way which I am going to describe I think that if someone couldn't learn to deal with it that would be evidence that that person was not likely to be a good philosopher. Nevertheless, I do not claim that it is the only good method, or even that it can be uniquely identified as the best method. I simply claim that it is one of the best methods, and that if it is pursued in its ideal form, rather than the degenerate "blood sport" form, it is not likely to drive away people who would otherwise become great philosophers, regardless of their gender.
When I took intro to philosophy at Washington State - and this was at Washington State, mind you, not at one of the top departments - one of the first things we were taught was how to argue. To argue is to present reasons - good, logical reasons; not personal attacks, appeals to emotion, or rhetorical tricks - for believing or not believing some claim. These irrational rhetorical techniques have to be excluded. Furthermore, you have to realize that the principle of contradiction and the principle of excluded middle hold and, therefore, if we disagree we cannot both be right. (If we turned out to both be right, then we would both be mistaken in our belief that we disagreed.) Accordingly, an attack on one's position must not be interpreted as a personal attack. Persons and positions must be kept separate by both attacker and defender. Someone who is driven by emotion rather than logic and becomes emotionally upset in such circumstances is not likely to be a philosopher because this is a person who doesn't want to find out that his or her positions are wrong. Lauren resents (and is a powerful counter-example to) the assumption, shared (strangely enough) by certain feminist philosophers and certain misogynists, that this sort of statement excludes women. The claims of certain feminist philosophers that certain philosophical fields (especially ethics) have been overly concerned with logic because they have been male-dominated may well do more damage to the perception of women in philosophy than almost any other factor today. That said, the "blood lust" - the desire to win arguments at any cost - that characterizes many philosophers (most of them male) is the very same problem as the people who take attacks on their positions personally, found in an offensive rather than defensive manifestation.
All this by way of background. I will now proceed to describe exactly what I mean by "the adversarial method" and how this sort of constraint on argument plays into it.
The adversarial method is best known from its use in law. The theory (which is at least as degenerate in law as it is in philosophy) is that if equally matched opponents argue opposite sides of a matter, the side of the truth will be at an advantage. For this reason, no matter how obvious a person's guilt seems, her trial is not judged to be valid unless she has adequate representation. She must have an attorney who has done a competent job of defending her.
We do this in philosophy. When we are trying to determine the strength of a position, one person attacks it and another defends it. This is often the best way (though not always the best way, and never the only way) to test the strengths of positions. Note, however, that it only works if the two sides are equally matched. This is why one of the most important skills that philosophers (should) learn as undergraduates is to present the strongest possible argument for a position they disagree with. It is often best for a view to be defended by someone who actually believes in it, and attacked by someone who doesn't believe in it, but sometimes we need to evaluate a position and we don't have a believer available. For this reason, even the structure of many single-author papers exhibits the adversarial method: the author first builds up the position under discussion and presents arguments for it, then attacks it. If she actually agrees with the position, she will conclude by rebutting the attacks. The adversarial method.
How do we ensure that the two sides are equally matched? Well, when your "opponent" is struggling to find a good argument for his position (or against yours), you have to help him out. I think (or at least I hope) philosophy professors do this for their undergrads all the time. We have to get the strongest form of the position, and the strongest arguments for it, in order to be able to evaluate whether our attacks against it succeed; otherwise, we are in danger of the strawman fallacy.
What this reveals is, in part, that one of the ways in which the "blood sport" method is degenerate is that it's about winning. But philosophy isn't about winning; it's about understanding. When we want the other person's position to fall, or we don't want our own position to fall, then we are not loving wisdom or pursuing truth. Instead, we are loving and pursuing victory (or, in the defensive case, hating and fleeing defeat).
Now, there was an interesting remark from Ted Brennan in the Leiter post:
Journalists are surprised that academics can be short with them because they last met academics in the classroom, and most professors are kind and generous when dealing with students. Serious academics save their scathing put-downs for colleagues and equals--I doubt that those quotes from Fodor and Sterelny document interactions with students.Instead of feeling pained and affronted, the bloggers and journalists should take it as a compliment: 'hey, those academics are treating me like an equal!'
This is the method I try to use in most of my philosophizing, including discussions on this blog. I encourage you all to call me out when I don't live up to it.
It seems that Alexander Pruss (also of Prosblogion fame) has set off a bit of a firestorm (there is a list of links at Siris) on the subject of the history of philosophy and the analytic-Continental divide. He has been criticized for making statements about Continental philosophy and then admitting that he doesn't know much about it. I'm going to try to be careful here, because I'm certainly no expert on Continental philosophy myself, but I do want to enter into the fray with a few observations.
I've titled this post "Philosophy is Analytic." Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by that in a very general way, and then I will dig a little deeper and argue that my claim is actually true. In claiming that philosophy is analytic, I mean to make two claims: (1) As has been noted at Siris and The Chasm, the distinction between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy is often unhelpful or even downright false. I would claim that the reason for this is that most of the characteristics analytic philosophy claims as its "distinctives" are characteristics of philosophy simpliciter. The flip side of this claim is that (2) certain characteristics which all analytic philosophy shares and some of what is called Continental "philosophy" lacks are characteristics of philosophy simpliciter, which is what leads analytic philosophers to make the claims criticized in (1).
Before I identify the characteristics I am talking about, let me say that, as some of the others who have entered into this conversation have already noted, there exist relatively uncontroversial descriptive usages of the terms "analytic" and "Continental" in the recent history of philosophy: specifically, analytic philosophy is a philosophical tradition conducted primarily in English and inheriting from the likes of Russell, Frege, and Moore. Continental philosophy is, similarly, a philosophical tradition conducted primarily in French and German which inherits from the likes of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Most self-identified analytic philosophers would probably also list Wittgenstein as a founding father, but it's my understanding that Wittgenstein is also widely read and respected in Continental circles. The further away from the founding fathers of each school we get, the more difficult it is to apply these terms as neutral and uncontroversial descriptions. This is true to such an extent that the author of the Chasm, who identifies himself as a "phenomenologist" and lists Husserl and Heidegger as major influences, says that the term "Continental" is a "pejorative." His complaint is that he isn't a French post-structuralist. It seems, according to him (and I'll take his word for it), that analytic philosophers are making the mistake Plato describes in The Statesman:
it's as if someone tried to divide the human race into two and made the cut in the way that most people here carve things up, taking the Greek race away as one, separate from all the rest, and to all the other races together, which are unlimited in number, which don't mix with one another, and don't share the same language - calling this collection by the single appellation 'barbarian' ... [I]f by some chance there is some other animal which is rational, as for example the crane seems to be, or some other such creature, and which perhaps distributes names on the same principles as you, it might oppose cranes as one class to all other living creatures and give itself airs, taking all the rest together with human beings and putting them into the same category, which it would call by no other name except - perhaps - 'animals'. So let's try to be very wary of everything of this sort. (262d, 263d)
Now, let me continue to identify the characteristics I am talking about. When I took intro to ancient philosophy with Charles Kahn in 2004, the first portion of the course was concerned with the distinction between philosophy properly so-called and wisdom literature, and what it was that changed at some point between Thales and Socrates such that philosophy arose as something distinct from wisdom literature. Plato and Hesiod are both trying to construct frameworks for considering the world we live in, but their enterprises differ in very important ways. My notes from that class (and I make no guarantees as to how closely my notes from Sophomore year resemble anything Prof. Kahn actually said) define philosophy as "an attempt at a certain kind of systematic knowledge attempting to answer certain fundamental questions by means of critical inquiry." The key terms are "systematic," "fundamental," and "critical inquiry."
A characteristic shared by early analytic philosophy (by which I mostly mean positivism) and Continental philosophy is a certain skepticism about this sort of enterprise. In the early 20th century, thinkers on both sides of the line expressed a degree of skepticism about our ability to use critical inquiry as a means of gaining systematic knowledge on fundamental matters. Strains of this continue to this very day. For instance, in his 1985 introduction to Leibniz's Theodicy Austin Farrer, contrasting 20th century philosophy with Leibniz, remarks that:
To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. A professor of metaphysics may nowadays be held to deal handsomely with the duties of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be only for the purpose of getting rid of them, by showing them up as confused forms of something else. A chair in metaphysical philosophy becomes analogous to a chair in tropical diseases: what is taught from it is not the propagation but the cure. (p. 7)
This applies to analytic as well as Continental philosophy. Nevertheless, these characteristics of systematicity and critical inquiry - characteristics that distinguish Plato as an author of philosophy from Hesiod as an author of wisdom literature - are the characteristics that analytic philosophers have latched onto as their distinctives. This is, indeed, more or less what 'analytic' means. In this respect, the term 'analytic philosopher' can be compared to the term 'born-again Christian': strictly speaking, both are redundancies (when we understand the terms 'philosopher' and 'Christian' in historically well-motivated descriptive senses, and not in terms of everyone who self-identifies), but we nevertheless use the terms meaningfully - the former to mean the heirs of Russell, Frege, and Moore, and the latter to mean the heirs of Billy Graham, John Stott, and Bill Bright. There are philosophers who have every right to use the term 'analytic' who are not heirs of Russell, Frege, and Moore, and Christians who have every right to use the term 'born-again' who are not heirs of Billy Graham, John Stott, and Bill Bright, but they ordinarily won't use these terms because they lead to confusion.
Nevertheless, it is the case that even as they doubted the possibility of their enterprise, analytic philosophers have clung tightly to it. The postivists (to a certain degree following Kant) applied critical inquiry to the limits of human reason and language to come up with an account of where human knowledge could go and where it couldn't, thus shifting the meaning of "fundamental." Where critical inquiry couldn't go, they stopped. There are, however, some Continental "philosophers" who do not do this - I am thinking, for instance, of existentialism, postmodernism, relativism, and deconstructionism. Now, I said I was going to be careful about what I said in my ignorance, so let me note that I am personally familiar with Neitzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, some excerpts from Sartre, a smattering of semi-popular-level secondary literature, and the popular American forms of the views I've listed. Certainly none of these represent Continental philosophy at its best, and that is precisely my point. The views in question often despair of the ability of critical inquiry to answer fundamental questions and then keep talking about them anyway. In so doing, they cease to be philosophy and revert to wisdom literature. Wisdom literature is not without value (I happen to be a big fan of existentialist literature, film, and theater), but this sort of thing is like a reversion from chemistry to alchemy.
I should note briefly that most "ethno-philosophy" is also not properly philosophy but wisdom literature. Philosophy properly so-called is distinctively Greek in origin. That said, I understand that Indian philosophy and Taoism are possible exceptions, but I don't know enough about them to make a personal judgment.
As one final point, I will admit that while I think that philosophy is inherently "analytic," and that much of what is called "Continental philosophy" is not philosophy at all, some of my own views might be looked at as "Continental" in nature by some. Specifically, I'm an idealist, and I think that phenomenology - that is, the evidence provided by the nature of our subjective experience - is the place to start our philosophical inquiry. I don't know anything about Husserl at all, and I don't understand Hegel very well, so I wouldn't know if my usage of the word "phenomenology" is anything like theirs, but I thought that I should own up.
Feel free to use the comment area, or write your own blog post, to educate me about the better elements of "Continental philosophy" or to dispute my analysis, but please do so by means of a critical inquiry that aims at systematicity!
I am presently reading Peter van Inwagen's Material Beings (I'm not sure if it's going to actually help with my very strange philosophy of religion term paper wherein I argue that idealism is compatible with a belief in the bodily resurrection of the dead, or if I'm just procrastinating). In section 10, after denying that there are, in metaphysical rigor, any artifacts (i.e. inanimate macrophysical objects, such as chairs), van Inwagen makes the following remark:
Does my position not fly in the face of common sense? I do not think so. This is not because I think that my position is in accord with "common sense," but rather because I do not think that there is any such thing as the body of doctrine the philosophers call common sense. There is common sense: Common sense tells us to taste our food before we salt it and to cut the cards. It does not tell us there are chairs. (p. 103)
I am content ... to appeal to the common sense of the world for the truth of my notion. Ask the gardener, why he thinks yon cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in short, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, hath no being. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 3.234)
Our "common sense" ideas are sometimes called "pre-theoretical intuitions" and the use is not limited to material objects. In the context of a debate on whether laws govern, Susan Schneider presents a reasoning principle she calls (C): "Ceteris paribus, choose the philosophical theory of F that best accomodates our (relevant) pretheoretic intuitions about F." ("What is the Significance of the Inuition that Laws of Nature Govern?", forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy) This principle, she thinks, militates against "Humean supervenience" (regularity) accounts of lawhood. I actually think that this principle is probably correct. However, I think it is almost entirely irrelevant. We almost never have intuitions about matters of philosophical interest which are both relevant and pretheoretic. For instance, in the lawhood debate, our inuitions come from a long tradition of science and philosophy. In the debate about material beings, Berkeley thinks that our 'intuitions' come from indoctrination with Aristotelian metaphysics, from which even the moderns have not escaped. People who have never studied philosophy or science don't have intuitions about this sort of thing.
Now, I do think there is one intuition that is relevant to the lawhood debate, and I think it is the intuition that those who hold the governing conception of laws are really getting at. This is what I was refering to when I was making inflammatory remarks about Armstrong-laws (I didn't intend them to be too terribly inflammatory, but commenter "Marc" was apparently rather upset, prompting me to clarify my actual position). It is, in fact, the intuition behind teleological arguments for the existence of God: to state it at its most general, this intuition says "where there is a rational order, there must be a rational ordering principle." This needn't be the traditional God, but may instead be something like (as I said in the previous post) the Heraclitean logos. This intuition is relevant while the others are not because it is actually within the realm of common sense: we distinguish between objects formed by random undirected processes and objects formed by processes with a rational ordering principle behind them all the time. Common sense is well adapted only for dealing with things we ordinarily encounter in everday life. Similarly, we have pretheoretical intuitions only about things we have reason to "intuit" about before we begin theorizing. Thus common sense and intuition are relevant to philosophy only rarely.
For the record, in those cases where it is relevant, I think that the reason it works is that we often go through rational deductive processes of which we are not even conscious. That is, we draw valid inferences, but a philosopher is at great pains to formalize and bring to light those inferences. This, I think, is the case with these "teleological" intuitions.
Philosophy of religion, I believe, is best viewed as a process of critical dialog...Such a critical dialog is risky. Probably everyone has heard a story of a student in a strict religious environment who loses his faith as a result of the critical challenges hurled at him at a university. But there is something unhealthy and even dishonest about a faith which hides from such a challenge. Can one really believe in God wholeheartedly and at the same time assert that one can only continue to believe by refusing to consider the evidence against one's belief? Such a "belief" seems perilously close to a half-conscious conviction that in fact God may not be real, combined with a wish to hid this truth from oneself...
A genuine and robust faith will not shrink from the process of testing, for it is confident that it will pass the test. If I genuinely believe that God is real (or that he is an illusion), I will not be afraid to examine alternative views and listen to problems and objections raised by others. Through this process I am confident that my faith will be deepened and strengthened.
- C. Stephen Evans, "Critical Dialog in Philosophy of Religion," in Michael Peterson, et al., eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, p. 129 (reprinted from C. Stephen Evans, Philosophy of Religion: Thinking about Faith, pp. 17-29).
Douglas Groothuis, a philosophy professor at Denver Seminary has some interesting thoughts on Christianity, philosophy, and education in his article A Christian Philosophy of Education on his blog, The Constructive Curmudgeon. An excerpt:
the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a philosopher are a strong and lived-out inclination to pursue truth about philosophical matters through the rigorous use of human reasoning, and the ability to do so with some intellectual facility. By “philosophical matters” I mean the enduring questions of life’s meaning, purpose, and value as they relate to all the major divisions of philosophy (primarily ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics). Not all Christians can be philosophers, but all should think philosophically (i.e., critically and carefully) about their own worldview and how it relates to the intellectual challenges they face from other worldviews.
No less than three top ten lists of things everyone should know about philosophy have been published on philosophy blogs in recent days.
The best of the three is at DuckRabbit. This list is entirely about how philosophy works, and not particular philosophical ideas the author thinks you should believe in. I think I agree with everything he says.
The list that started it all is at Philosophy, et cetera. I don't much care for this list on the whole, because I don't think it's really a list of things people should know about philosophy (that is, it isn't about meta-philosophy as the DuckRabbit list is), but instead includes a bunch of philosophical ideas the author thinks you should accept, and I disagree with a lot of these ideas. This gets progressively worse the farther down the list you go.
The third and final list is at Mormon Metaphysics. I like this list too.
I don't have time to write my own top ten list right now (busy writing my archaeology term paper still), but let me just link you to these three, and give you my definition of philosophy: philosophy is the application of logic in the pursuit of truth. Therefore, as Duck says, philosophy is "open to everyone to do, but you aren't doing it simply by saying you are (nor are you not doing it simply because you don't know that you are; on the other hand if you don't know that you're doing it you probably aren't doing it very well)." All sane and rational people do philosophy from time to time, just like all sane and rational people do physics from time to time (when they 'calculate' intuitively where that baseball is going to land, or how much force to apply to open the door without breaking it, or whatever), but that doesn't make them all philosophers or all physicists. Some people devote their lives to such things. You will also notice that my definition is so broad that it makes most academic disciplines sub-fields of philosophy. This is intentional, and the reason it's intentional is that historically they all 'spun off' of philosophy. Today, the people who are in the actual philosophy department are those who try to put everything together from all the fields, or those who work on fields such as metaphysics or ethics where after millenia of argument there is still not enough agreement on the fundamental principles for them to become 'sciences' (but we hope there will be some day), or those whose work doesn't fit neatly into one field, or who can't confine themselves to a single field, etc. You will also notice that according to my definition those who don't believe in any definition of 'truth' (as, e.g., neo-pragmatists) cannot be philosophers. My apologies to Richard Rorty.
Charles Kahn gave an excellent more extended definition of what philosophy is how it is different from wisdom literature, etc., in his intro to ancient philosophy course, but, alas, my course notes are in Philadelphia and I am in Athens.