Western Philosophy

I used to regard claims about the uniqueness of Western philosophy as ethnocentric. Some undoubtedly are. But there is something special about the Greek legacy — particularly Plato and Aristotle — that does set it apart from anything that came before. Greece gave the human race the idea of reason, which led not only to modern mathematics and natural science but also to ethics based on reason rather than authority.

On the other hand, there is no simple continuity from Greece to the modern West. During what corresponded to the early middle ages in Europe, the Islamic world and South and East Asia were much more sophisticated. There was also much more continuity of Greek learning of all sorts in the East. The bourgeoisie of the Italian Renaissance invented for themselves a much more direct descent from classical Greece than history actually supports.

Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the Enlightenment and Frederick Beiser’s The Fate of Reason show that mainstream thinkers of the Enlightenment still put many limits on the application of reason in touchy areas like religion and politics. Plato and Aristotle did not.

Immediacy

One of Brandom’s many contributions is a sharp critique of foundational uses of immediacy. He points out that this was a major theme in Hegel as well. Wilfrid Sellars called Hegel “that great foe of immediacy”.

In my youth, I believed in a sort of rational intuition in which complex content would be presented originally as a simultaneous whole, and only later (somewhat artificially) analyzed into steps. I now think this is completely wrong.

We certainly can encounter complex content in an immediate way, but I would now argue that this is like knowing how to ride a bicycle, which means that the immediacy is never primitive. Rather, all immediacy is what Hegel called mediated immediacy, which is something that has come to be immediate but did not start out that way.

We apprehend immediacy through something like Kantian intuition. Kant famously said there is no “intellectual” intuition, and that intuition without concepts is blind. He also suggested that the mental correlate of physical sensation was a kind of intuition. I want to say that intuition is not a kind of knowledge at all, but more like a kind of feeling. Feeling is not knowledge either, but it is very important in life overall.

Immediacy as noninferential input does not positively give us any truth. Brandom points out, however, that it does have a very important role in exposing problems with our current syntheses. Such problems drive learning and progress. (See also Error.)

The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle

In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel said that beyond all others, Plato and Aristotle deserve the title of educators of the human race. A big part of what makes this true is what I will call their epistemic modesty. In contrast to the sweeping and very strong claims of many later philosophers, Plato and Aristotle were both masters of careful understatement.

Plato developed a very sharp contrast between knowledge and opinion. No opinion counts as knowledge, period. Arguments from authority or tradition may yield true conclusions, but if so it is not the authority or tradition that makes them true. To assert anything at all is implicitly to take responsibility for the assertion, and therefore to invite dialogue. For Plato, there is no knowledge in the strict sense (episteme) of anything that becomes. The most important component of wisdom is knowing what we do not know. Plato’s great literary homage to Socrates makes the latter a moral hero whose honest pursuit of truth got him executed, when his only real offense was embarrassing powerful people with questions they could not answer without admitting that they could not justify their positions. Some of his later students in the New Academy even pushed Plato’s epistemic modesty to the point of generalized skepticism.

Aristotle said that to know something (episteme) is to be able to give adequate reasons why it is true. Many things initially seem clear to us from intuition or opinions we have learned to accept, but this is only an apparent clarity. No immediate awareness counts as knowledge. We should treat the opinions of the wise with respect but, as with Plato, opinion can never be knowledge.

This last is a bit controversial, due to traditional interpretations of language in the Posterior Analytics about presuppositions and first premises. Aristotle recognized that you cannot rigorously prove anything without some starting point. But he explicitly uses a different word for knowledge (gnosis) to say we start from premises that we are better acquainted with, and work toward conclusions we are less well acquainted with. This is appropriate, because in modern terms his description of episteme in part makes it a function from premises to conclusions, but here he is talking about a beginning. One episteme (“science”) may prove premises of another, yielding episteme on a larger scale via a sort of function composition, but we still have to begin somewhere.

Aristotle is very keen to make distinctions, and to point out when the same word is “said in many ways”. Here he just uses a different, more informal word (gnosis) that typically has a connotation of personal acquaintance, as opposed to the technical concept of episteme. Unfortunately, Posterior Analytics often seems to have been read as meaning or implying that immediately accepted premises can be more certain than the reasoned conclusions. But there is no textual evidence that Aristotle considers gnosis to be in any way more certain than episteme. The imputation of an argument about certainty to Aristotle at this location rests on a circular assumption that certainty is required here. That sort of thinking belongs to a foundationalism that is utterly foreign to Aristotle. The only kind of necessity Aristotle recognizes is what Leibniz called hypothetical necessity, which is the if-then variety. At the beginning of the Topics, Aristotle explicitly says it is what he calls dialectic that evaluates first premises. Even though it employs the same structures of necessary reasoning as episteme or “science”, dialectic is expressly said to yield only “probable” conclusions (precisely because first premises are inherently uncertain). (See also Aristotelian Demonstration; Aristotelian Dialectic; Belief.)

The misinterpretation of Aristotle on first premises is partly due to the influence of Stoicism on nearly all Western philosophy after Aristotle. Stoicism is fascinating and original in its own right, but where Plato and Aristotle cultivated epistemic modesty and left many questions open, the Stoics claimed to have all the answers, to have unproblematic direct access to reality, and to have formulated it all in a complete, final system. Stoicism was the first philosophy to have significant diffusion in society at large. This was possible in part because overly strong, reassuring claims made for easier marketing. The dogmatism denounced by Kant did not actually infect all previous philosophy as Kant implied, but it was extremely influential, and Stoicism was its most important historical source. (See also Stoicism and Skepticism.)

The Status of Ethics

For a long time, I mostly reduced ethics to empathy and an endlessly open Socratic quest for truth. The way to be ethical was just to seek the fullest possible understanding, in things small as well as large. Truth about how things really are seemed to me to be the decisive factor. Thinking about politics and history in terms of abstractly considered, putatively free choices by individuals seemed like a massive source of confusion, failing to take real-world contexts and constraints into account.

Under the influences of recent discourse about normativity, I now consider a sort of meta-ethics to be a good candidate for first philosophy. Logic, epistemology, and ontology can all be seen as depending on normative considerations.

It took some time for me to become comfortable with normativity talk. I was suspicious that in the background there must inevitably be some sleight-of-hand grant of deontological status to empirical “norms”, which would give the whole thing an inherently conservative slant. But this need not be the case. Normativity is just a fancy word recent philosophers use for value.

I still prefer to translate deontological vocabulary to something more hermeneutic. The only unconditionally binding imperatives are purely formal, and thus cannot provide unconditional guidance for action. This does not mean anything goes. There are meaningful differences and gradients everywhere. All differences are relative by definition, yet they are still differences.

The Platonic dialogues posit the Good as the first principle of all, prior to any matters of fact, beyond being and beyond knowledge. Aristotle developed a rich account of normativity internal to nature. Each thing has its own internal good, which for an animal for instance is a way of life. Modern mathematical natural science explains many new facts without reference to normativity, but nothing about this invalidates normative discourse. Kant and Hegel argue in effect that normative, “practical” reason about what to do is superior to (and actually informs) theoretical reason about what is.