A Postmodern Peripatetic?

I began this blog in 2019, envisioning an expanding spiral. The starting points were Aristotle’s ethics and Robert Brandom’s then very recent A Spirit of Trust, which were hinted at in the “peripatetic” and “postmodern” parts of the title, respectively. As a whole, the title was meant to suggest a new kind of broadly Aristotelian philosophy. I don’t identify with postmodern-ism, but in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom uses the adjective form “postmodern” in a quite different way, to describe Hegel’s project. Postmodern-ism nonetheless does have roots in what English-speaking secondary writers have called poststructuralism (another name I don’t like). Along with Plato, some of the leading French philosophers who get lumped into this latter category were important inspirations for me from the late 1970s — until they were overtaken by an “archaeological” Aristotle and a “deflationary” Hegel.

I always viewed Aristotle sympathetically, but in the early 2000s began a deeper engagement with his work. Around the same time, my late father influenced me to begin reading Brandom. This eventually led me to a new and much more positive view of Kant as well as Hegel, and a parting of ways with French anti-Hegelianism.

In the blog I initially wrote a lot of very short pieces, preliminarily sketching many of the themes here in a very informal and minimalist way. The center of gravity has gradually shifted to more scholarly commentary, excerpting, and partial translations, still presented in a relatively informal way. The first new direction that emerged was a belated engagement with the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur in 2020. This also began a trend toward longer pieces engaging more deeply with particular texts. Still in 2020, I applied a similar quote-and-commentary approach to Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy and Brandom’s Woodbridge lectures on Kant and Hegel, and wrote a preliminary sketch of Alain de Libera’s “archaeology of the subject”. In 2021, the quote-and-commentary approach was extended to H. S. Harris’s monumental Hegel’s Ladder. I also wrote a preliminary sketch of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s important work on Aristotle. Skipping ahead a bit, in 2023 I worked on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Since 2025 I have worked extensively on Olivier Boulnois’s investigations of the pivotal historical role of medieval philosophy in shaping views that have been widely assumed to be either distinctively modern, or else transhistorically endemic to “Western” thought. There has been much more besides, but these are some highlights.

An “archaeological” Aristotle and a “deflationary” Hegel have much to offer one another. The practitioners of each have an area of weakness that the other has resources to resolve. Thus the brilliant French writers on philosophical archaeology remain stuck in old-school prejudices about Kant and Hegel. Boulnois sees Kantian autonomy in terms of voluntarism, and Aubry sees Hegelian dialectic as totalizing. Meanwhile the brilliant American deflationary readers of Hegel — even Pippin, who makes salutary progress in recognizing the positive role of Aristotle for Hegel — continue to hold old-school prejudices about premodern philosophy as a whole. Thus in a footnote, Pippin summarily claims that Aristotelian and scholastic intellect is always passive. Brandom in the draft historical chapter of A Spirit of Trust that he omitted from the published version summarily claims that the non-voluntarist alternatives in premodern philosophy are more strongly linked to a morality of obedience than the voluntarist ones. But the whole mainstream of classical ethics emphasizes reason rather than authority, and treats Socrates — known above all for his practices of questioning — as a role model.

Husserl on Normativity

Translator J. N. Findlay ranks Husserl (1859-1938) with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, and calls Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1899-1901) his greatest work. My previous acquaintance with Husserl has been limited to his later, explicitly “phenomenological” period.

In the first two chapters, Husserl surveys and criticizes the then-dominant views of Utilitarian John Stuart Mill and his followers on the nature of logic, objecting that they reduced it to a “technology dependent on psychology” (p. 56). Frege had already introduced mathematical logic, but the great flowering of the latter had not occurred yet. Husserl in these chapters is particularly concerned with the objectivity of knowledge, and with principles of validation.

I was initially confused by his polemic against the claim that logic is a “normative discipline”. To me, “normative” means “axiological”, i.e., concerned with value judgments. I take the Aristotelian view that judgment refers first of all to a process of evaluation, rather than a conclusion. In this sense, judgment and normativity inherently involve a Socratic dimension of genuinely open inquiry about what is good.

All versions of normativity involve a “should”. But it turns out that the view Husserl is polemicizing against treated a “normative discipline” as one that takes some particular and predetermined end for granted, and is only concerned with what we “should” do to realize that predetermined end. On this view, “normativity” is only concerned with necessary and/or sufficient conditions for achieving predetermined ends. Thus Husserl associates it with a sort of technology, rather than with something ultimately ethical. So, what he is doing here is rejecting a merely technological view of normativity.

There is also a theoretical-versus-practical axis to Husserl’s argument. Aristotle had contrasted the ability to successfully perform an operation with the ability to explain the principles governing it. One does not necessarily imply the other. Husserl notes how many activities in life are merely oriented toward operational success, and says that most of the practice of modern sciences — including mathematics — has a mainly operational character.

Elsewhere I have contrasted “tool-like” reason with what I like to call ethical reason, but I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, and my notion of “tool-like” reason has potentially rather more positive connotations than that toward which Husserl seems to be leading. I don’t take the fact that engineering tends to drive science to be inherently bad. I think engineering can drive science in a good way, involving an integral consideration of ends; a concern with good design guided by those ends and the best practices we can come up with; and a recognition that the real world doesn’t always cooperate with our intentions.

On the other hand, I also find that the best engineering relies more on fundamental theoretical insight and well-rounded judgment than on sheer technology. This is a perspective that is simultaneously “practical” and concerned with first principles. When Husserl argues for the priority of theoretical disciplines over practical ones, he is mainly arguing for the importance of a concern for first principles. While I generally prefer the Kantian/Brandomian primacy of practical reason, I find common ground with Husserl in the concern for principles.

Space of Reasons

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) was one of the greatest American philosophers of the 20th century. A pragmatist trained in the analytic tradition, he rethought analytic philosophy from a broadly Kantian point of view, and famously criticized the “Myth of the Given”. His positive reference to Hegel as “that great foe of immediacy” made a great impression on the young Robert Brandom.

Sellars originated the phrase “space of reasons”, now much used by Brandom and others. He said that to hold a commitment at all is to invite questions about the reasons for it. The particular reasons for a commitment involve other reasons, which involve still others, and so on, forming a “space” that can be explored through dialogue.

I would note that in Aristotelian terms, the space of reasons would be a kind of field of potentialities. Because the space of reasons is potential rather than actual, it involves a vast multiplication of alternate (counterfactual) paths, structures, and fibrations. I associate it with an open field of potential Socratic questioning and negotiation. By contrast, both individualized ethos and the beliefs generally shared by an existing community would be kinds of actuality, in which particular alternatives are already selected, but may change over time. (See also Space vs Natural Light; Normativity; Intentionality.)