The Social Context of Philosophy with Bryan Magee (1977)

in this program we're going to try and draw together the various developments of schools of modern Western philosophy into a single coherent picture we're going to take three paces back as it were and try and see the whole in some perspective this means looking at modern Western philosophy in the context of modern Western society and it also means looking at it in the context of its own past trying to see just why and how the central concerns developed as they did and in consequence of that what the outstanding features of our present position are and perhaps on the basis of that a few informal guesses about what developments are likely to be in the immediate future when philosophers use the term modern philosophy they mean philosophy since Descartes who flourished in the early 17th century the development of philosophy since then has been one continuous if complex tradition so that the philosophy of our own day has to be looked at against that background for some hundreds of years before Descartes on the other hand the situation had been entirely different they had been one single worldview based on Christianity and enforced by the political authorities so that any public questioning of it was forbidden and usually punished by death by comparison with today people's knowledge was almost static or at least very slow changing and held with great certainty being based on no less an authority than God or his church on earth it's only after the Renaissance and the Reformation that you get the spectacular emergence and growth of the new science which produced among other things a new philosophy the old certainties are undermined and with them topple the old authorities so the problem was raised in a new and acute form how can our claims to knowledge be validated it's a problem which is still unsolved for a long time people thought that science was the provider of absolute certainty but now we know that this is not so well to discuss contemporary philosophy against this historical and social background I've invited Ernest Gellner who both a professional philosopher and a professional sociologist in fact his official title is professor of philosophy with special reference to sociology at the London School of Economics professor Yana it seems to me self-evident that modern philosophy contemporary philosophy 20th century philosophy can only really be understood against the background of some such historical and social perspective as I very likely sketched in in that introduction just now but it also seems to be self-evident that most of your colleagues as professional philosophers and sort of blind to this historical and social dimension would you agree with that yes I very strongly agree with your main your two main points I may have reservations about some some of the other side remarks but your two central points seem to be entirely correct now the main point I'll rephrase as follows what you defined as modern philosophy they got all over the 17th century onwards is basically they're not always consciously a kind of commentary on the social intellectual change which is taking place since then and it can only be correctly understood in in in the light of this this is this kind of observation and your second minor your second point you associated with it also seems to me create not enough people are are clearly enough aware of this one one thing that looking at it in that way brings to the fore is why it is that the central problem of modern philosophy ever since Descartes has been the problem of knowledge this basic question of what do we know or indeed do we really know in the sense of being absolutely certain of anything that if so how do we know that we know this is all the way through been the central question hasn't it well just as central I mean if if one had to define modern philosophy if I had to define it was one feature only a one tray only I think this is the one one would pick out or at least I would pick out namely that it gets absolutely obsessed with the problem of knowledge if you give me two features already and another one and I'll do it in due course but if you allow me one the centrality of knowledge to thought one could sum this up as follows it prior to this period knowledge is one thing amongst others it's an important thing but it's other than other problems knowledge is an event in the world an important one but it is one amongst others what characterizes thoughts of this period is that it tends to get the other way around the world becomes an event in knowledge it's kind of inversion knowledge becomes absolutely pivotal and this is course very very much connected with your opening point the distinctive features of the modern world in which this philosophy operates and do you also agree with me that this arises from the breakdown of the old Authority you're no longer they at one time they knew what they knew because God said so or the Bible said so all the church said so once that's undermined then the question arises well what authority do we have for what we believe yes I do agree but I wouldn't being kind to expanded and and not necessarily concentrate on the monotheistic or whatever the other premises were of the preceding order what was really characteristic of seeing order was very stable and that big society could feed back his own ideas to itself in confidence against a stable background well the stability is gone the this is probably the end of society to live with sustained cognitive growth I mean nowadays people are preoccupied by economic roads but he coming close is intimately connected with the fact that knowledge is growing and this is very very disturbing this and this has a number of features you mentioned one the growth of knowledge but there's other features which are connected with it and it's absolutely unique now you say there are other features connected with it let's start talking about what some of them are well I'd say at least three or four the the phenomenal growth of knowledge in in one particular area the second feature is not exactly contraction of knowledge in other areas but his relative contraction let's say people in by comparison with the success story in what is roughly speaking Natural Science they're the failure story in other fields whereas people previously are confident then then our less confidence this is tied up with a number of features like like the breakdown of a central authority the the the referring I take it to ethics and religious belief things of that kind yes that the men used to be sure of their ethical beliefs and moral beliefs and thought they had authority for these now they are no longer sure or even indeed know what to believe now they're no longer sure about their ethical social and various other beliefs and the sheer contrast of this with the kind of glorious success in the field of natural science it's not natural sighs not any unstable but it suits because successfully unstable there's a fair amount of consensus about the way although there's instability that the next thing is the better than last one by enlarge does nobody knows quite how it works by analysed works and works for the better with in other fields this is by no means so in other words what you're saying is the before Descartes people didn't know much but by comparison with present attitudes they were very sure of what they did they were sure or what they thought they knew whether in fact they knew it or not and then you'll get this runaway growth of silence them and scientific kinds of knowledge the map of knowledge gets distorted because some areas are obviously growing and other gear areas are either not growing at all or growing very slowly or actually contracting or what there is gets kind of corroded by doubt so this these are the two feature the expansion one direction and the absolute or relative contraction in other areas are collected without the third feature once once you have this like instability or disproportion between these areas you can't use the one area to sustain the other if you have I mean the successful common law is you get specialized it can't it's it's known to be unstable it's highly authoritative in a curious kind of way in that that it's it's respected though it's not definitive and at the same time it's a very specialized idiom the specialization of the like natural scientific knowledge that it's not no longer in the same idiom in which we normally speak when you speak about human beings makes it unavailable as a premise for one's vision on one social life so if you like that the third feature would be the specialization of what could loosely be called positive knowledge yes it seems to me I don't know whether you would agree with this or not it seems to me that for a long time after confidence in the old theistic premises of knowledge was undermined what people were looking for possible unconsciously was a substitute for that they were looking for some other single category in terms of which everything could ultimately be explained and for a couple of hundred years or so in the West it was silence people believed that in the end everything would be explicable in terms of science or then growing up alongside that you get the Hegelian kind of philosophy in which the supreme category becomes history everything is ultimately explicable in terms of history or then you get say Marxism which comes along and tries to combine the two and produce a kind of schema which combines historical explanation and scientific explanation as the forms in which everything is ultimately to be explained and indeed claimants historical knowledge is the version of scientific knowledge yes I'd accept the picture I think I think I would characterize it somewhat differently from you how would you well do the tomb we mentioned one well that the two main trends reaction was breakup are the following on the one hand a concentration on the problem of knowledge it isn't so much that science in the the substitute for the previous certainty it's the method in which it was obtained the if if the world if the world is if the vision of the words no longer stable at least the way in which one finds ultimate it could be stable this is one of the main themes of modern philosophy in the sense which you difficult define it they procure preoccupation with a theory of knowledge as a provider of a kind of touchstone for what is good knowledge what isn't looking in upon one's tools if the world isn't stable let at least the tools by which you find out about it being the stable premise and this is one sustained continual theme the attempt to use the theory of knowledge the examination of our own cognitive operators survive and then the workings of our minds or the criteria by which we separating that's one persistent theme and I think very good one and and and and and it can only properly be understood against background which which you know I've sketched out I think the other theme which is exemplified by Martin which you've already mentioned is to have a new kind of metaphysic which isn't which is not really an account of some kind of transcendent reality but what what could we call a human social metaphysic a specification of the general features of either the human or the social historic situation and these I think these two strands really cover most of most most of what was happening in the past 300 years and their intertwining Israel in story modern thought now you've mentioned one and I've mentioned one one of the important strands Marxism and I'm going to want to ask you about all of them in turn but since this is cropped up let me ask you about this now how successful do you think Marxism has been in its attempt to cope with these basic problems but basically basically it hasn't it's it's I mean it gets top marks by precisely trying to look at the at the social context of our predicament but in in various ways it fails I mean some some it's it doesn't it gets good good good it get good gets top marks or asking the right kind of question or some of the right kind of questions but basically it's mistaken is implies that can you give examples of which of its questions are right and why with why some of the answers are mistaken well this is this is a big big topic on agree the right question is to look at the at the preconditions of the emergence of the modern world but the wrong answers well the ones I'd pick out the the the the elements of error which seem to be crucial is first of all any utopian and messianic expectation the idea that some kind of total fulfillment is available when when certain defects and disadvantages in present present social order are removed there we kind of automatic self-adjusting system in which the problem will no longer rise and that until one has their something's radically wrong now this is this is the kind of general utopianism or general mechanism which people often trace back to the religious sources or to the absolute ideas and the German Romanticism which immediately preceded it and which in play Karl Marx more specifically I should have thought they were the the the errors about the nature of politics which are absolutely central the idea that politics in the sense of coercion and the management of people is simply the by-product of a certain kind of class of a class structure and once that goes it will not be necessary deprives anyone who believes in that theory from asking the right question which is on the contrary given that the management of people by people in the management the control by the polity of the economy is with us and rightly with us what kind of polity will shall we have which which will both deliver the economic goods and prevent tyranny in in fact it marks and does lead people to a strong question on their score I'd like to take up with you another philosophy which we are now in a position to see in its context in this discussion and that is relativism it's very fashionable in the modern world for people to believe and to say well any opinion is as good as any other opinion there is no ultimate truth therefore you can almost as it were shop among philosophies to buy the one that suits you best and it's clearer to see how this arose in the context that we were discussing earlier namely you get a breakdown of traditional authorities people no longer know where to look for the validation of their beliefs and they come in the end sometime to think well beliefs can't be that it 88 they're all equally that it or equally invalid what is your view of relativism in modern thought well rosy was simply isn't an available option at all leaving aside the abstract question of whether it's true in itself as a recipe for coping with this breakdown of authority the the general problem situation which we sketched it could only work if there was of island communities each of them were their own vision within which you could within which you would live I mean that the worst situation the world history which was not satisfying those conditions perfectly satisfy them in some measure there that celebrate a story about the man who asked the Delphic Oracle as to what rights issues observe and the reply was in each city observed the rights of their city that's all real or writings of in ancient Greece prior to Alexander there were identifiable cities and a man who was told to observe the rights of of the city he was inhabiting could could in fact do so that all the statues he was visiting and the case may be if on the other hand there are no well-defined mobile communities if in fact the terms of reference are what we sketched out namely the rapid change an oval kind of global world was overlapping sub communities in disagreement when you tell a man to do a room as sermons warning he doesn't know what what you're telling to do because there's no unambiguously marked unit called room or and in effect any other city Rozsival is not an option for this kind of reasonable but the relative this might say to you well if you're going to deny my attachment to relativism you've got to show me some way in which I can validate one belief as against other beliefs well I think the main the main tradition of modern philosophy hasn't been a failure precisely in this in this respect he wants a success story by and large yes yes I do I think that the theory of knowledge which attempts to codify the criteria of valid knowledge it's not it's not a complete success story I can't refer you to book which sit which finally settle this is on the whole may not be fairly successful yes yes I do yes what I would like to add incidentally we're you know in a way doing this back to front by discussing the solution without the problem we specified some of the features of our problem situation the growth of noise in some areas the contraction in others the separation of descriptive knowledge from the idiom of daily life and a situation and if there's one there's one further feature which we haven't met you it seems to be terribly important and this might be called the kind of the the dehumanization price of the advance of knowledge I think this is important I'll go into what you mean by that yes well the point of the point the story of the advanced knowledge seems to me this that knowledge proceeds one of one of one of the secrets of knowledge is the sub sumption of events phenomena including behaviour agreement human behavior under generalizations under generalizations has be formulated in neutral language repeatable by other people well the price of this is it seems to dehumanize the phenomena which I described if your if your behavior your attitudes whatever I explained in terms in the interplay of entities which are specified in current neutral language it kind of destroys your individuality incidentally to take the most sceptic aspect of this it also disposability destroys your illusion of freedom if it is an illusion this kind of dehumanization effect or what sociology is sometimes called the under the influence of Max Weber the disenchantment of the world the subsumption of human events under non-human abstract categories is very very disturbing and if I were to sing about the second main to each other model philosophy it means the kind of movement for the preservation of man the kind of retention of the human image of man ever defense against being explained by science whether or not that science particularly successful and and this is listed at this this is what I meant when I mentioned dehumanization and this is the kind of the twin theme the second theme of maan philosophies and what one theme is preoccupation with knowledge and their kind of ultimate touchstone is a substitute source of certainty the delimitation of knowledge first providers a basis the other is a provision of arguments for the retention of our kind of human image of agency I think insulting our in separating these two main themes of modern philosophy the study of what constitutes knowledge and the attempt to find a theoretical basis for the preservation of our own humanity I think you've done something very illuminating there but for the sake of clarity I want to keep them separate in this discussion and I'd like to pursue the the line of of the theory of knowledge a little more before I come on to the as it were the social philosophy because there seem to me to be one or two or three extremely interesting and important aspects to this development that we still haven't touched on you've referred to the instability of modern knowledge and I think this is an extremely important thing I mean the fact that modern knowledge is growing so sensationally fast all the time means that so to speak the premises of our outlook are unstable that they never remain the same for two decades together so that you can never build up a coherent and stable world outlook so that we are moving all the time from one world outlook to another with with the sense of the ground permanently shifting beneath our feet well this is so I mean some some of the philosophers of knowledge which are available try to incorporate this feature and say no it's not a problem it's a solution this is how it should be I mean in different kind of ways philosophers such as Sequoia Papa the American tradition Quine incorporate precisely the stress on instability as part of their theory of knowledge now I think the some extent this can be overdone this comes back to our opening point about the distinct distinctiveness of our situation the way the way instability can be overdone is if if one considers a permanent feature not only the human conditioning of the condition of life if you try to anchor the the fact of growth of think of cognitive growth to some kind of permanent story going back right into biological history and I think this is wrong i it's a kind of solution which I happen to disagree with it is a solution which tries to re-establish security on the basis of a cosmic story there's a kind of overall development from the aim of my own words of growth fight by trial-and-error experimentations on which on the hill replaces the deity is a kind of guarantor that the thing will be have a happy end now I don't think this will do for riot of reasons I think one has to as well that the premises have to have to have to have something to do with as are the distinctive situation since the 17th century or so the specification of what is distinctive of rapid cognitive growth ever posed to the relative stability which is which which more than normal human condition before that another point I want to take up with you is this that before Descartes the subject matter of philosophy was a big supernatural man's relationship with God will so to speak the matter of ultimate concern after Descartes you get the switch of focus to human activities to men's politics social life psychology cultural life and so on and an enormous increase not only in the scientific or quasi scientific study of these things but in the involvement of philosophy with the study of these things would you go along with that I would go long with that the way formulated seems to be able to some objection you you keep talking about philosophy and science and if this had been separate at that time now in fact they didn't really get sharply separated to some point in the in in in in the 18th century I'm the expression natural philosophy meant physics and this is still enshrined in things like titles of professors of physics in Scottish universities a professor of natural philosophy so the separate the separation came very late and the separation is fine it's partly a reflection of what we're talking about namely the separation of substantive inquiry from the inquiry and intimates of knowing but by and large your basic point except to tell you now that you've made I think these very illuminating broad generalizations about the development of philosophy since Descartes I'd like us to look at some of the specific contemporary schools against that background I've already asked you to do this in the case of Marxism and relativism but what about some of the others what for example about existentialism how do you see that as fitting into this picture well it does fit into this picture imitation of the curious kind of philosophy in that like the Cartesian tradition it is very individualistic but unlike it it's not really preoccupied with it's not centric by the problem of knowledge characteristic needs not all that interested natural science at all is a basically preoccupied with the human situation well that brings us really to the second of your two main things I mean perhaps we ought to take that up now if you like develop your characterization of existentialism against the background of this second tradition well the ironic fact about essentialism is well number variation but one of them is it just it's it's it's preoccupied with human situation it claims by implication to be an account of the human situation as such anywhere but in fact the irony is it's distinctively an account of the human situation in the post Cartesian or post a particularly a post agent essential world it described it's it's concentrates on the individual who has to take responsibility for his general worldview and his moral commitment and who cannot pass the buck now of course seems to me characteristic of the human situation in most societies societies with stable belief systems it's precisely that he doesn't have to pass the buck he the the authority is confident and unless he's actively a rebel he can fall back on it so census wise claiming to be a general account of human situation is in fact an account of a very distinctive as far as it goes it is in the terms you've just outlined and a counted out as far as it goes it's it's obviously in its and its popularity when it was popular you're the reflection of this it has interesting things to say about it I mean of course one of the interesting one of the significant things about it is highly fashionable in periods of acute crises an intellectual depression I mean highly fashionable in Germany after the first war in France after the second with the weather coming reference it and of course the kind of relative at least relative consensus that so-called end of ideology period and became less fashionable but this is yes this is this is one of the things to be said about it and another there are other things to be well it has a certain defect as I at the university subject there's something slide the comic and bizarre about turning the human condition into Leonard profession and a human condition something you either you know we all well know about we are all and we don't actually have to read extremely difficult rather protracted books you know to find about this is a slide to comic about it and it leads to leads to one of its features it it tends sometimes to be said in extremely pretentious language which is part of its again in heritage another feature of it which is very conspicuous in a think like such an extension of the kind of a priori psychology and so it tells us about how you feel and how you think not by asking you or observing you but by deducing it from certain general features of your situation to the fact that you're going to die the fact that you have to make moral decisions without having them guaranteed it's these kind of the fact that you that other people are objects to you but you're an object to other people they're these very general features about but the limitation the one existence once into the infuriating and interdependent of other people and the fact that one has to make decisions on inadequate evidence these are the kind of premises from there to deduce is how you really feel but it doesn't actually interesting things about it but one of the objections against it is that it's quite useful a church to find out how people really feel and people don't necessarily feel how they ought to feel on the theory and in in the case of a very interesting stink like Sartre who tries then to combine it when he tries to marry and he admittedly I hope confessedly does miriam essentialism in Marxism the a priority of his essentialism and the concrete and political context of his observation was sighs don't don't don't mix it all easily these are the things I would say about it yes other any developments elsewhere in modern philosophy outside existentialism which seem to you to be particularly promising and interesting along the lines of this strand of philosophizing for the preservation of our humanity which you mentioned earlier well and I don't I don't think we can expect EXO to preserve too much about him and actually too easily I mean I think this is this is one one of the main themes is people will offer recipes or kind of almost cup launch kind of for me for saying that we really are the way we think we are and we need we need to feel threatened I think we do need to feel threatened it's just it is it is a price the more we can explain the world the more we are ourselves explained and you can't have one without the other no no in this in this kind of in this chemistry and and not terribly sympathetic to the to the Society for the preservation of humanity I think we should preserve humanity but not too much and not above all not too cheaply I mean my model in the spheres is quite an old-fashioned philosopher Immanuel Kant who was very very concerned with preserving the minimum of humanity namely free will more responsibility autonomous cognition of the kind of premises but there but no more than was necessary and not cheaply only only the absolute minimum kind of baggage and for the rest accepted that the price of the price of the advancement of knowledge is that we also become objects of knowledge well now how do how in the context of this background do you see the schools of philosophy in which you and I have in fact grown up and learned and developed and taught anglo-saxon philosophy in this century well I mean especially the most influential philosopher in the period in which you know I were involved in this as both the students and teachers on it whilst presumably so-called linguistic philosophy or the philosophy whose main single source is in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and of course I'm highly critical of this as you know in order to discuss it I have to violate the the the the the rule you imposed on me of separating the tradition the theory of knowledge tradition from the preservation of humanity feel free to break the cause well he he as many other thinkers of course Aras trying let's try this philosophy now I started from the position which was a slightly eccentric variant of the theory of knowledge tradition he started from the enterprise of of delimiting not so much what could be known but what could be what could be thought of could be said the limits of meaning now I didn't this was this was this was an innovation highly characteristic of the century that instead of circumscribing what could be known and codifying the rule of knowledge when instead one codified what could be meant what will there to be said now it's a very convenient kind of device and then the case of circumscribing what can be known if there's only limited area that can be known or that can be said or meant that provides you with the premises if this is kind of substitute for the old stability and I suppose there are various reasons why people acquire this kind of language or meaning sophistication one of them was were simply technical advances in in in in formal mathematical logic where certain expressions which looked as if they had meaning had to be excluded or attempts were made to exclude them so people have hit on the idea that what what is available for you and I to say to each other and to mean is circumscribed and the circles are more narrowly than our intuitions give us and if this could be circled my very very narrowly this would provide a kind of nice basis well this will the the the the the early philosophy orbital sign in ensign of Bertrand Russell and a strong element of this of using the limitations of what could be said or the kind of the kind of basis for reestablishing it as a safe picture now he reacted against this by kind of oval reaction saying this was an error the the the real essence of language is not that it is a cover for a limited number of things a real essence of language you that but you and I use it in a wide variety of purposes in a wide variety of social context and it is alright once we realize this that the problem disappears and the one error is to seek some kind of external external external validator which in his youth he had thought in in in unmasking the secrets of notational secret language now I think he was totally mistaken this in his later philosophy in his late Indian mistake well it's mistaken for the reasons which we had Lian that the the terms of reference which stimulated the modern pursuit of criteria wasn't a misguided pursuit of a single ideal notation which would be the model for thought the the terms of reference were imposed not from within philosophy which in any case didn't exist a separate subject in the terms of reference arose from our shared human and social situation from the fact that we knew too much in one area too little in another there are picture of ourselves getting dehumanized that the areas in which we did know a lot or do know a lot and continue to know not don't serve as very good premises for deciding what to say what kind of social political that we have these are they this this is the concrete problem situation in reaction to which people are philosophize namely try to state premises which will be persuasive so they can re arrive at a consensus without using violence since they're doing now this is an objective situation it has nothing to do with the famous which ones by language or the pursuit of an ideal notation this this I would say the crucial area in that particular philosophy I've asked you to give your observations on a number of different schools of contemporary philosophy recent anglo-saxon philosophy culminating in the later that concern existentialism Marxism relativism perhaps you think all of them have a lot of juice in them in the sense of being able to or likely to bear fruit in the future but which if any do you think I don't think I would single our movements by name but I think both these that both the main streams the on the one hand the codification the the concentration on the process of knowledge and then the attempt to formulate criteria knowledge on the one hand and the sustained investigation of our human social situation on the other our highly meritorious and that the way forward seems to me well seems to me into in consists of a kind of confluence of these two at a more sophisticated level now the the the the point about the the tradition which examines knowledge or thought or in the later balance language the point about this seems to me the following it's basically kind of norm sitting exercise it's saying it's an exercise in trying to codify the criteria for valid claims to knowledge it's a kind of attempt to establish like the the entrenched clauses of the of the Constitution of the Republic of knowledge now this seems to me an admirable exercise which will benefit for being from being seen as such and often in the past seen as a kind of descriptive account and they and then either descriptive or explanatory account of how knowledge how individual knowledge actually works and and as such it doesn't have all that much merit I mean that's what you see it has is a sort of you see modern philosophy more as an organ or as an instrument for actually acquiring knowledge --is telling us how we should go about if you like this is closer to that than then I mean one of the one of the elements of one of the valid elements in the later philosophy sandwich about which are otherwise repudiate is of course the following that that what he stressed was something which people knew but didn't treat sufficient seriously that as an account of how language actually works of course it's absurd language isn't a matter of matching sentences to sensations all these observations and then building up from this a picture in a kind of kind of sandcastle sandcastle way from little grains and then adding evaluation of the kind of flags stuck on top of the castle the kind of the account of the accumulation of knowledge from little descriptive sentences and then adding and adding evaluation and all the other things the human I think things separately this is absurd doesn't work like that it's our actual employment of of language is obviously built into institutions and our customs and so on and he was dead right on that so as a as a demolition of a descriptive account of language I think he was right to be doing he was right in this similarly I think the importance of the work in linguistic of Chomsky's is like to move to my mind a completely conclusive demonstration thing then as an explanatory account of how we acquire when in his case linguistic skills but it applies to cognitive skills that this cannot be done in the the old theory of noise addition was very poor monitoring he couldn't good model of this and then this science I'll accept however if one accepts these kind of negative demolition jobs in the recent intellectual scene it doesn't actually cause need oblige one or indeed in my view allow one to abandon theory of knowledge the kind of attempt to codify to set the norms for cognitive enterprise now this is one this is one element right but I seem to see way forward in conjunction with this I think it has to be tied with a kind of much more realistic account of our social historical situation the distinctiveness of what is loosely called industrial society there's a society based on growing effective control of nature apply technology Universalist Russian bears are the mass mass organization so on this this ironically enough I'm saying philosophers to be both more abstract and norm sitting on the one hand and more sociological concrete on the other and I don't think the contradiction in making these two recommendations and he marks it was concrete in sociological he just unfortunately got it got it wrong but I'd prefer to see somebody somebody else get it right and it's silly to get it right without missing any expectations this this seems to me the way forward the marriage of the realistic sense of the distinctiveness of industrial civilization its preconditions and implications combined with doing this normative job on its normal setting job of using the criteria of knowledge and the only basis was the courage that we can possibly have would you see a concern with language as being a unifying factor in contemporary philosophy because it does appear that wherever you look even schools that differ from each other about a great many things have that in common an enormous concern with name I think there is an underlying unity in I mean in in the in your opening remarks which there's been one plot well it it has more or less but it not on the surface it hasn't quite often and on the whole to discussion we agreed about what the underlying shared themes and preoccupation and plot where language oddly enough doesn't seem to me to be one of them it looks like it on the surface but I can think of three major movement in the century which make fuss about three at least which make a big fuss about language and it seems to me the way in which they invoke language it's so different that the similarity is entirely superficial the major from them the really big contrast vying sees for instance between language profession of someone like Christine and his followers in the english-speaking Florrick world in some like Chomsky they both make a fuss about language but it's almost diametrically opposite the point about that the the the the the the main point about the latest Estonian use of language was to use it a kind of solution language was the resting place the actual employment of language provided the only norms that we could have or did have or needed needed to have in other words the kind of the idea was that the pursuit of more general extraneous validations or the delusion an actual linguistic custom was a kind of resting place now the mate this seems to me the central idea of Chomsky which makes him important that he really brought home how problematic language was namely their deity there's the kind of skills which go into into the construction and understanding of sentences which we take for granted it's something which must not be taken for granted so the use of language is almost diametrically opposite for Chomsky discovered how very much it to the problem which is try and try to use it to the solution so that although both making us about language they seem to I could hardly think of two systems of thought which were more radically opposed to each other whether or not whether or not their dividual flaws recognize this and again lately the of course the contrast in the invocation of language which we shine and the earlier so-called logical positivist and the movements also be considerable they will try to use the limits of language and the way of providing up with with with with with basis for a reestablishment of a consensus of a vision of the world whereas mr. Klein you used language and the premise for saying that we don't need such a basis that we never need no no need to look for it so that lank language doesn't seem to me unifying seen it's the the the the the idea of language has been used in such widely different ways that it doesn't in fact give a unity to 20 centuries older do you think there's likely to continue to be a unity on some other basis in the philosophy of the immediate future well I wouldn't it's very very tricky making predictions about what what what what people will do well I know is what seems to me the correct thing to do and the correcting that's why I can see is the pursuit of the etymological the theory of knowledge tradition the attempt to codify the criteria of what is and what isn't marriage to a much more concrete hard-headed interest in the actual social reality and this is this this is this the particular style which seems to me to be fertile and this is more more a statement what I what I like to see done then what I think people necessarily do I mean well I hope that your pessimism on that latter point turns out to be mistaken thank you very much professor gilma

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017