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Современные философы
Anglo-American philosophy has undergone a spectacular metamorphosis in the past 20 years, changing from a small, cozy, self-contained scholarly clique, reading few journals and writing little, into an enormous and increasingly sub-divided industry, churning out such a plethora of material that no single person can stay abreast of it. Among developments that would have been difficult to foresee 20 years ago, mathematical logic has become separated from philosophy, and philosophy has become intimately involved with academic linguistics. Professor Passmore's account is unavoidably selective, but gives a clear description of major trends and personalities. It can be recommended to the general reader who wants to know what philosophers have been up to lately, the beginning philosophy student, and the professional philosopher who wants a bird's eye view of the whole field. Discusses Chomsky, Davidson, Dennett, Derrida, Dummett, Feyerabend, Goodman, Mary Hesse, Kripke, David Lewis, Montague, Putnam, and Rorty.
- GenresPhilosophy
192 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 10, 2015
Not so much a book as an appendix to Passmore's 'Hundred Years of Philosophy,' this is very similar to that book: well written, clear, broad. In short, everything you'd want from a book like this. He spends more time on the anglo-americans than on the continentals, and 'Recent' is relative (it was first published in 1985), but it's a good overview of philosophy between the sixties and eighties, particularly philosophy of language, whether structuralist, Chomsky, Davidson or Dummett.
June 7, 2024
AN EXCELLENT SUMMARY OF PHILOSOPHY FROM 1966-1980
John Passmore (1914-2004) was an Australian philosopher, whose 1956 book (revised in 1966), “A Hundred Years of Philosophy,” is a marvelous survey of 20th century philosophy up to that point.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1985 book, “To the second edition of ‘A Hundred Years of Philosophy] I added a new chapter covering the years since the first edition… But I dismally failed… contemporary philosophy is above all else meticulous; to describe it briefly is to fail to describe it. Often enough… it is composed over time, in a series of overlapping periodical articles, rather than boldly stated in a single work… I can scarcely hope, even at the present length, to do more than give a taste of it. This is a descriptive, informal, necessarily summary account of some recent controversies, not a deep analysis or a final judgment about ‘who really matters.’ … What counts as ‘recent philosophy’? … In general… ‘recent’ begins in 1966… But the authors principally discussed were all of them familiar figures a decade ago… the younger generation must still await its historian.”
In the Introduction, he points out, “to an ever-growing extent, mathematical logic has fallen into the hands of the mathematicians… To be sure, analytical philosophers no longer … regard formal logic with scorn or dismiss it as wholly irrelevant… So far, [Rudolf] Carnap and [W.V.O.] Quine have vanquished [Gilbert] Ryle. Nevertheless, few philosophers now read the ‘Journal of Symbolic Logic’… Although analytic philosophers use symbols derived from the logical systems of the past decades, their symbols are often decorative abbreviations rather than elements in philosophical derivations. They refer to mathematical logic but do not engage in it… they are consumers rather than producers.” (Pg. 6-7)
He continues, “when philosophers want to bring out the fallacies in a philosophical argument, they often fall back on traditional, ‘Aristotelian,’ logic, finding nothing in ‘classical’ Frege-Russell logic to help them. ‘Relevant’ logicians, unlike [Peter F.] Strawson, are not ready to abandon formalization; they want a formalization which ‘works,’ which really does distinguish valid from fallacious reasoning.” (Pg. 8)
He suggests, “Philosophy, then, is both expanding and contracting; at certain points it is losing ground to other forms of inquiry, whether to linguistics or mathematics, at other points advancing where it had earlier retreated. Geographical boundaries, too, are not so clear as they once were. The familiar contrast between ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy was never, of course, geographically accurate… Nevertheless the contrast roughly worked. On the one side lay Franco-German-Italian philosophy, centering around Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, prophetic in style and, even when its outcome was atheistic, centrally concerned with the issues which have preoccupied theology. It allied itself with literature rather than science… On the other side lay analytical Anglo-American philosophy, with clarity as its central virtue… sympathetic to science, devoting its attention to epistemology, mind and language, centering around Ryle, [A.J.] Ayer, [J.L.] Austin, Quine…” (Pg. 11)
In Chapter 2 [‘Structure and Syntax’] he asks, “Does structuralism fall within the province of our history, narrowly confined as that has been? There are good reasons for answering in the negative, abandoning the structuralists to the historian of ideas. None of the structuralists has written a metaphysical work comparable to Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness.’ … Several of them have specifically denied that they are philosophers, as distinct from intellectual historians, anthropologists, political scientists or psycho-analysts. They resent, as inappropriate, philosophical criticisms; they firmly maintain… that they have no purely philosophical theses to maintain… their influence on the more widely-discussed Anglo-American philosophers has been slight… The structuralists, indeed, are often willfully obscure… precisely at the epistemological and ontological points where the Anglo-American philosopher seeks illumination…Such occasional references as they make to Anglo-American philosophy are usually… more than a little misleading. Yet… it would be a mistake to wholly ignore them; they represent in an extreme form certain tendencies which are also detectable in Anglo-American philosophy.” (Pg. 25-26)
He observes, “One does not know whether to say of [Jacques] Derrida that he is a philosopher, or, like the later Heidegger and Nietzsche before him, an anti-philosopher, seeking in his case to replace philosophy by literary criticism… One general objective runs through [Derrida’s] work---to ‘shake up’ our familiar conceptual systems, and, in particular, to free out thinking from its domination by … hierarchically ordered binary opposites… His manner of arguing, he himself says, is and has to be ‘a strategy that is complex and tortuous, involuted and full of artifice.’ Indeed, as he does not tell us, it is reminiscent of an electric eel. But at least what he is opposing is familiar.” (Pg. 31-32)
Chapter 3 [‘From Syntax to Semantics’] discusses Noam Chomsky, Richard Montague, David Lewis, Nelson Goodman, and Saul Kripke, among others. Chapter 4 focuses on Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett.
He begins Chapter5 [‘Realism and Relativism’] with the statement, “The debate between realism and anti-realism is not peculiar to Dummett; it has moved once again to the center of the philosophical stage… [Nelson Goodman] is another philosopher who expresses his admiration for the boldness of those pre-Socratic philosophers who ‘made almost all the important advances and mistakes in the history of philosophy,’ as they constructed systems on the basis of chosen starting points.” (Pg. 87)
He concludes in the final chapter, “Looking back at the story I have told, one might well conclude that philosophy has now returned to where it was at the turn of the century, battling between realism and idealism… One might more generally conclude from our story that philosophy still fails to make progress, in the sense in which science progresses… We are readily led, too, into the doctrine … that there is a subject called ‘epistemology’ in which ‘Philosophers’ are particularly expert. It tells us what ‘knowledge’ is. And that gives ‘Philosophy,’ it is then supposed, a certain supremacy in the realm of culture, since every kind of inquiry has to look to philosophy before it can be quite sure that it has attained ‘real knowledge.’… What is needed, rather, is a clean sweep, in Wittgenstein’s manner… Then what is left for philosophy to do, now that it sees how to liberate itself from ‘Philosophy’?... One thing ‘Philosophers’ pride themselves on… is close reasoning… That is far from being the main task of philosophy. Its more important concern is with ‘edifying’ rather than analyzing, with the abnormal rather than the normal, with trying out new ways of looking at things… it is an attempt … to fill the gap in human culture resulting from the demise of epistemology, by creating a theory of understanding, of the ways in which our capacity to understand is tradition-impregnated. This is somewhat as science filled the gap created by the death of theology.” (Pg. 118-121)
There is a real lack of “summary” books of recent philosophy; although as Passmore admits, the very latest “philosophy” must await its historian, Passmore’s two books are excellent and very helpful to those studying 20th century philosophy.
John Passmore (1914-2004) was an Australian philosopher, whose 1956 book (revised in 1966), “A Hundred Years of Philosophy,” is a marvelous survey of 20th century philosophy up to that point.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1985 book, “To the second edition of ‘A Hundred Years of Philosophy] I added a new chapter covering the years since the first edition… But I dismally failed… contemporary philosophy is above all else meticulous; to describe it briefly is to fail to describe it. Often enough… it is composed over time, in a series of overlapping periodical articles, rather than boldly stated in a single work… I can scarcely hope, even at the present length, to do more than give a taste of it. This is a descriptive, informal, necessarily summary account of some recent controversies, not a deep analysis or a final judgment about ‘who really matters.’ … What counts as ‘recent philosophy’? … In general… ‘recent’ begins in 1966… But the authors principally discussed were all of them familiar figures a decade ago… the younger generation must still await its historian.”
In the Introduction, he points out, “to an ever-growing extent, mathematical logic has fallen into the hands of the mathematicians… To be sure, analytical philosophers no longer … regard formal logic with scorn or dismiss it as wholly irrelevant… So far, [Rudolf] Carnap and [W.V.O.] Quine have vanquished [Gilbert] Ryle. Nevertheless, few philosophers now read the ‘Journal of Symbolic Logic’… Although analytic philosophers use symbols derived from the logical systems of the past decades, their symbols are often decorative abbreviations rather than elements in philosophical derivations. They refer to mathematical logic but do not engage in it… they are consumers rather than producers.” (Pg. 6-7)
He continues, “when philosophers want to bring out the fallacies in a philosophical argument, they often fall back on traditional, ‘Aristotelian,’ logic, finding nothing in ‘classical’ Frege-Russell logic to help them. ‘Relevant’ logicians, unlike [Peter F.] Strawson, are not ready to abandon formalization; they want a formalization which ‘works,’ which really does distinguish valid from fallacious reasoning.” (Pg. 8)
He suggests, “Philosophy, then, is both expanding and contracting; at certain points it is losing ground to other forms of inquiry, whether to linguistics or mathematics, at other points advancing where it had earlier retreated. Geographical boundaries, too, are not so clear as they once were. The familiar contrast between ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy was never, of course, geographically accurate… Nevertheless the contrast roughly worked. On the one side lay Franco-German-Italian philosophy, centering around Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, prophetic in style and, even when its outcome was atheistic, centrally concerned with the issues which have preoccupied theology. It allied itself with literature rather than science… On the other side lay analytical Anglo-American philosophy, with clarity as its central virtue… sympathetic to science, devoting its attention to epistemology, mind and language, centering around Ryle, [A.J.] Ayer, [J.L.] Austin, Quine…” (Pg. 11)
In Chapter 2 [‘Structure and Syntax’] he asks, “Does structuralism fall within the province of our history, narrowly confined as that has been? There are good reasons for answering in the negative, abandoning the structuralists to the historian of ideas. None of the structuralists has written a metaphysical work comparable to Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness.’ … Several of them have specifically denied that they are philosophers, as distinct from intellectual historians, anthropologists, political scientists or psycho-analysts. They resent, as inappropriate, philosophical criticisms; they firmly maintain… that they have no purely philosophical theses to maintain… their influence on the more widely-discussed Anglo-American philosophers has been slight… The structuralists, indeed, are often willfully obscure… precisely at the epistemological and ontological points where the Anglo-American philosopher seeks illumination…Such occasional references as they make to Anglo-American philosophy are usually… more than a little misleading. Yet… it would be a mistake to wholly ignore them; they represent in an extreme form certain tendencies which are also detectable in Anglo-American philosophy.” (Pg. 25-26)
He observes, “One does not know whether to say of [Jacques] Derrida that he is a philosopher, or, like the later Heidegger and Nietzsche before him, an anti-philosopher, seeking in his case to replace philosophy by literary criticism… One general objective runs through [Derrida’s] work---to ‘shake up’ our familiar conceptual systems, and, in particular, to free out thinking from its domination by … hierarchically ordered binary opposites… His manner of arguing, he himself says, is and has to be ‘a strategy that is complex and tortuous, involuted and full of artifice.’ Indeed, as he does not tell us, it is reminiscent of an electric eel. But at least what he is opposing is familiar.” (Pg. 31-32)
Chapter 3 [‘From Syntax to Semantics’] discusses Noam Chomsky, Richard Montague, David Lewis, Nelson Goodman, and Saul Kripke, among others. Chapter 4 focuses on Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett.
He begins Chapter5 [‘Realism and Relativism’] with the statement, “The debate between realism and anti-realism is not peculiar to Dummett; it has moved once again to the center of the philosophical stage… [Nelson Goodman] is another philosopher who expresses his admiration for the boldness of those pre-Socratic philosophers who ‘made almost all the important advances and mistakes in the history of philosophy,’ as they constructed systems on the basis of chosen starting points.” (Pg. 87)
He concludes in the final chapter, “Looking back at the story I have told, one might well conclude that philosophy has now returned to where it was at the turn of the century, battling between realism and idealism… One might more generally conclude from our story that philosophy still fails to make progress, in the sense in which science progresses… We are readily led, too, into the doctrine … that there is a subject called ‘epistemology’ in which ‘Philosophers’ are particularly expert. It tells us what ‘knowledge’ is. And that gives ‘Philosophy,’ it is then supposed, a certain supremacy in the realm of culture, since every kind of inquiry has to look to philosophy before it can be quite sure that it has attained ‘real knowledge.’… What is needed, rather, is a clean sweep, in Wittgenstein’s manner… Then what is left for philosophy to do, now that it sees how to liberate itself from ‘Philosophy’?... One thing ‘Philosophers’ pride themselves on… is close reasoning… That is far from being the main task of philosophy. Its more important concern is with ‘edifying’ rather than analyzing, with the abnormal rather than the normal, with trying out new ways of looking at things… it is an attempt … to fill the gap in human culture resulting from the demise of epistemology, by creating a theory of understanding, of the ways in which our capacity to understand is tradition-impregnated. This is somewhat as science filled the gap created by the death of theology.” (Pg. 118-121)
There is a real lack of “summary” books of recent philosophy; although as Passmore admits, the very latest “philosophy” must await its historian, Passmore’s two books are excellent and very helpful to those studying 20th century philosophy.
August 14, 2017
The value of this book is in its citations. Without them and some basic idea of what they contain, the reader is hopelessly lost. Largely, this book is pointing out the major works that consider debates over language of science and how it relates to varying perspectives of epistemology. In showing the importance of knowing some debates on philosophy of language in how it relates to cognition, social structures of science, and history, this book is a good source to find citations. However, this book isn't meant to be read straight through if one intends to learn anything new. One should use it to find new work in an already developed interest of philosophy of science/language or epistemology.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews