Wishing you all (delete as applicable) an Auspicious Dhanu Sankranti, Happy Milad-un-Nabi, Serene Buddhist New Year, Happy Hannukah, Merry Yalda, Solemn Zaratosht No Diso, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Solstice, Blessings upon the followers of Bahá'u'lláh, and Felicitations on the birth of the tenth Nanak. If you’re not celebrating any of these, then Happy Swik!
Only a Game will return in the Gregorian New Year.
The Last of the Continental Philosophers was a four part dialogue between veteran Nietzsche scholar Babette Babich and ‘outsider philosopher’ Chris Bateman, looking at why continental philosophy is something every academic philosopher claims for their own while the practices of this tradition are gradually dying out.
The dialogue originally ran from 29th November to 20th December 2016. Each of the parts ends with a link to the next one, so to read the entire serial, simply click on the first link below, and then follow the “next” links to read on.
The four parts are as follows:
If you enjoyed this dialogue, please leave a comment! A new Babich and Bateman dialogue begins in early 2017.
What started as a discussion about the (doomed?) state of continental philosophy turned last week to the reasons that analytic philosophers claimed the ‘continental flag’ for themselves. Now, the discussion concludes by moving into the relationship between analytic philosophy and the sciences, and what this means for everyone.
Babette Babich: Analytic philosophy is a disaster when it comes to theology [as discussed last week] but it is also a disaster when it comes to natural science, thinking about it, engaging it, and these days it is the scientists who are saying such things about analytic philosophy, to which, and rather predictably, analytic philosophy responds with utterly naïve circularity by urging scientists to take courses in analytic philosophy.
Chris Bateman: There are problems on both sides, here. Some scientists raise complaints about philosophy not understanding their field, and thus writing nonsense. This for me is an odd complaint because there is just as much nonsense written within each scientific field by the scientists themselves, and complaining about the ‘outsiders’ seems to be very odd focus. Writing The Mythology of Evolution was a fascinating exercise for me because it’s the most sustained discussion I’ve had with people in a field I myself had never studied. They were extremely open to my questions, and it made me think that claims of failed discourse between science and philosophy were a question of a lack of will, and not anything fundamental; but poor communication caused by a deficit of will is perhaps the hardest breakdown in discourse to fix.
BB: Indeed. But evolution is one of the most complicated questions going. As someone who started her career in the sciences, specifically one of the sciences that claims to theorize evolution, namely biology, what is troublesome is still a matter of history and context, so the analytic-continental debate could be restaged just at this level as well. But that is another question – and you have a book on it! More generally, it is worth noting that analytic philosophers do not, towards the end of the remedy to this communication problem with science, take courses in physics, or better yet, in physical chemistry, just to name a course that separates the science-minded from the non-scientifically minded just at the undergraduate level.
CB: Some philosophers are well versed in certain sciences in my experience – I’m a particular admirer of Isabelle Stengers, who was a chemist before she practiced philosophy, and whose work has massively informed my own. But there is certainly not any general awareness of a need for interdisciplinary work – which is a great shame, as almost nothing interesting happens without spanning disciplines, and philosophy is a wonderful nexus between other forms of thought.
BB: Absolutely true! But philosophy of science will take, at least in my experience, anyone trained in the sciences who wants to write philosophy, without requiring a comparable ‘training’ in the history and texts of philosophy. Thus Bob Cohen, for a long time the head of Boston University’s Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, had a degree in physics and this is common. Peter Galison has a PhD in physics and history of science, in good Conant fashion (Conant senior, let me be clear, as it was his stipulations that made Kuhn Kuhnian). The point is the explication of science to scientists which some philosophers of mind sometimes undertake to do, consider the Churchlands, Pat and Paul and so on. Thus Steven Hawking declared, some years ago attracting media attention — and never bothering to retract the claim — “Philosophy is dead.”
CB: Indeed, and so unwisely, too. The press is as much to blame as anyone here, for thinking that a physicist has ultimate authority on anything but physics which (and I speak as an ex-astrophysicist myself) is the narrowest and least generally applicable of all the contemporary sciences.
BB: Just to be clear in this regard, Hawking’s comments were contra philosophy but not contra continental philosophy — analytic and continental are not distinctions Stephen Hawking makes and he is pointing to the great majority of philosophers to begin with rather than the straggling few individuals of the continental kind, statistically not worth worrying about, being few in number and too long in the tooth to boot, just remember Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of the prime mechanism of scientific change…
CB: I find, as Foucault also makes clear, this barrier to change applies to all disciplines, personally. But I fear we have travelled far from the question we were working on!
BB: So returning to our earlier discussion, and now I can hear the full power that drives your already very forceful point; why, given all that can be said about the dominance of the analytic approach in philosophy, the persistent push to be continental, even if only to appropriate the name? Well, apart from just taking all the jobs and titles and posts, which is the biggest part of it, there is also an utter innocence: a kind of conceptual blindness on the part of analytic philosophy to the continental tradition. This amounts to what is in effect, a constitutional inability to see the point of any of the things noted before [e.g. in part 2] as significant in any way.
CB: Which is also the general problem some scientists have had with philosophy of any flavour, I rather suspect.
BB: To be sure. But think of the moment in a colloquium, provided it ever happens, which in fact it does not tend to, where, having invited a continental philosopher (as opposed to a continentally-flavoured analytic philosopher) to give a talk where someone in the audience asks the speaker to say just what it is the speaker is saying, a question is usually posed (there is more rhetorical spin than logic here) as the third or fourth question after the lecture. This can be a quite friendly question, posed in all innocence, just as one can explain something in class and a student can raise their hand and ask one to say it all again, once more, with pith, for the exam.
CB: The expectation that there must be a simpler way of putting a point, which is tied up in the naïve risks entailed in taking something complex and then making it too easily understandable, and thus misunderstandable – the ‘selfish’ gene being the paradigm example par excellence.
BB: That is a great example! In this context, if I could seem to be suggesting that continental philosophy just is what Heidegger does in Being and Time along with what Nietzsche does in all of his philosophy, including Zarathustra (Heidegger reminds us to ask who was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?), also including the very unpublished bits many of us are delighted to have scholarly permission to ignore, and not less all the pre-Socratic thinkers as well as a Plato read rather differently than an Oxbridge don would read him and an Aristotle read differently than a current Stanford professor of theology would read him, today’s continental claimants are often more at home in comparative literature or other departments where the talk is talk of “theory’ which last I have nothing against but which is not, because it does not have to be, philosophy.
CB: This is critical theory you’re referring to here? I always find it odd, to be honest (although I enjoy reading a lot of it) that anyone would call ‘theory’ something that involves neither theorising nor application of theory. I rather suspect the choice of ‘theory’ is a rhetorical move to add credence to a particular kind of hermeneutic activity, because ‘theory’ is a word clad in the shiny armature of the sciences.
BB: No, or not quite, or at least not as I understand critical theory. For me, critical theory is Horkheimer and Adorno – and then some. But today’s Frankfurt School hasn't been about Adorno for years. Thus if I have reservations about philosophy overall, your point about ‘theory.’ only gets more complicated inasmuch as there is no move to 'annex' Comparative Literature or what other disciplines like Political Science or Sociology or even Media Studies or Communications can call ‘theory.’ Thus it matters as Reiner Schürmann long ago observed (to quote him once again as a witness to the era) that when the American analytic philosopher, Richard Rorty wrote The Mirror of Nature to look at certain conundrums interior to the philosophical project of raw feels and C-fibres that were then all the rage, and proceeded to decamp from the Princeton Philosophy Department he did not join ranks with the so-called pragmatist pluralistic movement, let alone the ‘continentals’ who read his book with enthusiasm, but, ganz im Gegenteil, or “far from it” as Schürmann would say, switched instead to those very departments of Comparative Literature that had long welcomed Derrida, jumping disciplines as he jumped ship.
CB: Sometimes, any safe harbour, no matter how far flung, is better than going down with the ship...
BB: Certainly! But I am not persuaded that Rorty needed safe harbour. A Princeton Professor is not typically a persecuted personage. Surely Rorty wanted more than analytic philosophy. But he remained enough of an analytic philosopher that he would not put in with other voices, the pluralist voices, let alone the continental voices. Rorty, I would say, wanted to become Rorty rather than to help bring other voices into the profession. But there is something more: and currently among analytic philosophers there is, it seems to me, a sense of incipient boredom. I find a presentiment of this in, of all people, Mary Midgley who wrote a blurb on your book The Mythology of Evolution to inspire blurb-envy in anyone, especially me (I have adored Midgley’s work for years, and it takes nothing away from this admiration to note that she too, of course, enjoys an analytic formation and great sympathy for the same tradition).
CB: I ought to say that as an outsider, I felt enormous pressure to earn endorsements for my philosophy books lest I have no credibility at all. Not to mention, lacking any training in philosophy, I felt I needed to engineer something akin to an apprenticeship by building upon the work of others, to which I was obligated to a certain intense (and solitary) study. Thus Imaginary Games is clearly a tribute to analytic aesthetician Kendall Walton, who very gladly endorsed it, and The Mythology of Evolution answers Midgley’s call to clear up the contemporary confusion about motives, and again, she endorsed it. I consider these endorsements as enormous blessings, of course, but it ought to be recognised that I sought them out from direst personal need... But I digress: you were talking about analytic boredom?
BB: My point here, in addition to connecting with your own book, is that Midgley herself points to the devolution of analytic philosophy, left to its own devices – and it insists on being left to its own devices whereby and on its own terms, it winds up, as I am fond of quoting A. Z. Bar-On, as having “less and less of what to analyze.”
This is Midgley’s point, as she wrote in a lovely letter, snippets of which have (owing to the occasional interest regarding the absence of women in academic philosophy, especially at the highest levels) been getting a certain amount of attention on the internet. To finish this very long answer to your very engaging first question, I’d like to quote her at more length than she is usually quoted, not that she is long, she is very concise, inasmuch as what Mary Midgely does assesses analytic philosophy’s ‘normal’ in the sense of Kuhn’s normal science, as a culture which endures until revolution anticlimactically comes through folk’s dying off or until some other way emerges that manages to change the topic. As she writes in a letter to The Guardian (Thursday 28th November 2013):
What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on until somebody from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation onto a quite different topic, after which the games are forgotten.
More from Babich and Bateman in the Gregorian New Year.
Over at The Journals of Doc Surge, Chris Billows has written a blog-letter to conclude our exchanges over philosophy and psychology over the last two years. Here’s an extract:
Philosophy is the eldest thinking system and is deserving of respect. In pre-Modern times Philosophy was imbued in all aspects of life including an understanding about human purpose and afterlife. Today, Philosophy plays the role of being thought pioneers since secularism has demanded that metaphysics be kept in the private domain of religion. Rationalism and secular thinking has led to inflation of secular professions such as scientists, engineers, psychologists, who have replaced Philosophy’s once prominent role in human thought. Philosophy is being replaced by its children…
You can read the entirety of Chris’ letter, In a Matter of Aesthetic Preference at his blog. I’d like to thank Chris for these Republic of Bloggers exchanges, which have been productive for both of us. Given the note of conclusion, I feel that Chris should have ‘the last word’... I ought to make two clarifications, though.
My defence of philosophy is never an expectation that others will take it on; pursuing philosophy as I have done is a major task, and my goal is not to drum up more practitioners as such. I seek, in all things, a mutual respect. My goal is thus to have philosophical practices understood for what they are, that their contributions to knowledge and reflection might be appreciated; never ignored or dismissed, nor overvalued as ‘prophecy’.
Today, we end up justifying paths not taken (‘I don’t need to know that, because…’) through some strange pressure to ‘know everything.’ It ends up with hostility to certain practices that we have excluded, as they become an outsider that we must justify as being ‘outside’. Wikipedia Knows Nothing shows this as absurd: knowledge-practices are always distributed, no individual can know everything, and the impression that they could stems from a confused view of the nature of knowledge.
Thus the second clarification: positivists are not my enemy. I argue against short-cutting knowledge as it is mistaken, but those that do so are not my enemy. I seek a world where all religious practices and all forms of positivism can coexist. This is, as Kant puts it “merely possible” – ah, but what a possibility!
With grateful thanks to Chris for this engaging series of exchanges. The Republic of Bloggers is always open for discourse.
The dialogue began when I asked Babette Babich what characterises the (dying) tradition of continental philosophy, and why so many philosophers feel the need to ‘claim’ the term for their work. Following on from last week, the discussion continues as we explore the appropriation of the continental title by analytic philosophers with very different methods.
Chris Bateman: This still leaves open part of my original query: why, given the predominance of analytic methodology, would anyone feel the need to claim continental as part of their title?
Babette Babich: Your original question, brilliantly, stepped aside all the muck I’ve tracked back in regarding the analytics and the continentals, and their disputes and bitter histories, almost up to the veritable ‘existentialist café’ reference to Sartre, to ask why, and everything I’ve brought back in just makes your question even more powerful, to ask why then, after all that, one might want to claim to be continental?
And the answer is venality: it has to do with the getting of posts in academic philosophy: I wish it were something more noble or, as they used to say when I was young, more ‘tough-minded’ than just that. But it is not so, alas, and analytic philosophy, which already had the greater portion of the jobs when I took a doctorate some thirty years ago, now occupies nearly all the jobs. In fact, the late Reiner Schürmann wrote a de Tocqueville style report on the state of philosophy in the US (written in French for the French) claiming, as he wrote in the mid-eighties, that the analytic move was a done deal with 90% of the jobs (he counted), going back to the early 1960s.
CB: This is more than just a coincidence, though, and it’s certainly not any kind of Spencerian survival of the fittest... it must at heart have to do with the prevalence of (and academic bias towards) positivism in the wake of its stricter ancestor, logical positivism. And this ties in also with your aforementioned point that having been connected in any way with Jesuits hurt your career – because for all that I might admire certain contemporary positivists, my quip that they are at heart “atheists for science” is apposite, and an unthinking anti-religious bias goes hand-in-hand with positivism as a broad movement, just as loving one’s country need not end in racism but all too frequently does.
BB: One could say that my worry about continental philosophy corresponds to the standard lament: they don’t make philosophers like they used to! But it seems far too political to simply represent the ordinary decline that goes with golden age thinking (and, contrary to millenarian fantasies, the golden age in such fairy tales is never the age to come, this is Judeo-Christian thinking). And it is massively in force, whether we are atheist or not, in our ‘faith’ in technology which goes hand in glove with our conviction that we are not destroying the world beyond any possibility of remedy (the liberal consensus seems to be that we can solve everything if only we all admit that there is climate change and that we are through pollution and deforestation causing this age we name the anthropocene, as we surely are, and yet not that we are doing anything so nefarious as ‘controlling’ the weather, heaven forfend: of course that’s impossible!).
CB: My philosophy increasingly moves against this mythos of technology as saviour, another of my inheritances from Mary Midgley, of course.
BB: Only Sloterdijk, and very gingerly at that, comes close to suggesting the irreversibility of our environmental crisis and its at least in part militaristic etiology in his book Terror from the Air. No one else touches this theme.
CB: Timothy Morton’s idea that we and the other animal species around today are the dwindling survivors of an extinction event that already happened also leans in this direction, but I agree it is rare that this perspective comes out at all.
BB: In any case, at issue is reversibility, and there is no chance that pollution or deforestation will be halted. Thus and, just in case everything is ‘beyond all repair’ (to use American military jargon absent its acronymic vulgarity), we can just spend all of everyone’s money and all of the earth’s remaining resources to get a select few of us to Mars, or some other supposed alternate planet, there to rinse and repeat the cycle.
CB: Aye, I’ve found myself forced (paradoxically, from my perspective) to become a space travel opponent precisely because the ‘flee the planet’ mythos, as Lynn Margulis astutely critiqued in her final years, is exactly the wrong way of understanding the problem. For if we cannot work out how to live here on Earth, we shall not be able to live anywhere in the universe, so even if you want a future with ‘space colonies’ and the like the focus must, can only be, on learning first and foremost how to live within our terrestrial resources.
BB: And here we are, this is part of a continental style, adding complexities to your question which was only about why one might say that one is continental if one is not in fact continental. We can coin a new term for philosophers of this kind, the analysts who claim to be continental and call them ‘trans-Continental’ (but I am still going to prefer the original Orient Express to this new terminology). There are a lot of these after all: almost all of those who teach Nietzsche and Heidegger at the university Professorial level. There are exceptions of course (but they are few) in the UK, in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and increasingly, I wrote a book about this, La fin de la penseé, in France and I was just in Berlin to see just how very true this is of Germany too. Today’s professors, you can just read their CVs or listen to them, are analytically trained, by which I mean that they use analytic argumentation and do what is recognized as analytic. This is so far advanced that mentioning analytic is not necessary. It is goes without saying as the default mode. And on the basis of this, one can define or specify what analytic philosophy would call ‘really’ analytic, which last stipulating distinction is a quite analytic thing to do.
CB: Indeed – Stephen Yablo wrote a brilliant paper that influenced my engagement with the analytic practices known as ‘fictionalism’, about the difficulties entailed in shrugging off commitments with ‘really’. It emerged from his examination of discussions between Carnap and Quine – the logical positivists once again having a historical role here in making analytic philosophy what it is. This reminds me that even the disagreements within analytic philosophy move in analytic circles: the analytic methodology lurks at the foundation of academic philosophy today.
BB: All, but all, of my new colleagues at Fordham, even the so-called ‘continental’ ones, naturally have analytic formations. The department head once told me, not unlike the email example I began with [back in part 1], not to say such things to younger colleagues as it upset them. But for me what is at issue is a matter of style and what that style does to philosophy and how it limits it.
CB: By excluding entire ways of thinking?
BB: Yes. Analytic philosophy does not connect with approaches such as Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s or Derrida’s... unless in an analytic or domesticated mode. But the text is the problem. Thus Dreyfus made Heidegger analytic and other scholars just followed suit. The trouble is the text, meaning the trouble is a hermeneutic one. I note, because it is important, that one should make an exception for Foucault as one can manage to leave out all reference to Pierre Hadot and a different way of writing on ancient philosophy and so too, for more arcane reasons, Deleuze, who counts in today’s analytic modality as the new Bachelard, who was, for his part, always a name, positivistically, poetically as he was, congenial to analytic philosophy of science. So yes, there is a kind of disconnect with respect to a great many significant thinkers, but including certain names such as Simondon and Stiegler. But always, the problem seems to be the need to exclude any reference to history or context at all and that is why analytic philosophy is, to my mind, a disaster.
CB: There are no shortages of disasters caused by philosophy either narrowing its own perspective, or being compartmentalised and shuffled off the stage where matters are discussed in public. It’s one of the reasons that I see my own role as being in part about popularising philosophy – because when it comes to avoiding disaster, philosophy is one of our best and least used tools. Do you see other disasters beyond those we’ve already mentioned?
BB: I think there are fascinating questions and challenges involved with popularizing philosophy, something that has been a great trend in Europe for a few decades but that I have worries about. On the disaster front, I ought to underscore that (and of course all of this is in my own judgment) the analytic turn, now consummate as it is, can only be a disaster for a Jesuit school just to the extent that analytic scholars cannot offer training in the kind of philosophy that is of use to the priest-to-be. Lacking connection with theology but not less with other traditions in philosophy, between philosophical schools as well as further connections to history and to art and to poetry, all those complexifying details one might have objected to leaves us today with an impoverished philosophy. The same thing is true of Jesuit schools in the UK and so on. Maybe the better question is how can it be otherwise? Those who determine what counts as ‘good’ philosophy are analysts and they do not recognize any but their own approach to philosophy. And “there’s an end on’t.”
CB: The connection with theology is an important one, I think, and not because religion itself is essential, per se, but because it remains the fundamental matrix of culture, even when it is not recognised as such. There are so many people who consider themselves atheists today and think that this means they are completely outside of religion. As a result, they fail to see how their thinking is resolutely bound up with the Abrahamic traditions, and especially Christianity, which is the analytic philosophy of world religions. The result – much as with the relationship between analytic and waving a continental flag – is that we say we are not going to talk about theology, when what actually happens is that a particular theology (or rather atheology) is the unacknowledged dominion of thought on a rather wide swath of topics.
The dialogue concludes next week: Analytic Philosophy and the Sciences
Trafford Council recently announced a proposal to change School Crossing Proposals into 'traded services', effectively cutting the service while seeming to pass it onto the private sector. This is the letter I sent to Trafford Council on 27th November 2016 in response to this outrageous proposal, along with their reply, and my response to that.
Dear Trafford Council,
It has been just over a year since I wrote to you in defence of our local School Crossing Patrol Services, which you attempted to axe in 2014-2015 using rhetoric that was, as I outlined at the time, ill-founded, misleading, and immoral. Now, you have announced a new set of budget proposals in which you accept that these services “make a valuable contribution towards pupils’ safe and sustainable travel to schools” but then propose to make them into “a traded service” such that the costs can be pushed onto local schools and community groups. Are we to understand from this suggestion that Trafford Council believes that the children of rich families have a greater right to life, and thus that the children of poorer schools deserve to die in traffic accidents?
According to the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT), road accidents account for half of the accidental deaths of school-age children, far more than any other kind of accidents. The risk is particularly great when living next to a dangerous road, such as the A56 between Altrincham and the city centre (Chester Road, Cross Street Washway Road etc.) where many key crossing patrols operate. Research conducted in 2001 suggests that children from poorer families were at least 20 times more likely to be killed as pedestrians than children from richer families.
Trafford Council’s proposal to treat crossing patrols as ‘traded services’ is an attempt to push the cost of essential safety services that protect the lives of our children onto the local schools. But the schools attended by those living in relatively poorer areas are already suffering from the effects of government mandated ‘austerity’, and are struggling to afford essential teaching services, let alone the additional expense of crossing guards. This proposal is a dishonest attempt to cut an essential safety service by seeming to transfer it. The schools that need these services cannot afford to pay for them, but the families cannot afford to lose them.
At root, the proposal to make crossing patrols ‘traded services’ is not even plausible, since a typical crossing patrol does not serve a single school. Considering just the crossing over Chester Road in Gorse Hill, children cross here to half a dozen local schools, and to reach bus stops on both sides of the road to travel to schools further afield, as well as to reach nurseries and other local facilities. There is no way to ‘trade’ the cost of such a vital service to a single school.
If the intent is to divide the costs between all the schools that the service supports, it would be necessary to create an intermediary to manage the complicated payment system required. But of course, we already have such an intermediary: Trafford Council. Indeed, the sole purpose for local government is the provision of public goods, such as road safety services. If Trafford Council intends to offload its duties as a provider of public goods, it might just as well do away with itself. Until such time as the risk from motor vehicle accidents has been thoroughly mitigated (and there is little sign of this happening), local councils have a moral duty to provide protection to the vulnerable members of the community at risk from road accidents.
The suggestion to treat crossing patrols as ‘traded services’ is a farce and an insult to every family who benefits from these essential public goods – not to mention implying that Trafford Council believes that the children of poor families are worth less than those of rich families. No doubt their own children are not the ones at risk. On behalf of everyone whose children’s lives Trafford Council are gambling with, I warn you that we will not take this affront lightly, and urge you to reconsider this unjust policy before it costs you your seats on the council.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Chris Bateman, BSc, MSc, PhD
Senior Lecturer, University of Bolton,
Visiting Professor, Laguna College of Art and Design, Los Angeles,
and proud resident of Stretford and Gorse Hill
This is their reply, received on the 7th December:
Dear Dr Bateman
Thank you for your correspondence dated 27th November 2016 in which you highlight your concerns regarding the Council’s proposal affecting the School Crossing Patrol Service.
The Council is currently undertaking a public consultation on its budget proposals for 2017-18. The provision of School Crossing Patrols is not a statutory duty for councils, although we recognise that they can make a valuable contribution towards pupils’ safe and sustainable travel to school.
However, the School Crossing Patrol Service National Guidelines clearly state that the responsibility for getting children to and from school is a parental one. It is also important to note it is not the purpose of a School Crossing Patrol to resolve poor driver behaviour.
Therefore, The Council is consulting on the proposal that School Crossing Patrols becomes a “traded service” offered to 3rd parties such as schools and/or community groups / private sector to fund. The Council will retain the accountability for school crossing patrols funded by 3rd parties. This includes the training, risk assessments and health/safety issues.
The public consultation will conclude on 16th December 2016 and we will consider all responses before determining which proposals to take forward. Your views will be included in the consultation process.
Yours sincerely
Phil Valentine
Environment Strategic Business Manager
I responded as follows:
Dear Ms Keogh,
Thank you for the reply from Phil Valentine.
Mr Valentine is correct that parents bear the ultimate responsibility for getting their children to schools, and that School Crossing Patrols are not responsible for poor driver behaviour. However, Trafford Council is responsible for all public infrastructure in the region and thus bears a tacit responsibility for the confluence of traffic where it intersects with the catchment areas of schools and presents a substantial danger to school-aged children. If the council withdraws its support for crossing patrols in these areas, it is derelict in its moral responsibilities, whatever its legal responsibilities might be, since it is denying its responsibility for dangers brought on by infrastructure conditions that it alone is in a position to affect.
What is more relevant here is that the proposal to make crossing patrols a traded service amounts to the claim that only wealthy schools should have the additional protections and assistance provided by a crossing patrol. This is severely problematic given that the places where these patrols are most needed are precisely the places which can least afford to fund them. This is the core issue raised in my letter. The proposal implies that Trafford Council believes that richer children have a greater right to life than poorer children. Mr Valentine's reply shows no evidence that he or Trafford Council care about this issue.
I appreciate that, as a Strategic Manager, responsibility for policy decisions does not fall upon Mr Valentine shoulders. I would therefore ask for the contact details of those at Trafford Council who were responsible for this policy decision that I might pursue this matter further with them.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Chris Bateman
Last week I asked Babette Babich what characterises the (dying) tradition of continental philosophy, and why so many philosophers feel the need to ‘claim’ the term for their work. This week, the discussion continues as we move towards a positive exploration of continental philosophy practices, as opposed to the thriving analytic philosophy tradition.
Babette Babich: Analytic philosophy privileges argument and persuasion, making a case, making a claim, proving a point, persuading an opponent and so on and it is to this extent fairly legalistic, case-focused. From this perspective it is rather easy to wave a flag and think that waving a flag is all that is needed. So if one talks about Heidegger or Nietzsche that will justify calling oneself continental.
Chris Bateman: Can you provide a definition of what constitutes continental philosophy, even if such a definition is a simplification?
BB: We are so very analytically minded – it is the dominant mode in philosophy after all! – that a definition is certainly in order. What is continental philosophy? Continental philosophy is thinking, it is questioning, elaborating questions, making them more comprehensive, deeper, making them worse, proliferating these same questions and adding more and other associated questions. It includes reflection, musing, quandaries, provocations, sometimes it includes comparisons, say, but this was a joke after all, connecting M&E — analytic metaphysics and epistemology — to M&M’s. And this range of different things has been true for quite some time going back to the beginnings of analytic philosophy with the Vienna Circle and logical ‘analysis,’ whereby any time one mentions Vienna it makes a difference to note that one should not forget Freud but one does.
CB: Mary Midgley, who has been a huge influence upon me, never forgets Freud, but I am younger and sadly tend to ignore him, even though I have frequent recourse to the Vienna Circle and the ‘logical positivists’, who I often draft in as a ‘bad guy’ in my philosophy, because they demonstrate (as Midgley said to me in a recent exchange) an excess of certainty that is part of the complex of problems we face today, along with (paradoxically) a voiding of the very possibility of certainty that is just as problematic. But you were talking about Freud...
BB: Yes, Freud, because that adds a layer of complexity to the word ‘analysis’ but not less to the historical context of the term in its genesis and development. Thus to logical positivism and logical empiricism and logical analysis one ought I think to review the relevance of psycho-analytic investigations along with the psychological investigations that animated so many at time at one side or the other of psychologism, including Frege and most saliently Husserl and Heidegger.
CB: So was the Vienna Circle the original confrontation between analytic (which they effectively founded, riffing off Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – much to his chagrin!) and continental, represented then as the early phenomenologists, Husserl and his one-time assistant...?
BB: I would make that claim but of course historically speaking they were all continental. The dream of analytic philosophy is an expat philosophy and Wittgenstein only became Wittgenstein as himself an expat, an import: Austrian wine in British skins as it were. Mercifully, and I am thinking of all philosophy in the last century, pre-Brexit! But it was Carnap who was the original analytic baiter, as it were, and he took on Heidegger. Thus his analytic challenge to Heidegger’s reflection on thinking and being, thinking and nothing, quite independently, as Carnap sovereignly ignored Heidegger’s context just as analytic philosophy has, with a perfectly good conscience about it, been doing ever since. Carnap ignored Heidegger’s reference to the origins of philosophy with Parmenides as this directed Plato and thus all the rest of us footnotes, as Whitehead regarded us. Heidegger sought to raise the question of Being, to think Being, as he put it, thereby appropriating Leibniz’s question: why are there any beings at all much rather than not being in the first place or at all, in order to ask after and thereby connecting the thought of nothing (i.e. no thing at all, no being at all) with the thought of being.
CB: And these kinds of questions were bordering upon nonsense to Carnap, Quine and the other logical positivists I suppose, since they were ‘straying into’ metaphysics which was the Vienna Circle’s bugbear...
BB: Nonsense does not say the half of it. Carnap zeroed in on the logical contradiction in the reifying move, that is: the object contradiction of treating the nothing as something (I note that Heidegger himself adverts to just this), whereby it is said of nothing that it is: or as Jimmy Olson, could say “Holy Parmenides!” Sartre, in an unsung effort to come to Heidegger’s aid, for which Heidegger who did notice this, was, predictably, ungrateful, wrote Being and Nothingness, which adumbrated how he, Sartre, with no little assistance from Simone de Beauvoir with whom he wrote the book (unless you ask the Fullbrooks and a number of other scholars who would tip the balance of contributing authorship in de Beauvoir’s favour – count one more for female philosophical minds!) would have proposed at least one answer to Carnap. For his part, Heidegger was deeply affected by Carnap’s attack as it highlighted what he regarded as a failure to hear his question as such (Being and Time, after all, is all about not hearing questions, in addition to not having posed them to begin with, there is also the problem of not being able to see that the questions he is talking about are questions, to which must be added the persistence of the habit of assuming that there are no questions to be asked in the first place.
CB: Very much an inheritance from Nietzsche, I would hazard.
BB: To be sure! As I am fond of pointing out, Nietzsche himself claims his special excellence to have been the asking of heretofore unconsidered, unasked questions. In fact, Nietzsche uses this philosophical habitus as it characterizes academics now and in his own day as the basis for one of his better jokes in what is for me the key to his philosophy of science, namely: our assumption that because we fail to perceive something we are justified in concluding that there is nothing, that there is nothing there at all, an assumption we make in perception, as empirically as we like, and an assumption — and this is where Nietzsche rightly ambitions to doubt more radically than Descartes and to take critique more critically than Kant — that also obtains on the level of the concept. We think that whatever exceeds our conceptual grasp exhausts the range of the possible. In my thinking on the philosophy of science I would bring Eugene Wigner and Nietzsche together right at this point, but unfortunately there is rather a great deal to say beforehand, so I leave it at that for the moment.
CB: Perhaps we should return to Heidegger... I’m curious to discover how this pans out.
BB: Well, Heidegger remained deeply affected, interested as he was in logic, having written a dissertation on logic and science (he remained, as I think it important to note, qualified to examine doctoral theses on both subjects throughout his university career) and I think his objections to what Carnap missed in his thinking, his questioning, illustrates the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. Continental philosophy uses all the resources of language and thinking and indeed experience, this is the life-world, this is the body, to think about the questions it raises.
CB: All of which is far too messy for the logically-grounded analytic approach!
BB: For the most part, analytic philosophy is interested in making claims. These are also effectively ‘answers.’ For the sake of the question as such, continental philosophy complicates matters. Thus, along with Nietzsche, from whom I do argue that Heidegger did borrow this a bit, it is Heidegger who teaches us how very difficult it is to question anything, especially as an academic, especially as a trained philosopher without immediately jumping ahead to what one supposes the answer to have to be, or even, as Nietzsche was terrible critically-minded in pointing out, to smuggle it in in advance with one’s initial definition and then triumphantly, all Jack Horner about it, to pull out the very thing one had inserted, insinuated, defined, stipulated at the start with the appropriately exultant noises of discovery.
The dialogue continues next week: Claiming the Continental Flag