Since it came up in the comments on the previous post, what about language requirements? My own view is that they're useless in Philosophy as a departmental requirement. To explain: students working on dissertations on, say, Aristotle, certainly need to acquire a serious command of Greek, whereas students working on, say, deflationism probably have no use for any foreign language at all (they'd be better off learning more logic). So students working on dissertations in areas which require work in foreign languages should be required to acquire them at the level appropriate for their work. But these are matters for a student's dissertation committee to decide. Foreign language competence should not be regarded as a requirement for advancing to the dissertation (or "prospectus") stage.
In other words, the old school line about how working knowledge of a foreign language is essential to doctorate-level research is bunk.
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This seems right. I suspect that in departments which still have language requirements, this is a holdover from a time when English wasn't the predominant language of philosophy in the way it is today. 50 years ago, someone in my position (a grad student working in logic and phil of math) would have to know at least German (and perhaps French and Polish), but now all of the major writings have been translated and a great deal of the new stuff coming out is in English.
It will be interesting to see whether language requirements become increasingly rare. My own department abolished its general language requirement a few years ago, although as Spiros suggests, dissertation committees can still require students to study a language if it's obviously necessary given the topic.
I wonder though whether one should know a foreign language just because one (as a philosopher) is also a scholar in the humanities and therefore should be able to venture outside of the intellectual circle created by your language. I'm a first year in a department with no language requirement and part of me (a very small part, that I'm sure would be killed off by the extra workload of actually learning another language) would like to learn German with some competence just so I can read those continental journals out of the anglo-analytic circle. But that might be of little worth to most philosophers; I'm just not sure.
Second anonymous: depends on what kind of philosophy you want to promote. Lots of folks just don't see contemporary philosophy - of the kind that tends to get published in the top journals - as in any significant way a part of the humanities. Yeah, would be nice to be able to participate in cross-disciplinary debates, but the humanities just isn't the focus here. There are other currents in philosophy which want to remain conntected to the humanities. As to being able to read a foreign language to see what's going on: first, be aware that more and more philosophers on the continent publish mainly in english. Second, if you really want to be able to read stuff in a foreign language, choose french. For an english speaker, getting enough french to read - though certainly not to talk, write, or even to understand speech - isn't demanding. I did it in 6 months.
There's also the issue of just what is being required. I recently applied, and there seemed to be three categories of school: those with no language requirement (more than half), those with a requirement that, from the information included on the program's website, would probably result in one's learning the required language (two or three), and the remainder, which had a requirement that seemed really unlikely to leave a student in a position to use the language without a great deal more training. Those schools seem to have dumbed-down their language requirement rather than eliminating it, probably as some sort of departmental or higher-level compromise. That seems really pointless.
One question here (and in the previous thread) is an essentially practical one, viz. how best to train students so that they are able to get jobs and do them. And it’s not obvious to me that this question will have a general answer: it will depend a lot on the specific situations and aims of particular departments and students. But there’s also the (essentially theoretical) question of what kind of training is most perspicuous for the inquiry itself, i.e., what methods are demanded by the nature of the object. And here it seems to me that Spiros’s suggestion (that only dissertation projects that engage with texts in a foreign language should necessitate learning that foreign language) seems reasonable. But I have a hard time imagining a line of inquiry in philosophy that wouldn’t involve some engagement with texts not written in English (though it’s perfectly possible that this is a deficiency in me and not in the facts of the matter). Spiros’s example of such a project is something on “deflationism,” but I would think that any serious work in logic would have to involve serious work with Aristotle (among other things), which would seem to shoehorn the student right back into Spiros’s other example of a project on Aristotle (which would require Greek).
In more general terms, I’m inclined to say that (1) if understanding a problem adequately (i.e., in a manner that meets the standards of scholarly rigor) involves understanding its history, (2) if the history of philosophical problems almost always leads, at least in part, to texts not written in English, and (3) if engaging adequately with a text requires reading it in its original language, then (4) it follows that virtually every dissertation project in philosophy will require knowledge of at least one language other than English (which in principle renders a department-wide requirement duplicative). The premise that seems most vulnerable to me in the above argument is (3): I think it’s right, but I’m not completely sure why—it might just be because I’m a literature scholar and so am trained to focus on precisely those aspects of meaning that get lost in translation or paraphrase. But philosophical discourse involves such subtle distinctions that it surely also involves the same careful attention to the minutiae of specific formulations, and hence involves engagement with texts at a level of grain where problems of translation will matter.
Of course graduate students are cranked through programs so swiftly these days that they probably just don’t have the time to learn the languages that were once par for the course (as Anon@4:52 suggests) in philosophy and elsewhere. So perhaps the practicalities have trumped the demands of rational inquiry here, which strikes me as a serious problem.
English jerk, it is simply false that anyone doing logic seriously today needs even a passing acquaintance with Aristotle. I am told by really good logicians that there is medieval stuff that anticipates some of the work in non-classical logic, but it only anticipates it: you can't actually learn anything new about non-classical logic by reading the scholastics.
There are two questions: do you need a historical background to do mainstream philosophy in the analytic tradition (outside history of philosophy). And the answer to that question is clearly no, not in M&E, or logic, or in most of moral philosophy. The other question, is this a good state of affairs, is one I won't try to answer.
If you dissent, give me an example. What would a logician learn from Aristotle (much less Aristotle in Greek) that she wouldn't already have got from her undergraduate training? To make the challenge fair, I will allow you to cast the net broadly, to include all of M&E.
The issue of primary sources in philosophy is a strange one. In many respects, recent philosophy has tried to emulate science, possibly to its detriment, but philosophical study beyond the beginning undergraduate level is still organized primarily around primary sources.
In science programs, it is not at all unusual to reach the advanced graduate level, or even beyond, without encountering a single primary source (other than notes prepared for a class, which is really just an informal sort of textbook). One then works with those sources because the information in them has not yet been processed into other forms, not because the text of those sources is particularly valued. And, if one happens to go back to older original scientific sources, one is generally struck by how difficult they are to understand. This shouldn't be surprising: it can take a long time to figure out the best ways of explaining something well.
But in philosophy the expectation is that people will work with the primary sources, even when there is almost universal agreement that they are written poorly (i.e. Kant). It seems to me that reading 3 or 4 differing but well written and self-consistent explanations of what a given philosopher said would be much more valuable than reading an original but confusing text. This can also have the effect of elevating writings that lack clarity above those that do, so that huge efforts are put into trying to determine the best interpretation of some text that may not have any better interpretation than those that have already been recorded.
A lot of this seems motivated by hero worship and ego: "Because Y is wonderful, and wrote X, X must really say something self-consistent and profound, however hard it is to read it that way. And who better to determine what X really says than me?" Well, probably the legions of people who have studied X extensively ... maybe we should put together a collection of their interpretations and read those.
I don't know that that's true, Neil. The following from the SEP entry on "Ancient Logic" is, I think, fairly accurate with respect to recent developments:
"During the rise of modern formal logic following Frege and Peirce, adherents of Traditional Logic (seen as the descendant of Aristotelian Logic) and the new mathematical logic tended to see one another as rivals, with incompatible notions of logic. More recent scholarship has often applied the very techniques of mathematical logic to Aristotle's theories, revealing (in the opinion of many) a number of similarities of approach and interest between Aristotle and modern logicians."
John Corcoran's "Aristotle's Natural Deduction System" is a classic example of the scholarship in question. Certainly he and others would take issue with your statement that "it is simply false that anyone doing logic seriously today needs even a passing acquaintance with Aristotle."
P.S. John Stuart Mill, as we know, learned Greek at the age of three and Latin at the age of eight. Now we think it useless for philosophers to learn either before the age of 30. I guess this means we have advanced far beyond the days of Mill!
Anonymous, this is well beyond my area of competence so I really can't be sure. But the passage you quote seems to me to say not that contemporary logicians can learn from Aristotle, but that there are "a number of similarities of approach and interest between Aristotle and modern logicians." Again, I could be wrong, but the fact that some logicians today describe themselves as Aristotelians doesn't suggest to me that they take themselves to learn from Aristotle. I assume it is a description: like Platonism in maths.
Neil:
You ask whether one “need[s] a historical background to do mainstream philosophy in the analytic tradition (outside history of philosophy).” Your answer is simply “No,” but I’d be curious to hear you explain your reasons in a bit more detail. For my part, allow me to use an even more pointed case than Aristotle to think about this question: Hegel. After all, the “analytic tradition” arose in part out of a reaction against Hegel (and against admirers like Bradley and Green), and one of the many things they reacted against in Hegel was the latter’s view that a very rigorous kind of history of philosophy was inseparable from the serious practice of philosophy. Russell and Moore (among others) repeatedly claimed that Hegel’s writings were just nonsense, and for many years Anglo-American philosophers were convinced by this both to dismiss Hegel and not to read him (hardly a laudable combination). But now, as I’m sure you know, people are actually bothering to read Hegel again and discovering that he has all sorts of relevant things to say to contemporary philosophy (Paul Franks’ book All or Nothing is a good example of this, and there are also people like Brandom who aren’t studying German Idealism but are clearly influenced by it). In fact, some of the best work on Hegel these days is coming out of the US.
This turn of events shouldn’t be terribly surprising since Russell’s opinions about Hegel were, to put it gently, extremely stupid. But how is one to know about this extremity of stupidity unless one bothers to read Hegel? Or to return to Aristotle: Call Aristotle’s conception of Logic P, and let’s simplify the history a bit and say that Russell’s conception of Logic, Q, arose out of a desire to deal with what he thought were the limitations of P. So Q was motivated by an argument against P, and Q has the shape it does because of the problems it is trying to solve (I assume that this is generally true). What does understanding Q involve? For an undergraduate, just Q itself might be sufficient (since the degree of Bachelor is just supposed to certify just that you have some acquaintance with a subject, whereas the degree of Magister certifies that you have mastery of a subject and the degree of Doctor certifies that you have both mastery of a subject and the authority to contribute new scholarship to the subject). But for doctoral level work on Q, you would need to understand the argument against P, wouldn’t you? And if you’re going to have a serious understanding of the argument against P, an understanding that would enable you to notice the weaknesses of the argument against P, surely you’d need to have a serious understanding of P. In other words, if the progress of philosophy is a sort of modus tollens, then its history appears (negated) in each of its premises.
Aw, English Jerk, they ask me what Aristotle said in ancient Greek. Makes me feel all needed 'n cared about. Like History of Philosophy people are special, too. *sobs*
729: Why is that philosophy again?
Some interesting assumptions in the post and in the comments here. One is that all interesting and important philosophical work is being done in English. Isn't it kind of hard to know whether or not this is the case if English is the only language that one can read? This attitude seems like the philosophical equivalent of the New Yorker so provincial that she thinks nothing of cultural worth can be going on to the west of the Hudson.
Also, quite apart from doing history of philosophy well (which does require knowledge of languages other than english) and which _is_ a way of doing philosophy, there is also the point that knowing how different languages work or how different cultures understand parts of the world (as this understanding is embedded in their languages) helps one to do certain kinds of philosophy better. For instance, it helps to eliminate those intuitions that are merely the product of language or culture.
EJ, you are assuming the question is my (2) - what should philosophy be like. My claim (though I have views on 2) is that in fact for most philosophers in the analytic tradition, it is not like this, It may be that Brandom's work was inspired by Hegel. I know people whose work was inspired by John le carre. It remains true that most of us do not need to read either. Analytic philosophy is problem oriented; someone works on, say, cardinality in possible worlds. To work on that, they need read nothing prior to Lewis (and the great majority of their reading will likely be less than 2 years old). It might be a good thing if philosophers had a synoptic view of their work, but they don't, as a rule,
729: Not to worry—everyone knows that ancient languages have magical powers. One day you will redeem them all, or utterly annihilate them, as you see fit.
Also, in Leiter’s “20 ‘Most Important’ Philosophers of All Time,” your chaps rock the top slots.
Neil: Okay, so what are your views on (2)? They don’t read Leibniz, but shouldn’t they?
EJ, I guess I think we should let a thousand flowers bloom. I think that the kind of philosophy I do doesn't require any significant acquaintance with history. It is detailed problem solving (to be clear; that's the kind of philosophy I do, not that I have solved any problems!), and the debates are responsive to what's going on in a lively technical literature. This is the view of philosophy that Jeff McMahan promoted, in the quotation Leiter picked out here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/mcmahan-on-the-healthy-state-of-analytic-philosophy.html
I think this kind of philosophy, which is often (as in my case) heavily interdisciplinary, with the cognate disciplines being in the sciences, is valuable and produces exciting work. I don't claim that it is the on;y kind of philosophy worth doing. Some questions require a broader view. If you want to know, say, what is the meaning of life, or what is a good society, rather than, say, what is modularity, then you need a broader view, and some history is going to be required.
I write as someone who has read Hegel and doesn't want to repeat the experience. Too much hard work; one has to allocate one's intellectual resources, and the many hours I spent on the Philosophy of Right could much more profitably - so far as I my work is concerned - have been spent on maths, or formal logic, or cognitive neuroscience. Other peope can reasonably choose other ways of allocating resources.
Duke now requires that people doing certain topics in philosophy now do course work in the relevant sciences - in neuroscience or evolutionary biology. They're promoting my kind of philosophy. One thing we lose in doing this kind of philosophy is the ability to engage with one another, since we share less and less across the discipline. But this cost seems worth it to me, given that we acquire new colleagues in the sciences.
Neil:
I’m definitely happy with disciplines including and supporting both very narrowly-defined, technical work and more broadly-defined, potentially accessible work (though “what is the meaning of life” is obviously going too far). My discipline has essentially renounced the former in favor of the latter, to my horror and grief. So I agree that you should stand your ground on that point. It helps that my own work crosses over into minimalist syntax, so we may have more problems in common than one might expect.
Still, to give the devil’s advocate his due: isn’t it possible that someone working on modularity might find something of value (i.e., a problem or solution they might not otherwise have noticed) in, say, Kant’s account of faculty psychology or even in Aristotle’s De anima? Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind strikes me as having interesting things to say about modularity, and his discussion of the history of 19C faculty psychology (and its perversion into phrenology) seems consequential for how his argument unfolds in that book. No doubt there is, as you say, a large body of technical literature that makes no reference to earlier treatments of the same or related questions, but why shouldn’t they be more like Fodor?
Also, a side note: Elements of the Philosophy of Right is one of the least significant works that Hegel never wrote. I would have thought, given what I take to be your interests, that The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic would have been more relevant. But it’s true enough that working with Hegel demands an enormous amount of work and permits no shortcuts (though, unlike Kant, Hegel is actually easier to read in German).
EJ, you seem committed to claiming that scientists would be better off having a stronger grasp of the history of their discipline. I'm with Kuhn on this one: it would not only be unnecessary, but actually harmful inasmuch as one wants the young scientist to develop the physical intuitions of the contemporary debate.
I tried the phenomenology. I got as far as about p. 3. Life is much too short. As a matter of fact, I might as well not have read elements: I can't remember a word of it,
I enjoyed your comment, 2:43. It reminded me of an Ivy League trained logic professor I had in graduate school. He simply wouldn't believe a student who told him that classical Chinese didn't have a word to express the existential or copulative senses of our word "is" (it's true, you can look it up). His life's work was premised on the universality of the "is" experience or something. I think there would be less of a tendency to mistake features of English for features of all reality if, well, one knew more languages than just English. And I say the stranger the language, the better it serves this purpose. Don't wimp out and just learn French!
I'm puzzled by the lack of consideration in this thread about the possibility of reading texts in translation. Granted, there can sometimes be issues in translation (especially with, e.g., Aristotle, where the original texts have a variety of textual issues that a translation can't really capture).
But somebody working in, say, political philosophy can get insights into issues in that field by reading translations of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, etc. without reading the texts in the original languages. A person specializing in Hegel will, of course, need to know German quite well, but I don't see why this shouldn't be a matter that can be determined by a dissertation committee, as the original post suggests.
Lucky for me that I don't make any claims about the universality of existential is. It has struck me in the past that it is odd the number of monolingual philosophers of language. I'm neither monolingual nor a philosopher of language.
Neil: Yes, I think that “scientists would be better off having a stronger grasp of the history of their discipline.” I’m with Popper on this one: “I do not even go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science. For it cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas which have obstructed the advance of science there have been others—such as speculative atomism—which have aided it” (LSD 16). I gather that he has in mind Democritus or Lucretius, who turned out to have some useful ideas after all.
Anon@12:13:
That’s a very sensible question (see also Anon@9:24 above). My reasoning would run like this: Our claims to truth require us to have a more precise, rather than a less precise understanding of issues in our area of inquiry. Having a precise understanding of a philosopher’s views involves paying close attention to how exactly they formulate their claims. This can only be done if you’re looking at the original text, not a paraphrase in another language, which inevitably brings quite different resources to bear (particularly at the level of lexical semantics). In other words, the nature of the inquiry involves maximally rigorous engagements with the relevant texts, which entails learning the languages. Of course, as I said above, graduate programs are not well-designed for the realization of this ideal (there just isn’t time), but this seems to me to be a defect in graduate programs, not a defect in the ideal. You can probably get away with reading Plato or Hegel in translation, but wouldn’t you read them in the original if you had the time to learn the languages?
As a stopgap, I think someone should publish a series of major philosophical texts with interlinear translations, or at least with the original on a facing page (like the excellent Wilkinson & Willoughby edition of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters).
A late contribution -- better than never, I hope.
Even if EJ is right that reading Hegel or Aristotle may prove fruitful for those working contemporary problems in analytic philosophy, becoming sufficiently fluent in ancient Greek or 19th century German for reading original texts rather than translations to be of value seems a low payoff strategy.
"It has struck me in the past that it is odd the number of monolingual philosophers of language."
Agreed!
Thanks for the comments. A thought: Even if one concedes English Jerk's point, it still seems to me that departmental language requirements are silly. The level of command required to advance or participated in the scholarly debate regarding translation of some texts goes far beyond what a PhD Program in Philosophy can require at the departmental level. Forcing students to acquire "reading knowledge" of some foreign language as a part of their pre-ABD curriculum is a waste of time: some students don't need the language at all, and those that do need more than "reading knowledge." Maybe it's time to simply abandon the idea that dissertation-level work necessarily requires foreign-language work?
Hi, how can I contact you?
I want to start, a list of philosophy BLOGS. A small presentation of the thing, a library or address book. But one question I don't know is, how to contact people through blogs, I'm not familiar with this medium.
If time permits, I want you to make a post here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/
It will get stickied and start a list of philosophy blogs. You could write a small intro too, like "Here is a index and library of PHILOSOPHY blogs ...."
Already an index of BBS is here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/the-community-of-ephilosophers-philosophy-bbs-sites-t9.htm
Kind regards,
- Niki
Hi, how can I contact you?
I want to start, a list of philosophy BLOGS. A small presentation of the thing, a library or address book. But one question I don't know is, how to contact people through blogs, I'm not familiar with this medium.
If time permits, I want you to make a post here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/
It will get stickied and start a list of philosophy blogs. You could write a small intro too, like "Here is a index and library of PHILOSOPHY blogs ...."
Already an index of BBS is here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/the-community-of-ephilosophers-philosophy-bbs-sites-t9.htm
Kind regards,
- Niki
Natalia,
Hi. Sorry-- there's no way to contact me outside of this blog (its anonymous). You may feel free to link to what's here.
Hegel easier to read in German? I'd disagree with that!
In any event, my PhD was on Hegel and I certainly thought it right that I studied German as well. However, I agree that such matters -- e.g., whether a PhD candidate should study a foreign language or undertake any particular study in or outside philosophy -- should be a decision for his/her committee.
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