Philosophy and Mystification: A Reflection on Nonsense and Clarity

309 Pages·1998·1.38 MB·English

by  Guy Robinson

Philosophy and mystification
Philosophy and Mystification is both a book of philosophy and a book
about philosophy. It is a reflection on the nature, methods and resources
of philosophic enquiry, one that is grounded in concretely discussed
central problems. The problems discussed are ones which have dogged
Western philosophy in the modern era: logical necessity, machine
intelligence, the relation of science and religion, determinism, skepticism,
as well as the search for foundations and origins that has so
characterized our time.
Guy Robinson argues that a conception of philosophy was adopted in
the Seventeenth Century which brought with it projects, goals and
methods that required us to see the world upside-down, creating abstract
and mystified entities to explain the ordinary and concrete, requiring us
to explain the social in terms of the individual, and the human and
purposive in terms of the mechanical, and not only to see nature as a
vast mechanism but science as a mechanical activity whose rules it was
the business of philosophers to discover.
Robinson has made an unusual alliance between Aristotle, Marx and
Wittgenstein in trying to re-focus our views on these problems and in
locating philosophy itself in a wider historical context. His thesis is that
the historical tasks of a revolutionary transition in Europe made the new
conceptions of philosophy, of nature and of humanity seem both natural
and necessary and hid from the philosophers the inversions and
incoherences involved. If we are to escape from the confusions and blind-
alleys we were led into then, we are going to have to go back not only to
question the agenda but to understand how the historical context made
that agenda seem both natural and necessary. The aim of Philosophy and
Mystification is to make a start on that project.
Guy Robinson was senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Southampton until his early retirement in 1982 and then research
professor at MIT and the University of Boston. He now lives and works
in Dublin.
Philosophy and mystification
A reflection on nonsense and clarity
Guy Robinson
London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 1998 Guy Robinson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN 0-203-98089-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-17851-7 (Print Edition)
Contents
Preface v
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Philosophy and mystification 1
1 Understanding nonsense 13
2 Following and formalization 39
3 Infinity 59
4 Miracles 75
5 How to tell your friends from machines 91
6 Nature and necessity 107
7 Skepticism about skepticism 127
8 Fool’s intelligence 145
9 Language and the society of others 161
10 Deus sive natura: science, nature, and ideology 175
11 On misunderstanding science 195
12 History and human nature 213
13 Newton, Euclid, and the foundation of geometry 237
14 Coda: philosophy and history 255
Notes 281
Index 295
Preface
The discussions that make up this book have a history going back almost
forty years, but it is a consequence of the view of philosophy they
embody that I have not found myself having seriously to revise or recant.
Their aim has been clarity of thought and vocabulary, and while this aim
always leaves a space for improvement, it does not have a place for the
notion of “being wrong” that goes with the activity of setting out
theories and doctrines.
Those discussions that have previously been published have therefore
been left more or less as they were and simply clarified where I could see
they needed it. They have also been left in the order of their first writing,
with the exception of chapter 1, not previously published, which
attempts an overview of the method, resources and the conception of
philosophy they exhibit.
I would like here to thank the editors and publishers of the following
journals for permission to use material from articles and symposium
papers for the following chapters: chapter 2, “Following and
Formalization,” Mind (1964); chapter 3, “Infinity,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. (1964); chapter 4, “Miracles,”
Ratio (1967); chapter 5, “How to Tell Your Friends from Machines,”
Mind (1972); chapter 6, “Nature and Necessity,” Royal Institute of
Philosophy Lectures (1974); chapter 7, “Skepticism about Skepticism,”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. (1977);
chapter 8, “Fool’s Intelligence,” Universities Quarterly (1982);
chapter 9, “Language and the Society of Others,” Philosophy (1992);
chapter 10, “Deus sive Natura, Science, Nature and Ideology,”
Philosophy (1993); chapter 11, “On Misunderstanding Science,”
International Journal of Philosophical Studies (1996).
Acknowledgements
Properly, acknowledgements should reach back to what Graham Greene
so beautifully describes as “that moment in childhood when a door
opens and lets the future in.” For me that was not so much a moment as
a period, the period of several years from the age of eight when my
father and I would walk a mile to the railway station in Douglaston,
Long Island, he to take the train to work in New York City, and I to go
in the opposite direction to school in Port Washington. During those
walks he would often explain scientific ideas to me and gave me a sense
of the physical world and how things worked. He was himself a
biochemist and as a graduate student had been asked by Frederick
Banting to be his assistant in the work of isolating and refining insulin.
Declining, he offered his roommate Charlie Best in his place.
Those talks gave me an interest and a sense of being at home in the
sciences that I have carried with me even though I never pursued that
interest. But it is something I have to acknowledge as part of my
philosophical formation.
Another important part of that formation was being introduced to
philosophy through Aristotle and not through Descartes. This gave me
an outsider’s perspective, one that will be evident throughout this book.
Lincoln Reis was the teacher who helped me to see Aristotle as a living
philosopher and not merely a historical figure whose ideas had to be
studied rather than used. But on the other hand, it was perhaps more
important that I came to see that Aristotle was not to be taken as an
ultimate authority whose words could save one thought. Those words,
or the words of any other, can only be starting points and suggestions to
be critically examined. If they are to have life and substance, one has to
think them for oneself and make them one’s own.
For another element I have to thank Elizabeth Anscombe, who
generously lent me the galley proofs of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the
Foundations of Mathematics in 1955 when I was struggling with the
problem of “the actual infinite” that was thought to be generated by
set theory and by Cantor’s “transfinite arithmetic.” In the further
vii
struggle to understand the Remarks and to bring it to bear on the
problem, I came to see the depth and the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s
criticism not only of Cantor and Russell, but of some of the deepest
currents in the philosophy of the modern era. Entry by that port helped
me avoid the canonical interpretation of the “private language” argument,
one that attempted to draw the sting of Wittgenstein’s criticism of the
individualistic assumptions of the modern era by making his argument
bear only against a language that “could not be taught to another.” I
have tried to set out my own versions of those criticisms in what follows.
To my late colleague A.R.Manser I owe the recognition of the
philosopher in Karl Marx. That philosopher is at times sketchy and only
suggestive, perhaps, but offers many insights if read sympathetically.
That influence will be seen also in some of the discussions following.
I have tried to repay my debt to the writing of T.S.Kuhn in chapter 11,
and since writing that chapter, and following his generous reaction to it,
I benefited much from discussion and correspondence with him, though I
am pretty sure that he would not have agreed with everything that I have
drawn from those discussions. His death left many issues unsettled.
From my old colleague Tony Palmer, I have had the incalculable
benefit of sharp criticism and a dogged opposition that forced me to
argue my corner and clarify my ideas. At the same time, when those
ideas had been clarified and objections met, he was generously able to
accept new ideas and a different point of view and to acknowledge that.
One could hardly ask for more.
From Bernard Harrison I have had a combination of support and
criticism that I can hardly overvalue. His criticisms have been valuable
and his support enthusiastic and practical.
Alasdair MacIntyre has been an enthusiastic and supportive reader
over many years and has given practical and critical help that I am more
than glad to acknowledge.
Robin Andersen has given a close and careful reading to some chapters
and has made criticisms that have been especially valuable in being made
from the point of view of a non-specialist. My son Guy Robinson has
been helpful in that way too.
Finally, from my wife, Bee Ring, a writer herself, I have had not just
support (that would be too passive a word) but rather, pushing to create
a single book out of the thought and the writing of a lifetime.
Guy Robinson
Dalkey, Dublin, 1997
viii
Introduction: Philosophy and mystification
There are two currents that run through this book, both of which set it in
opposition to a practice and conception of philosophy that can be traced
back to the seventeenth century and is exemplified most clearly in
Descartes. One current flows from the view that the business of
philosophy is not with some special kind of truth, such as Descartes
sought, a truth higher and more elusive than that found in the everyday
world, a truth requiring special techniques for its discovery. The contrary
view informing this book is that the object of philosophy ought to be
clarity and putting order into our thoughts and our ways of talking about
the everyday. These thoughts often enough get tangled when ways of
talking that have been developed in one area or field get transferred to
another, or come up against ways of talking devised for entirely different
subject matter and for different purposes. That view of philosophy and
the resources it can appeal to is discussed in chapter 1 and is exemplified
throughout the following treatments of particular tangles and confusions
endemic to the modern era.
But there is also, beyond this, a view about the source of the tangles
and confusions that have been characteristic of that era (which is our
era), their source in certain moves, certain assumptions and projects that
seemed natural and necessary to the philosophers of the seventeenth
century, seemed so for very good historical reasons. But good historical
reasons, as their name implies, have a shelf life, and in any case, while
they may be motivating, they are not compelling with the universal,
timeless and abstract force that philosophers generally set themselves to
pursue, and often think they have found. And this brings the discussion
into a deeper conflict with the self-image of philosophy that has been
particularly sharply drawn in the modern era, the image of it as the
pursuit of the absolute and the timeless and what is unconditioned by
circumstance and history.
One of the tasks on which I have tried to make a start is that of
identifying some of those false assumptions and mistaken projects that
initiated the modern era, while at the same time giving at least a sketch