Another Leiter Travesty Pt. II

I am quite unnerved by this recent tirade, but let's be fair to a man that labels, yet rejects being labeled himself. First, let us be concise about the definition of Party Line Continentalsm (PLC).

Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him).

Is the nature of philosophy fixed by one author, or methodology? Is CP? I wasn't aware that PLC was fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology nor its French reception. But let's be fair to what he thinks Good philosophy is. Good philosophy is well-composed prose, good reasoning and a decent understanding of the history of philosophy. All these things are beyond PLCers. As Leiter puts it,

their command of the history of European philosophy after Kant is often quite weak and idiosyncratic...
Party Line Continentalists are very exercised about the fact that there are philosophical scholars of the Continental traditions who treat the figures of post-Kantian European philosophy as philosophers, without reading them through the lens and the methods of Heidegger and/or post-structuralism. Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists (Deleuze is an exception) were not, however, very good scholars or philosophical expositors, so it is not surprising that those with real training in philosophy and its history would not read the great figures of the Continental traditions in accord with the Party Line.

I think the use of the term PLC vs. Scholars of the Continental tradition is a misnomer first of all. There is more diversity between all the work I have ever encountered. Of course, we cannot assume my experience typical, but the anecdotal experience here is in part what carries evidence for Leiter's conclusions about philosophy as a whole. Leiter picks up the self-identification of the ostracized from the very philosophical orthodoxy historically that smushed all these thinkers and traditions together in the first place. Only "real philosophers" appear as the group I mention. Then, Leiter accuses Continentals of banding together when they were initially just thrown to the wind in the time of dominant analytic philosophy. However, this is not my gripe, just an unfair time slice of the exclusion as it stands now. It's a separate and independent issue whether or not this ostracizing is still active by what PLCers call "Analytics."

And again, it's not the party line, nor is it anyone's line per se. Anyone that has ever been to SPEP or even the Heidegger meeting at the Pacific APA knows there are as many different versions of Heidegger and Derrida than an official line. Such a generalization betrays the exact content and variety of scholarship within “Continental philosophy.” Of course, Leiter would have to take seriously the journals Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy Today and Research in Phenomenology and the New Yearbook of Phenomenology as sources of top ranked journals since many of these authors are truly scholars of various thinkers, not PLC in whole. In fact, I know of many Husserlians that have started picking up on certain problematics such as Zahavi in cognitive science, or how I situate my work as trying to discern structures of moral experience by appropriating Husserl as a way to enter metaethical problems. But, I digress. There never was a PLC, but then again, there were many people interested in Heidegger and Derrida's problematic with the metaphysical tradition. Let me make my second point.

The point is that PLCers (even though there are really noPLCers) were never bad expositors if one understood what their gripe was WITH THE TRADITION as a whole. They spoke in the same OVERALL tone that Putnam mentioned when he uttered that “Meaning ain't in the head” or Gauthier calls for a solution to the “crisis of morality” ushering in such an ambiguous phraseology to call for a solution to moral foundations as the result of moral bargaining. It's just for these thinkers (Derrida and Heideggger) the history of Western philosophy is one huge conceptual scheme in the very same way that semantic and representational content were encountered historically in the whole of metaphysics for Putnam and the history of ethics is encountered for Gauthier.

Given that one can conclude generalities about the history of Western philosophy, then such generalizations or trend-observations can stand in for decent understanding of history, as long as they lead to a clear problematic. Given that Heidegger and Derrida consider the history of Western metaphysics as uncritically accepting of presence from the Greek onwards, then it is not that they are bad expositors of history; it is Leiter and the rest of the Anglophonic world that are bad at recognizing what it is and how they are encountering the conceptual scheme of Western metaphysics. Being insular for one party is directly connected to the inability for others to even want to listen. We should be mindful of that. I will concede, however, that the predecessors were better at expressing the criticism of Western metaphysics than Heidegger or Derrida.

For these Anglophones, it all comes down to clear writing. Of course, if you were to read my paper on Stevenson's emotivism, you would think that I was an "analytic." If you read my Husserl & Derrida seminar paper, you would see me oscillating between historical clarity and the alleged obscurantism since the very critique of metaphysics/Husserl involves many locutions of Derrida, as well as the attempt to make sense of them. It's not that PLCers are bad at philosophy; it's that Anglophones pretend that the prose they write can be understood by a decently educated man in general which is as much a fiction as the ideal observer in consequential theories. However, this type of clarity in their projects was as never true as they wanted to it to be when analytic philosophy held its domination. Clarity is a matter of degrees. Just read Grice's proposal about meaning, or Davidson. You'll get levels of clarity depending on how convoluted the problem and its historical dimension. Thus, you can see my problem with the want of exclusion entirely as he says it,

I am genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments, where lack of real depth in philosophy and its history does not matter. If, in addition, some of the unfortunate "fads" in Anglophone philosophy--and the trivial intellectual parochialism that often accompanies them--do not intervene, then we may really enter a period of philosophical scholarship in the Anglophone world in which "analytic" and "Continental" as terms of partisan battle are largely uintelligible to those drawn to the problems of philosophy.

Not only does this speak to a generous spirit to the humanities, but the biased assumption of science-philosophy relation over the humanities. How is it that English departments lack real depth? I recall Nussbaum's fascinating point about the role of literature in moral thinking and the transformative dimension we have from our encountering literature and art at large.

I have a problem with anyone that starts off with faulty assumptions. First, that Heidegger and Derrida are bad expositors and bad historians of philosophy given that such generalizing can come in the same Anglophonic tendency to stand in relation to history (I'm not just repeating this, I have reasons for thinking this, e.g. the argument of analogy contained herein with David Gauthier and Hilary Putnam). Next, these trends carried on in their predecessors not as bad scholarship and philosophy. Instead, they are like projects picked up just in the analytic tradition. Consider the term "cottage industry." Every student of analytic philosophy is aware of those papers that have spurned cottage industries of papers, and some of my favorite works of analytic philosophy come from these papers, like Bernard Williams "Internal and External Reasons" or "Moral Luck." PLCers are interested in problems, but want to see them articulating in the textual history, not abstracted into logic.

Finally, the dominant trend to see philosophy as only problems that transcend their historical significance is itself a presupposition that needs defense, and itself an uncritically held belief by many philosophers. In essence, you don't get that for free, Mr. Leiter. In philosophy, none of us get our assumptions and starting premises free. That's the point, and uncharitable point you miss completely. Don't get me wrong. I think Derrida misses the point of Husserl's complexity the more I read Voice and Phenomenon, and Violence and Metaphysics. Moreover, I see Husserl as an interlocutor to expose the shortcomings of Heidegger. I would just rather expose and treat them fairly as taking up problems within the context of the history they encountered and makes my ability to understand them possible.

Derrida Abstract

I know some of you have asked informally when I was going to post something about the Husserl and Derrida Seminar. I finally have a brief sense of the argument I will advance. Of course, this, like everything I do, is under a constant state of revision. Here's the current form:

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the sign is not undermined by the co-contamination of expression or indication. Instead, they co-operate at nuanced levels in which expression is the “solitary of the soul” and indication is the level in which such expression requires an articulation to the mediated Other. In fact, we can reinscribe this motif of the distinction back into the entire overall ambition of Husserlian phenomenology. Such a reinscription will allow me to agree in part with Derrida that this distinction does inaugurate phenomenology, but the call of contamination of the sign is too quick. In La Voix et La Phénomène, Derrida confuses too quickly expression and indication as blurred contaminated senses, yet the essential distinction is an attempt to phenomenologically describe an experience that's content can only be articulated after it is undergone. I find this to be the aim of the Fifth Meditation. As such, I instantiate my claim in how we should take Fifth Meditation in CM as both an expression of the phenomenologist articulating how the other is given to me and simultaneously CM as expressing “in living speech also function” as indicating the content of this description to others.

SIU Phenomenology Research Center

I usually don't post things about my host institution, preferring to keep separate my blog life from my school. However, this news should be known by others.

SIU now has a dedicated center researching phenomenological work. It is VERY EXCITING to me since the bulk of my work is in phenomenology. There are only a handful of centers dedicated to phenomenology, and we are well positioned to have relationships with these few centers as well, including Dan Zahavi's Centre for Subjectivity Research.

We'll be hosting our phenomenology workshop finally in the new center! Moreover, we will be active, and even have Francoise Dastur over in late April.

Our website is now up, and is a work in progress.

This new resource strengthens my ability to apply phenomenology to areas of value inquiry, and moral phenomenology in general.

With the Phenomenology Center, and Dewey Center, we are very well-positioned to advance the fields of American philosophy and phenomenology respectively.

Health Care Debate

So, the Teabagging movement and these Congressmen were involved speaking at a rally with this sign in the back of the podium. The sign reads: National Socialist Health Care, Germany, 1945 with a picture of heaped bodies of Holocaust victims.

Michele Bachmann:

Washington Office
107 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2331
Fax: (202) 225-6475

John Boehner:

Washington, D.C. Office
1011 Longworth H.O.B.
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-6205
Fax: (202) 225-0704 Toll-free number

Eric Cantor:

329 Cannon Building
Washington, DC 20515
P: 202.225-2815
F: 202.225-0011

Jeb Hensarling
129 CHOB
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-3484


I called these offices. One of Cantor's interns or staff (it was unclear which it was) couldn't even tell me what Dachau was, and the same held for Hensarling's intern/staff member. She simply put me on hold and wished me away. Bachmann and Boehner's offices both repeated the same thing--they were not responsible for a rally of 10,000. I said that is also slightly misleading. We can associate with whom we choose. Our ethical associations have bearing on our character and practical identity. We can choose to be in the company of people, and that doesn't really remove the fact that the sign is distasteful and the Conservative opposition to health care is resorting to uncritical rhetoric and symbolism. It makes me sick.

If there are sensible Republicans "out there" that have substantial criticism, then they are being lost in the shuffle of stupidity with which these people are choosing to enact their opposition with equating Obama to Hitler, appropriating genocide in awfully erroneous and disanalogous ways, and ambiguous word toting like "freedom."

Nietzsche As Naturalist: Discussing Leiter's Nietzsche

There are some interesting threads worked out in B. Leiter's paper available on the the Social Science Research Network, Nietzsche's Naturalism Reconsidered and while we may not see eye to eye on many things, I have been having similar thoughts about Husserl given my exposure to the proprioception literature in Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind, and his call for a neurophenomenology. For me, it seems that Husserl's critique of the natural attitude is a critique of strong naturalism:

Strong Naturalism (SN): All events require physical explanation.

If all events require physical explanation, then the laws of logic must be physically based, and the move to psychology to explain the rules of logic is the very source of the psychologism Husserl defends against.

Weak Naturalism (WN): All events require explanation, but not all explanations need to be physical (some can be simply descriptive like phenomenological descriptions)

I digress.

I am particularly interested in Leiter's paper as a good example of scholarship on Nietzsche despite some skepticism of poster's in another thread that Leiter is a hack Nietzsche scholar. Being skeptical about the PGR is a separate issue from his view of "naturalizing Nietzsche" So, given that my audience has always been MORE Continental, I thought that we should look to the arguments presented in the most clear concise writing I know of Leiter, and propose where he goes wrong (if he does).

For me, this is a wonderfully written piece where the argument is very clear. My exact skepticism falls on method here. I'm skeptical that every piece of Nietzsche's corpus can be unified under one single authored motivation. Philosophical exegesis sometimes tries to unify disparate elements into one single guiding thread for interpretation--sometimes this seems to quick, other times too slow. This is often done in hard cases like Aristotle in which the Metaphysics resist easy unification of theme since we cannot account for how the author's mind regarded the place of the various inconsistencies (where did Aristotle change his mind?). The same may be said of how particular some of the texts in Nietzsche's corpus seem to be.

However, let's give Leiter his due despite people emailing me that we shouldn't. If you don't think that Nietzsche can be naturalized, then argue for the claim. As I said, I'm sympathetic that there are degrees of rejecting naturalism that doesn't admit of reading Husserl as a full-blown anti-naturalist. There could be many shades of naturalism, even open for Nietzsche.

Right now, I'm wondering about distinction between a therapeutic and speculatively naturalist reading of Nietzsche. Can such a distinction hold?

Taking Up History as the Decisive Universal Moment

Meaning for Husserl is the result of a transcendental realm accessible by suspending our worldly relation. Heideggerians, instead, think that we cannot circumvent the historical situation we find ourselves. From their viewpoint, Husserlian phenomenology is a turning away from the concrete historical world. Thus, perhaps, if anyone thinks that Heidegger contributes to our understanding of philosophy, it is in showing that the descriptive efforts of philosophy are essentially bound up with the history it takes up.

This same Heideggerian tendency to see philosophical problems embedded in a horizon of intelligibility that proceeds from our relation to history produces a view that amounts to a historicism. Philosophical problems only make sense given we can still speak and make sense of the very history in which we find ourselves. However, I want to argue against this view. For me, this is only one layer of the problem, and is distinct from asking if what a philosopher has said is true. Moreover, this also explains a key difference between styles of doing philosophy (and perhaps why Husserlians are alone on this). In truth, we need both, but the dynamic of doing philosophy doesn't bear on the problem that we can still carry on as if history does not matter. I don't think this is just some philosophers being dismissive about history; it speaks to our abilities to philosophize on our own in our own historical situation.

So, in this brief post, if we can still carry on as if we do not require history, then I want to ask is it a product of our historical situation that we can abstract from history? Perhaps, the pressing question I want to ponder is what is it about our historical situation that makes it possible to carry on in anglophone philosophy as if history doesn't matter as much as asking whether or not what a philosopher says matters to us?

I don't think there is any easy answer to these questions. But, I have an inclination as to where to start. First, the fact that Anglophone philosophy has largely been a project of centralizing the epistemological subject in a variety of problems is on track. In centralizing the epistemological task, philosophers make philosophy about both our historic situation as knowers and establishing formalistic criteria that transcend the very history we find ourselves. We can identify those structures of subjectivity in a variety of contexts, but we must see it is these objective conditions that establish our ability to make sense of meaning. Therefore, we might want to consider that identifying the epistemic conditions of our knowing stand over and above the historical situation. However, such a move is replete with problems.

My second move is to address that though we have access to what the subject qua epistemologist is, such a subject needs grounding in the history of its occurrence. It doesn't make sense not to make history a level of analysis. As Gadamer shows, we are beholden to history since it is the very possibility of making sense of what is handed down in tradition, yet that doesn't mean that we are bound to that history since we take it up. We take up history and that is the moment we can see that there is something universal, something transcendent in that we can speak about our ability to take up history. In this way, we can see that a universal subjectivity does come into our concrete experience, it is just that if you stand on one side of doing philosophy than the other, you miss both dimensions to philosophy. That's an oversight on both our parts.

Another Leiter Travesty

Leiter has remarkably come to the defense of a hack job book on Heidegger by Carlin Romano indirectly. See the post here.

But that does stop his rumination about Heidegger scholars, what I take it to be meant by cult:

There is also something interesting to be written about the ways in which the Heidegger cult and its temporal and cultural kin, the Strauss cult, have operated in similar, quasi-fascistic, "in group" vs. "out group" ways: esoteric terminology, hostility towards dialectic engagement, worship of the master, and so on.

Heidegger doesn't engage in dialectical argument because for him, the purpose of philosophy is to describe human facticity. He is teasing out phenomenological descriptions of human existence. Maybe that is, in itself, an argument---yet in so doing, philosophy is not a description of some problem abstracted from history. It occurs within an ontotheology. In this way, it is resistant to the very positivism that carries Leiter's naturalistic Nietzsche (of course, I would argue something like that someday)! This is not some weird obscurantism if people were honestly going to give him an honest reading, know the background of the philosophy that gives birth to Heidegger, i.e. Husserl, know his contemporaries like Natorp, the background of Dilthey, and see him as completing (by Heidegger's self-estimation) the shortcoming of Husserl's phenomenology. When you know all of that, Heidegger is up to something whether or not one agrees with its status in the history of phenomenology, or philosophy at large.

Moreover, understanding the context of Heideggerian phenomenology in its beginning allows one to encounter why Heidegger moves to poetry. In fact, the language Heidegger adopts is provocative; it has a purpose beyond the lens put to language in any analytic framework. But again, one would have to understand the under-currents of Rilke, Holderlin, Heidegger's rejection of some central themes of the metaphysics of presence and the attempt to implement phenomenology as reasons for why Heidegger requires/uses language the way he does.

The charitability of Leiter's lapse is as charitable as a Protestant Minister's characterizing Leiter's work on moral psychology and Nietzsche. Just because Heidegger and those influenced by his philosophy look like something from the outside doesn't mean they are that way. This is a separate issue from whether or not Continental philosophers and supporters of Heidegger in general have done a good job of talking to outsiders. However, the outsiders must be willing to listen, and one good way might be to honestly represent Continental philosophy schools that are marginalized. And, I might add, have great scholars in phenomenology working on Heidegger! But this problem is more complicated than just than the professional dimension.

Leiter also displays some ignorance of the status of this debate. Consider the following,

"Faye's leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden ("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit." OK, so how do these "reactionary ideas" about exaltation of "the state and the Volk" figure in the main themes of Being and Time? I have no idea...

Since Leiter finds the argument from one phrase of Romano on Faye somewhat "interesting", let's look at the above. First, this theme has already been taken up by a number of skeptics and critics. The big book, Mr. Leiter is Victor Farias' Heidegger and Nazism. So, now you have some "idea"; you're only about twenty years too late in your ignorance (It was published in 1987 by Temple University Press).

Really... Oh yes, he does Continental philosophy lady and gentleman. Lest we forget. Now, I know he is nice to me when he says, "The ideas that Heidegger's books should be banned and that anyone who studies Heidegger is a Nazi sympathizer are so ludicrously offensive as to defy belief." I take that as nice, and what he might mean by generous. But seriously, you have to listen to people, like myself, who engage in this stuff before characterizing us from the outside. At least, he goes to Thomson and Carman as good philosophers working on phenomenology. At least, we should respect him that far. Yet, the spirits of his comments are redolent of generosity cloud in the intolerance we Continental Philosophers (Aspiring or Established) find ourselves.

Moral Philosophy for the Masses

This just goes to show how relevant ethics is, and how unlike other areas of philosophy, moral philosophy is just germane to one's life. Michael Sandel, a moral philosopher at Harvard, is publicizing his course (allegedly the most popular at Harvard) "Justice" to local PBS stations in Boston. Here's the article off the NY Times website.

TV episodes can be gleaned from the website of Michael Sandel here.

Women in Philosophy: A Question for You?

While I have revealed a new love of Irigaray and that I am in a Continental Feminism Survey Seminar, this post should not be seen as connected to these recent motivations (or maybe it should since I have found a love of how Continental Feminists have appropriated and successively demonstrated a research project in Continental philosophy). Apparently, one of those mass-consumption philosophy periodicals have published an article on women in philosophy in general. Here's one of the interviewees blog entry about her interview, and the recent debacle with the NY Times.

My question to many here is given the dearth of women (for whatever reason or variety of reasons), is it right to teach with this sensitivity in the back of one's mind? Should I actively try and recruit talented women students into the major given the dearth of women in general? Would it be more responsible of me to actively recruit women students given that I have some working knowledge prior to recruitment of the reason or reasons why women are not in philosophy to begin with?

Assume for a moment a possible world in which philosophy actively discriminates against women (which might be very possible, I admit) and I recruit students into the philosophy profession (it should be clear this is hypothetical and not associated with my home institution), convincing a few to pursue graduate study. In so doing, it is possible I have done some form of intellectual violence to them. No? Shouldn't the causes of women aren't in philosophy first be identified so that my talented women students can have this information to see if they truly want to go into philosophy, or is recruitment itself a way to lessen whatever forces are at work keeping away women in philosophy?

What do you think?