[Wittrs] Parfit, Analytic Philosophy & Giants

[Han Geurdes]

Sean what do you mean by:  such monism is the fundamentalist disease of the
human mind of our present times.... ?

On 18 August 2011 07:52, Han Geurdes <han.geurdes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Sean,
>
> I can understand the emotion of the '... then my life was wasted on X'. But
> after some thought this wasted life cannot be something philosophical.
>
> If the analytic philosophy stands in the tradition of science the only
> thing one can conclude  is that '... when A is refuted by Q and P is feeling
> sad about that because Hyp(P): A=true, then P at its least has spared his
> fellow analytic philosophers {U,V,W,....} to research along P's lines'. That
> is of the greatest value in science so why not in philosophy that wants to
> work like a science.
>
> If P researches in e.g. comparative biochemistry the hypothesis that
> retroposons in rRNA producing rDNA do only occur 100nt upstream of an AGA
> sequence in rDNA of Drosophila melanogaster but it turns out that ribosomal
> RNA is repaired *after* it is created with polymerase III from rDNA. But
> again not for all animal species, e.g. in the ribosomes in Drosophila but in
> the cytoplasm when looking at e.g. Xenopus, then a new scientific and damned
> important fact is established in the chemical evolution of the animal. No
> biochemist or comparative zoologist would call that a waste of a lifelong
> research. Mind you it is even unknown how rRNA is transported to the
> cytoplasm so the refutation of inter-ribosomal splicing of rRNA in all
> animal species gives a wealth  new hypothesis from one's refuted research.
> Furthermore perhaps some other clever researcher can draw conclusions about
> the role of retroposons in cancer.
>
> Analytic philosophers should then really act as scientists and not like
> magisters hiding in a pile of dwarfs.
>
> Best
> Han
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 17 August 2011 20:02, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>  Link:
>> http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/on-wasted-philosophic-livesparfits-fanaticism.html#
>>
>>  On wasted philosophic lives...Parfit's fanaticism
>>  Analytic philosophy was self-consciously founded a) against the great
>> man approach to philosophy [let's call that "the magisterial approach"], and
>> accepting, by contrast, b) the division of intellectual labor, such that c)
>> philosophy is a collective enterprise. The rhetoric that accompanied these
>> moves appealed to success of the sciences. (I have labeled this "Newton's
>> Challenge to philosophy" <http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/658906>.) Now
>> one self-conscious byproduct of this approach is that from (some baseline)
>> progress is *possible*. As in the sciences, even refutations and lack of
>> confirmation can facilitate progress. Everybody's efforts matter. Hence, the
>> journal article replaced the lengthy monograph as the favored form of
>> communication. If size matters, Derek Parfit is no analytic philosopher.
>> Joking aside, Mark Schroeder's very interesting, even moving NDPR review<http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25393-on-what-matters-volumes-1-and-/> of
>> Parfit's super-sized *On What Matters*, calls attention to a peculiar
>> affectation of Parfit: "in more than one place [Parfit] tells us that if one
>> of the competitors to his metaethical theory turns out to be correct, then
>> his life 'has been wasted.'" Sure enough, checking inside his book on
>> Amazon, I find Parfit writing, "If naturalism were true, Sidgwick, Ross, and
>> I would have wasted much of our lives." (vol. 2, 12; see also p. 367). More
>> astonishingly, Parfit puts such a claim also in the mouth of Sidgwick (vol
>> 2, 303-304). The thought that there is no philosophic value (pure waste) in
>> failure is deeply antagonistic toward the whole spirit of analytic
>> philosophy. (Incidentally, Schroeder clearly indicates the importance of
>> progress to Parfit's way of thinking.)
>> But what to make of the claim that if somebody's philosophic pilgrimage
>> was ultimately wrong, misguided, or (worse) merely foolish, does it follow
>> that s/he has also "wasted much" of his/her life? Certainly as an empirical
>> question this can only be settled by further facts, such as, was one a good
>> citizen, parent, child, lover, friend, or even mountain-climber (etc). All
>> these ways of not wasting one's life are compatible with being a foolish
>> philosopher. (Some involve non trivial opportunity costs, of course.)
>> According to Wikipedia, Parfit is nearly my dad's age, so he must have a
>> reasonable sense of how he managed (allow me a strange way of talking) the
>> time of his life. Perhaps, we might say (and not just those of us who have
>> read Aristotle or Montaigne), that if concern about wasting one's life is
>> sensible, one should not place one's bets on only one worthy activity
>> (allowing for the sake of argument, that philosophy is such an activity).
>>  Now, it's true that if one does not reach a mountain peak, then a climb
>> has failed; perhaps one might even consider such a climb wasted. (I use this
>> example because Parfit embraces (according to Schroeder) "the thesis that
>> moral progress is possible. At the culmination of volume 1, Parfit writes:
>> “It has been widely believed that there are such deep disagreements between
>> Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists. That, I have argued, is
>> not true. These people are climbing the mountain on different sides.” (vol.
>> 1, 419)") Clearly Parfit thinks those of us in moral philosophy should be
>> climbing HIS mountain. But this idea (that one's life is wasted if one
>> happens to be climbing the wrong mountain) is evidence of a certain kind of
>> fanaticism (however, well argued). Not only does Parfit embrace moral
>> monism, he embraces *human monism* (for him--Parfit may be more tolerant
>> toward others). Some might agree with Parfit that aiming for the right
>> moral-theoretical target is what's necessary for worthy living, but I wonder
>> if even these will all agree that it is sufficient. For, how much of one's
>> life must remain *unexamined* if one climbs a mountain and while mapping
>> it, one IS PUSHING others along it! Either way, such human monism is a form
>> of fundamentalism in thought that is the disease of our times.
>>
>
>
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