Why Does Philosophy Have a History?, Michael Rosen

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Michael Rosen. Unlike other disciplines, the history of philosophy does not involve the accumulation of knowledge or the resolution of problems. But why?

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Good evening, everybody. Thank you all very much for coming, and if it's not too late for that sort of thing, a very happy new year. Welcome to the first lecture of 2026, continuing the centenary series of London lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Our speaker this evening, I'm very pleased to say, is Michael Rosen. Michael is the Joseph S. Clarke Professor of Government at Harvard University. Prior to his appointment at Harvard, he held various other academic posts, including at UCL and as a Fellow of Lincoln College in Oxford. He's also the editor of many books and sorry, the author and editor of many books and collections, including Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, Onvoluntary Servitude, and most recently The Shadow of God. Those of you who like the parlor game of trying to classify philosophers into analytic or continental will have trouble with this particular case. But Michael brings to all his work a very vivid sense of the history of the subject, and so who better to have with us this evening addressing the question why does philosophy have a history? Michael.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Good evening, everybody. And thank you indeed for being with us in this wretched weather. I mean it's not wretched, it's wretched weather, so perhaps there weren't too many other temptations, but I do realise that this is London and uh there are there are many, many other things that one might be doing uh on a night like this. Um I want to say a few words uh in particular praise and gratitude towards the Royal Institute of Philosophy, but I think I'm going to save that uh for the end of my remarks because what I have to say will I hope make more sense to you then than it does now. So I many years ago I went to a lecture by the Belgian philosopher, many of you will know, Philippe van Parisch. And Philippe said that there are two sorts of people who go to lectures, those who only remember the jokes and those who only remember the diagrams. Now I've got to apologize that I don't have that many jokes, and I don't have any diagrams, but I do have some pictures. So I hope you'll enjoy the pictures. And with that, also, as you can see, I have a written text. I'll occasionally look at you as though I'm making this up and to try and give you the idea that this is spontaneous, but uh it's not so. In the preface to the critique of pure reason, Kant claims that his critical philosophy, of which that was the first instalment, is going to complete the history of metaphysics. He says, metaphysics on the view which we're adopting is the only one of all the sciences which dare promise that through a small but concentrated effort it will attain, and this in a short time, such completion as will leave no task to our successors save that of adapting it in a didactic manner according to their own preferences without their being able to add anything systematically to its content. In other words, he, Kant, is bringing philosophy to an end. But, he says, in making this bold assertion, he's doing no more than what any philosopher has to do. And as he explains at the beginning of the Metaphysics of Morals, anyone who announces a system of philosophy as his own work says in effect that before this philosophy there was none at all. For if he were willing to admit that there had been another and a true one, there'd then be two different and true philosophies on the same subject, which is self-contradictory. If, therefore, the critical philosophy calls itself a philosophy before which there had as yet been no philosophy at all, it does no more than has been done, will be done, and indeed must be done by anyone who draws up a philosophy on his own plan. So Kant says, I'm bringing philosophy to the end, but also I'm beginning philosophy. Well, so for Kant philosophy falls into just two periods. The past, which he says is a cycle of delusion and despair oscillating between dogmatism and skepticism, and the present, when philosophy is both restarted and brought, in all essential respects, to its conclusion. The image reminds one of an oriental fairy tale. One system after another is rejected until finally a humble suitor from provincial East Prussia arrives with a key that unlocks the heart of the fair Princess Sophia, after which metaphysics presumably becomes established as science, as wissenschaft, and all live happily ever after. Now, in Hegel's sarcastic retelling, however, the narrative is a bit more gory. The only achievement of each succeeding system is to have put its predecessor to the sword. The whole of the history of philosophy becomes a battlefield covered with the bones of the dead. It is a kingdom not merely formed of dead and lifeless individuals, but of refuted and spiritually dead systems, since each has killed and buried the other. Now, I don't need to tell you, I think, that Hegel, no less than Kant, thinks that the history of philosophy reaches its conclusion in his own system. The difference is that for Hegel, the history of philosophy itself is rational, because as it unfolds through time, the different past philosophies can be seen to represent partial perspectives that, when brought together, reveal the structure of the one true system, which is, of course, Hegel's own. But just imagine. What if this is a lottery where there's no golden ticket? And neither Kant nor Hegel has succeeded in bringing philosophy to an end. Are philosophers trapped then in this bloody gladiatorial arena whose pointlessness is apparent to everyone but themselves? It's not at all surprising that Marx should have rejected the idea that philosophy has any kind of a rational history. He writes, morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness have no history, no development. But men developing their material production and their material intercourse alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and their products of their thinking. So philosophy is doomed to failure, according to Marx, because its entire project rests on a fundamental illusion, the illusion that ideas are autonomous. Hence, so far from being the science, the wissenschaft, that the idealist philosophers claimed it to be, philosophy is, says Marx, nothing more than religion brought into thought and developed in thought. It is, like religion, ideological, a mere shadow of real history, and it is to be condemned as, I quote, another form and mode of existence of the alienation of human nature. Now, in a somewhat cruel but often cruelest ones of the funniest, quip, the Harvard philosopher W. V. O. Quine is supposed to have said that two sorts of people are drawn to the study of philosophy. Those interested in the history of philosophy and those interested in philosophy. Oh, there is a joke. Well, it's Quine's joke. Yeah. Yes, laugh while you can because I can assure you there aren't that many to come. Yet, as we can see, the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical problem. In fact, I think it's one of the very deepest problems in philosophy, for it challenges the very idea that philosophy is rational. So can that challenge be met? What sort of a history does philosophy have? And what sort of a history ought it to have? Now, clearly, the idea of a system played a decisive role in the little story I told so far. As Kant describes it, the purpose of a philosophical system is to unify human knowledge and demonstrate that it's complete in its structure by showing that it's rooted in a common principle. By a system, he says, I understand the unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea. This idea is the concept provided by reason of the form of a whole, insofar as the concept determines a priori not only the scope of the manifold content, but also the positions which the parts occupy living relative to one another. It is thus like an animal body, the growth of which is not by the addition of a new member, but by the rendering of each member without change of proportion stronger and more effective for its purposes. So, slightly convoluted Kantian sentence, but the basic idea is that systems are things that have an internal kind of unity that holds them together. And that, as you can see from the picture, is not an original thought of Kant. So philosophical systems are mutually exclusive, or so Kant argues, because considered objectively, there can only be one human reason, so there cannot be many philosophies. In other words, there can only be one true system of philosophy from principles. Each is going to be mutually exclusive. And Kant's successes in Germany, Reinhold, Fichter, Schelling, Hegel, were all in agreement with Kant about the need for a philosophical system. Anyone who doubts how central the idea of system is for Hegel need only look at the title page of the phenomenology of spirit, which he calls the system of the science's first part, the phenomenology of spirit, or note the forceful statement that he makes in the preface. He says, the true form in which truth exists can only be its scientific system. So for Kant, this means that the previous history of philosophy is, in effect, no more than a history of error. For Hegel, the history of systems is itself systematic and can be displayed as part of the one true system, the system of systems, as it were. Now, although the German idealists all believed that true philosophy is, as they called it, Wissenschaft, a science, they didn't claim that it's objective knowledge in exactly the same way as mathematics and the empirical sciences. On the contrary, or so they thought, if philosophy was going to play its foundational role for human knowledge as a whole, it had to be distinct from the particular sciences. Nevertheless, that attempt to give knowledge, unity, and completeness in a system rested upon certain beliefs about scientific knowledge. So those of you who've read Kant will know that for Kant, mathematical science of nature is the model of objective knowledge. And that leads him to one of the two central problems of his theoretical philosophy. How can it be that mathematics, which is necessary and a priori, can apply to empirical reality, which is something we know from experience? And Kant's solution notoriously is based upon a very static picture of science. Euclidean geometry describes the structure of space and time once and for all. And on that basis, Kant proclaims his intention to complement his critique of pure reason with what he referred to as a metaphysics of nature, a quote, system of pure speculative reason to act as a bridge between philosophy and physics. Now, surprisingly, Hegel, in whose philosophy ideas about progress, development, and radical conceptual change play such a great role, actually has a rather similar view of the empirical sciences. According to Hegel, progress in the natural sciences is for the most part cumulative. And once established, the fundamental discoveries of science are not subject to revision. The non-philosophical sciences are, he says, unhistorical. And indeed, Hegel too gives Euclid's geometry as an example of such a once and for all discovery. Now, in fact, even in Hegel's own lifetime, mathematicians were starting to explore geometries that didn't accept Euclid's parallel postulate. But those were treated as mathematical curiosities. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that Einstein came up with the sensational discovery that these geometries, not Euclid's, best explained the structure of the observed universe. Where Kant had believed that Euclidean geometry was demonstrably true a priori and necessarily applicable to the physical world, philosophers now had to accept not just that it was not necessarily true, but it wasn't true of the world at all. After Einstein, any account of science, it seems, has to accept that science will change in ways that can't be anticipated. Now, to trace all of the effects that this had on philosophy would be a vast project beyond my capacities either in time this evening or indeed knowledge. But it clearly has devastating implications for the idea of a philosophy as a closed system, as the idealists understood it. So, where does that leave the history of philosophy? Moving away from the goal of once and for all systems that will show the unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea may make philosophy less vulnerable to scientific change, yet the question what sort of history philosophy can have still remains open. Now, the late 19th and early 20th century, of course, saw the birth of analytical philosophy with the work of Freger, Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. And while the radical character of analytical philosophy's break with the past of philosophy is widely accepted, it's less often noticed that the same period was also one of fundamental change among those continental philosophers who didn't take part in the analytical revolution. What the new different new streams of thought had in common was, I think, a determination that philosophy shouldn't find itself caught out once again by developments in science. But that determination pointed in opposite directions. On the one side were positivists, pragmatists, and radical empiricists, for whom the task of philosophy would be to ally itself as closely as possible with the developing sciences, mapping their structure and defending them from the invasions of metaphysics, without presuming to prescribe particular forms of explanation or accounts of the basic entities involved. On the other, and Husserl's phenomenology in the German-speaking world is perhaps the clearest example, but I could also mention Bergson in France, there were those philosophers who looked not to ally themselves with the sciences, but for a distinctive object domain for philosophy that was going to be investigated independently of the natural sciences. In that way it might also escape from the threatening implications of changes in science. And one consequence of that period, one that I think hasn't been sufficiently noticed by many, is that it also affected the way in which philosophers saw their own past, particularly the way in which people understood German idealism. So perhaps ironically, one of the slogans of the day in the early 20th century in Germany was back to Kant. But although the initial impulse behind German Neo-Kantianism was to counter various materialistic philosophies then current, the Neocantians also reinterpreted Kant in ways that were, they hoped, going to leave him much less vulnerable to the criticism that his philosophy was dependent on a now refuted view of logic and science. So it's actually to the Neo-Kantians of the early 20th century, rather than Kant himself, that we owe the widespread image of Kant as a pioneer of epistemology, Kentnistheorie in German, and scientific methodology, Wissenschaftstheorie, whose turn to experience, as attributed to Kant, was opposed to metaphysics. So if you actually just look at the titles of Kant's works and the number of times he uses the word metaphysics, the idea of Kant as an opponent of metaphysics rather than someone who thinks that he's doing metaphysics in a way that's better than it had been done before is very unlikely. But we can understand it as a way of trying to rehabilitate Kant against the reproach that he is caught in a once and for all view of philosophy and science. And this re envisioning of Kant had a lot of effects on the history of philosophy and the way it was understood. Among them was to drive a wedge between Kant and Hegel. So something that's quite familiar in the history of philosophy is that Kant is represented as a protagonist of transcendental philosophy as opposed to Hegel's speculative metaphysics. And that contrast is actually very familiar in the secondary literature on German idealism today, and I think as a matter of historical interpretation. Is largely misguided. At any rate, the philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th century who founded analytical philosophy were very reluctant to situate themselves historically. And when they did, it was in relation to philosophers of the day like F. H. Bradley or Hermann Lotzer, who now, I think, seem quite remote to most of us. But their common idea was that analytical philosophy represented a revolutionary break with the past. And that reminds one, surely, of Kant's claim to have started philosophy anew. Well, one obvious difficulty is that the founding fathers of analytical philosophy didn't agree with one another about what this new philosophy ought to be. Frege himself was most fundamentally interested in, as it would turn out to be, unsuccessful project of reducing mathematics to logic. Bertrand Russell was a committed anti-holist whose revolt into pluralism, as he called it, enabled him, or so he thought, to return to a kind of realism that the idealist philosophy of which he'd grown up had made impossible. He was a believer in the metaphysics of F. H. Bradley, a great admirer of Bradley, and as he tells it, Frager's logic made it possible for him to escape from its prism. The logical positives, on the other hand, were verificationists, out to separate science from metaphysics once and for all. And so on. So these different conceptions of philosophy, these different projects, make it quite unlikely that we're dealing with a revolution in which everyone agrees about what the new task of philosophy is. On the contrary, a cynical observer, that's me, might think that in their lack of attention to history, the analytical philosophers were following the cartoon logic of Weil E. Coyote, who, as you remember, ran over cliffs and continued to make progress only because he didn't think to look down, or in their case, back. At any rate, the idea that in remarking the boundaries between philosophy and science, the proper object of philosophy had been revealed, and that made systematic philosophy possible wasn't confined to analytical philosophy. On the continent, Husserl's project of transcendental philosophy as what he called a strenger Wissenschaft, a rigorous science, was the clearest example. But others drew the opposite conclusion. If philosophy and science are different in principle, then one shouldn't expect philosophy to make progress in the same way that science does. Indeed, one shouldn't expect it to be a science at all. And Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed that I thought very vividly in one of his Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s. He said, as these are collected from notes, science builds a house with bricks which once laid are not touched again. Philosophy tidies a room and so has to handle things many times. The essence of its procedure is that it starts with a mess. We don't mind being hazy so long as the haze gradually clears. So this is, if you like, a kind of Sisyphean picture of philosophy. Or one can't help thinking it's kind of like an Edwardian nursery. The children come out and play every day, and at the at bedtime the nurse has to kind of put all the toys away, ready for them to do the same thing the next day. But isn't it conceivable at least that the rationality of philosophy rests on the fact that it actually makes progress over time? Now, to outsiders, the suggestion might be hard to take seriously. Isn't it evident that philosophers are still battling away over issues that are not exactly the same, at least very, very similar to the ones that divided the Greeks? What greater contrast with the sciences could there be? Yet, if philosophy is continuous with the sciences, or if it's actually a part of them, then perhaps it shares in their progress, developing the best possible theory of thought and language, just as physics develops the best possible theory of the natural world. And that is the position of Quine, with its radical fusion of logical positivism and pragmatism. He writes, philosophy lies at the abstract and theoretical end of science. Science in the broadest sense is a continuum that stretches from history and engineering at one extreme to philosophy and pure mathematics at the other. Well, it follows at least from this conception that philosophy has to be purged of the great majority of its old questions. In fact, Quine only allows two kinds of philosophical question. He says there are the ontological questions, as they might be called, general questions about what sorts of things there are, as well as what it means to exist, for there to be something, and there are the predicative questions, questions about what sorts of things can meaningfully be asked about what there is. Epistemology would be included in the latter. Now, I can easily see the appeal of the idea that the best way to respond to the embarrassment of the Einsteinian Revolution is to leave the sciences to govern themselves. That, as a slogan of the 1920s in the Soviet Union had it, science is its own philosophy. Yet the idea that disputes about a discipline's subject matter and its methods will have been resolved once and for all once it becomes a science, or as in the case of politics, when it adds the word science to its departmental nameplate and calls itself political science, is surely at odds with the evidence. Because questions of explanatory norms and standards persist within the sciences and would be sciences, whether they're taken to be part of philosophy or not. As an example, I give you the philosopher Jonathan Glover, who in his book on the nature of mental disorder notes how powerful practitioners of psychiatry and psychology impulses are to dismiss philosophy. Nevertheless, he writes, it depends on not asking questions that matter. It's the vision held by people living in a city with buildings so solid that they forget that they are in an earthquake zone. So I'm left then with three images of philosophical history, each of which is open to an obvious objection. One, that modern philosophy exists on the side of a revolutionary philosophical breakthrough. But why then has there been so little agreement about those who claim to live on this side about what exactly that breakthrough amounted to? The second is that the history of philosophy is a history of progress. But why then is that not more apparent? And the third is that philosophy is Sisophean, it has to keep tidying the same room. But why are we condemned to go on making the same mistakes? Can't we learn from the past? Now, each of these are conceptions of the place of philosophy in history, but they're not by themselves historical conceptions of philosophy. And another response of the developments of the 20th century has been to embrace philosophy's historical character. I'm going to talk a little bit now about Hans Georg Gardamer. It's an absolutely I knew Gardemer personally, and uh that's exactly how he looked very frequently. So Hans-Georg Gardemer's truth and method, Wahrheit and Methoder, was originally published in 1960. It's an extended historical account of the idea of interpretation as it has been thought about and practiced in mainly German philosophy and historical studies since Kant. The philosopher Ernst Tuggenhart remarked in his review of the English translation in the Times Literary Supplement that Gardimer might well have called the book Truth Against Method, because Gardimer's argument is indeed largely negative, documenting the failures of psychologistic accounts of language and thought. But it's also intended to point to a positive alternative. As he writes, the following investigation starts with the resistance within modern Wissenschaft against the claim, the universal claim of scientific method. It is concerned to seek that experience of truth that transcends the sphere of the control of scientific method wherever it is to be found and to inquire into its legitimacy. And it's this experience of truth that the book is supposed to reveal to us. So underlying it is a philosophical claim about language. Language cannot, Gardimer claims, be assimilated to a purely logical mathematical model. It remains necessarily immune to logicist and psychologistic attempts to develop naturalistic accounts of it. And what they neglect, Gardimer claims, is the dimension of interpretation, which works not by the application of deductive logic, but through the use of a power of judgment whose operation can't be formalized. It's the vitality and creativity of language that lies at the heart of the Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, and gives them their distinctive value. So Gardemer, like Husserl and Heidegger before him, continues the sharp separation between philosophy and the natural sciences, that, as Weddick explained earlier, became such a marked feature of continental philosophy at the turn of the 20th century. Where Husserl contrasted the genetic questions of the sciences, as he called them, with the transcendental ones of phenomenological philosophy, and Heidegger distinguished the ontic questions of the sciences from the ontological ones of his philosophy. Gardemer draws the line as one between explanation and interpretation, with truth, understanding that as deep and significant revelation, being reserved for the latter. And that's the consequence of the romantic idealist conception of language whose origins and distinctiveness truth and method traces so lengthenly and painstakingly. The sharp distinction between mathematics and the natural sciences on the other hand, on the one hand, and the Geisteswissenschaften on the other, leads to a view of philosophy as essentially interpretive. So for Gardemer, the goal of philosophy isn't proof, which is the goal of mathematics, or discovery, the goal of the empirical sciences, but persuasion. And Gardemer, like Hegel, sees philosophy as a kind of exercise in self-understanding, a kind of recollection and bringing to consciousness of something that we're already acquainted with, but without Hegel's assumption that that process has been or could ever be brought to a point of completion. So the history of philosophy is philosophy for Gardemer and must be tested by the standards of interpretation. So the method of truth and method is reflexive. How else to defend a historical interpretive conception of philosophical argument than by presenting a historical narrative that exemplifies it? Now the general outlines of the overarching narrative that Gardamer gives to support his story is quite familiar. It's the story of a culture based on the natural sciences coming to universal domination. And the Gardamirian approach frames the whole of Western philosophy within a single historical cultural problem. How have language, life, and meaning become eroded? And what, if anything, can be done about it? Either we live in a world in which the advancing forces of causal empirical explanation will occupy every redoubt, or we have to declare some central area of human life immune and rally to its defense. Now, clearly, this is a picture that many find appealing, even liberating. And you can find similar accounts in Heidegger, Gardiner was Heidegger's student and assistent, and in many other authors under Heidegger's influence. Some obvious examples include Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Charles Taylor, my own much-admired teacher. But it's also got to be said that a very different historical narrative is also well known, one that on the face of it might be thought to be just as persuasive. So, starting in the 17th century, the vast expansion of scientific knowledge has sent religion and religiously inspired worldviews into retreat. Miracles and sundry divine, or indeed satanic, interventions in the natural order have been banished. Would-be scientific claims based on revelations, such as the biblical creation narrative, have been exposed to all reasonable people as no more than picturesque myths, and so on. In the course of this, each successive wave of discovery has forced the defenders of religion and religiously inspired worldviews to withdraw. Like King Canute's courtiers, they've set up their throne on the beach, but have moved it back as the tide advanced. For the German idealists and romantics, while the advance of the sciences might have eliminated teleological and holistic explanations from physics, there is no chance of their extending this to organic nature. There will, as Kant unhappily remarked, never be a Newton of a blade of grass. Yet, as we know, this position too had to be abandoned. So now those who want to defend the uniqueness of human beings have entrenched themselves behind the claim that language contains an experience of truth that will remain forever immune to the methods of the sciences. But while one can admit that psychology and linguistics haven't yet given us a complete account of mind and language, they do be able, they are able to claim to have made such progress, particularly the way in which the use of LLMs has transformed our ability to model language, to make it overwhelmingly likely that at some point in the future, with the help of neuroscience and perhaps artificial intelligence, this redoubt too will have to be abandoned. Well, Gardemer is often compared with Wittgenstein. Certainly, both philosophers emphasize the connection between meaning and social practice and believe that philosophy should challenge the ways in which that's become fixed and reified. But there are also some fundamental differences. One very famous point in the philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein writes about a view that he's criticizing that, I quote, a picture held us captive, one that we could not get outside because it lay in our language. Slightly less famous, though, is the next section in which Wittgenstein gives his response, his remedy to that challenge. And what he says is we must return to ordinary language. We bring words back again from their metaphysical to their everyday use. Now, whatever you think of Wittgenstein's idea that the everyday use of language is an effective kind of therapy for people suffering from the disease of metaphysics, and you can probably tell that it's not something that impresses me greatly, it does point sharply away from history. Because for Wittgenstein, our language as it is now contains all the resources we need. And there's no reason to believe that past uses of language, especially not the past uses of language made by past philosophers, were any less metaphysical than present-day ones. For Gardamer, on the other hand, philosophically oriented historical narratives aim to persuade by showing the force of ways of seeing the world that have been dismissed or covered over by currently dominant perspectives. Now, I think it must be said, perhaps it's already obvious, that Gardemer's picture of history, like that of his teacher Heidegger, is profoundly conservative. His assumption is that the past understandings that history reveals have a depth and authenticity that modern ones lack. And in this I disagree with him. To my mind, it's an open question whether modern ideas are inherently inferior to pre-modern ones. Gardimer's appeal for me is not in his claim that the past was deep and authentic while the present is shallow and superficial. But the way in which he allows us to understand philosophy as historically embedded while at the same time rational. And that's because his conception of rationality is persuasive and contextual rather than demonstrative and absolute. Still, if Gardemer believes what guides philosophy isn't deductive logic, but a power of judgment, Urteilskraft in German, you remember Kant's third critique is called the critique of judgment, the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Something that can't be formalized, what place would there be for argument in philosophy? Now, for Gardemer, the ineliminability of imagery and metaphor from philosophy confirms. That philosophy lies with rhetoric and persuasion on the side of a watershed separating it from mathematics and the natural sciences. Now I agree that philosophy is indeed full of images, analogies, and models, but I don't think that makes philosophy into poetry. When a philosopher asks us to think that the world as we see it is like the play of shadows on the back of a cave lit by an unseen fire, or when another philosopher, in this case Kant, asks whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge, they aren't offering poetic imagery, but urging us to reconfigure the way we think about reality. And that is, I think, philosophical imagination. Philosophical imagination is the challenge to look at things differently. The metaphors and analogies we find in philosophy function as, in Daniel Dennett's phrase, intuition pumps. And this, in my opinion, the use of that elusive word intuition notwithstanding, isn't a form of access to truth that's beyond explicit reason giving argument, but a distinctive and important form of argument itself. So one author who defended a conception of philosophy very similar to this, in which argument and imagination go together, but didn't assimilate it to literature, was the émigre Austrian philosopher exiled in Oxford, well, I mean, who found a place in exile in Oxford, Friedrich Weissmann, in a famous, once famous article, How I See Philosophy. He explains that in his view, there's more to philosophical argument than the clarification of terms, the exploration of logical connections, and the discovery of inconsistencies through counterexample, important though each of them is. Beyond that, he says, there is vision. As he writes, at the heart of any philosophy worth the name is vision. And it's from there that it springs and takes its visible shape. When I say vision, I mean it. I do not want to romanticize. Now, in my opinion, there's much that we can learn from Weismann. And here, looking at our chair, I bring my remarks to a close, but not to a conclusion. On the contrary, what I've been trying to do this evening is to open questions, not resolve them. But I do want to offer you one or two final thoughts. Writing the history of philosophy, like writing any kind of history, has to delimit the boundaries of its object. Yet, as historians know, that's seldom easy or innocent. One point of history is to explore the ways in which the boundaries of objects as we know them have changed. And why? Yet, to do that, we must have some background against which the object in question can be depicted. And in the case of philosophy, this is actually almost impossibly difficult. Because the history of philosophy is a history of contestation on all levels. Contestation both about philosophy's methods and its subject matter. And indeed, the very word philosophy has been applied so diversely that at times philosopher has meant little more than someone engaged in the inquiry about the nature of reality. So, how can the history of philosophy be written at all? One way would be simply to project backwards our modern idea of what philosophy is, and to write the history of philosophy as the pre-history of the present. But to do that would be to miss what I think is its chief value. For it's not as if we, the contemporary philosophical community, however, whoever, whomever that might be, are agreed about what philosophy is. On the contrary, the confidence of the founders of analytical philosophy notwithstanding, we are contending about its methods and subject matter today just as much as ever. Just as we can interrogate past understandings of particular concepts to help us reflect upon which versions we are now prepared to endorse, exactly the same applies to philosophy as a whole. To see how others understood the subject can illuminate how we ourselves are going to approach it. And now, moving from, well, I think much of my talk has been assertion, but now to candid assertion, I see it as useful to make a distinction between what I call a broad and a narrow sense of philosophy. In one of his conversations with his amanuensis Eckerman, Goethe says that philosophy can only give us forms of life, Lebensformen, and ways of coming to terms with the world. And that I think captures a broad and continuing motivation for philosophy. Philosophy is about how we can come to terms with the world, our own finitude, and the fact of suffering notwithstanding. And that places philosophy, of course, continuous with religion. And it's a question, of course, how far philosophy can take the place of religion, how far it must ally itself with religion, and in what way, if not religiously, it can fulfill, if at all, the task of reconciling us with the world. Perhaps it can't reconcile us, perhaps it shouldn't reconcile us. Perhaps the most it can do is explain to us the distance between a world that is worth living in and the world that we do live in. All of those things, I think, belong to this broader conception of philosophy. And to this broader conception of philosophy, there's a very much broader conception of who philosophers are. Everyone, it seems to me, who has made an original contribution to this issue of how we should see the world, including very much writers, artists, poets, political agents, can be counted as part of this debate. But within it there's also a more narrow conception of philosophy, one which of course also goes back to Plato, namely the idea of philosophy as being an attempt to come to terms with the world rationally. So a good friend of mine claims, claimed for many years, that he was once on a bus with the proverbial two ladies. And one said to the other, don't think about it, dear, that's my philosophy. And one can see that in the first case, perhaps that is a response to the way in which the world is. But in a narrower sense, in the Platonic sense, philosophy is committed to rational reflection, even allowing for the fact that exactly what makes reflection rational and what the standards are that it needs to apply is a matter of controversy. So part of that is, of course, philosophies of philosophical skepticism. A skepticism that it's possible to reach rational conclusions about the important questions that we find ourselves facing. So it's this broad and this narrow conception of philosophy that I think we can find within at least the Western tradition. And that brings me finally to what I want to say in appreciation of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Now, as I'm sure you know, the Royal Institute of Philosophy was set up in order to extend philosophy beyond the boundaries of the Academy to which it had increasingly been confined. And I think that is an absolutely admirable thing. Once upon a time, David Hume described himself as an ambassador from the courts of learning to those of conversation. What a wonderful, wonderful thing to be. But I think speaking now as someone, well, I'm not a philosopher in one sense these days. My salary is paid by a department of politics. And that's one way in which, of course, one resists the impulse to be inward-looking. I think philosophy, when it is abstracted away from all forms of rational dispute, becomes superficial. And yet when it solely concentrates on looking inwards, it risks becoming sterile. And so, while I think it's a very good thing, I hope for those of you who are not part of the Academy to have this contact with philosophy. I only hope that I have what I've had to say makes some kind of sense despite the professional defamation of being overfamiliar with these matters. I also think it's immensely good for philosophers to be forced, sometimes against our inclinations, to present ideas to people who are not fellow professionals. And in that way, I think the Royal Institute of Philosophy has done a tremendous job in helping to keep us, to keep the activity of philosophy alive and vigorous. So thank you all.

SPEAKER_02 55:03

So going right back to the beginning of the talk, Kant and his ahistorical conception of philosophy, I mean one thing, if you wanted to sort of challenge Kant on this, you might say he was very, very confident that he had about what constitutes the canon of philosophical questions. Might there not be a philosophical question that he just forgot to ask? And so consistently with his view that you can't have two true philosophies because that would be self-contradictory, somebody else later coming to ask something that was simply complementary to Kant's because he thought that, you know, there were the questions of ethics, metaphysics, logic, etc. And there was some particular bit of philosophical questioning he just overlooked.

SPEAKER_03 56:01

Well, I'll answer in his name.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Go on.

SPEAKER_03 56:05

He thinks that the in the end, what sets the boundaries of philosophy is human reason. And because there's only one human reason. So now obviously human reason can be applied in lots of areas that presumably he hadn't thought of. Though I must say, when you look at the breathtaking scope of what he wrote about, it's kind of hard to think. I mean, there are many things that he wrote about in ways which we now find superficial or indeed repellent, but uh you know it's very hard to think of things that he didn't have any thoughts about at all. But even those things that were, you know, that perhaps have come on the scene since are ones that he might easily say were downstream from the basic structures of what he was looking at.

SPEAKER_02 56:58

I see.

SPEAKER_03 56:58

All right.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

Well, thank you, Emmanuel. Now on the Sisyphian conception of philosophy, rolling the stone up the hill and the Wittgensteinian, that you know, we all have to start, every generation has to do the same work over again because the nanny tidies the room and then the kids mess it up all over again. I mean, couldn't you sort of justify that conception of philosophy on the basis that even if philosophy itself has no history, history wraps its questions up in different guises. So we are not very good at learning from the answers that previous generations have given to them.

SPEAKER_03 57:44

Well, that is an interesting, but I if I may say so, non-Wittgensteinian uh way of putting it. Because Wittgenstein thought that we could always come back to ordinary language, and that it was only because we got distant from that. Now, someone could say, well, yes, we we aren't learning from history because we're looking at history in a presentist way. Um, and that is what the Germans call very vividly, but not always very helpfully, the hermeneutic circle. Simply, if you're going to interpret something, you've got to use uh your own interpretive uh apparatus to start with. And I think that is certainly inescapable, yes.

SPEAKER_02 58:41

Okay, thank you. Last question. I I was cheering you on when you quoted Weismann and the idea that philosophy has to have a vision and finding inconsistencies in arguments can't be the whole thing. But given your approval of uh Goethe, for example, a little bit later in the talk, how how strongly do you really want to insist on the difference between the philosophical and the poetic imagination?

SPEAKER_03 59:13

You told me at the beginning that I should be succinct in my answers to you so that people would have time to come in. You've asked the question which is actually quite hard to answer succinctly, because there is how different is the philosophical imagination from the poetic imagination, and how far, how different is the philosophical imagination from a certain conception of the poetic imagination, one which is very much embedded in people, in the in basically speaking, romantic and idealist conceptions of poetry. Gardamer's but going right back to Coleridge, I don't know if anyone has read Coelid's biographia literaria, but Coleridge makes a different distinction between imagination and fancy. And imagination for Coleridge is a kind of holding together of otherwise diverse things in a way that can't be made explicit and articulated. So it's you know very spery explicitly a way of getting above and beyond mundane forms of reasoning. And I wonder how far that idealistic picture of poetry is an actual, is an accurate picture of poetry. But I think it's that picture of the poetic as a kind of ideal transcendence of anything that's merely associative, that's merely uh imagistic. Uh that the the so as I say, we'd have to talk about this for a lot longer to see how plausible that is, but just in a very sketchy way, I think my answer is it's opposed to that romantic idealist conception of what poetry is or what poetic imagination is.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

Very nice answer, thank you. Over to you. Uh yes, gentlemen with glasses, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:22

Can you please um enumerate the number of ways in which you've used the word metaphysical in your talk? Um I right in thinking you've used it in more than one way, but I may be wrong in that. Can you simply uh list the ways in which you've used that term in your talk?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:42

Well, I don't have total recall for everything that's said in the talk, but I do I think uh one of the things we have to understand is that the word metaphysics is often used as a kind of pejorative. So um, and several people that I've been referring to, not not myself using it, but as it were, people I've been quoting, have been trying to separate what they do as philosophers from metaphysics. So there's a way of writing the history of philosophy as being about people uh contrasting themselves with metaphysicians. And I could spend quite a long time talking about the history of the word metaphysics, which I suspect might be confusing, but I don't know if everyone knows this, but the word comes into in in in as a label for a book of uh of Aristotle's, and it simply the bit that comes after the physics. So the idea that there's something distinctively different about metaphysics, but it goes through different morphologies. So philosophy, again, as we know, often came to mean very much just a comprehensive view of the world. So Descartes talks about philosophy and it's going all the way from the sciences upwards, and he talks about metaphysics as being part of philosophy, and it almost looks like in to our modern view uh that what he means by metaphysics is philosophy in the modern sense, and then everything else, the physics and medicine and things like that, are all uh elsewhere. So I think that uh in terms of you know, if you are accusing me of being inconsistent, I'm I I I I plead in my defense that I'm as it were trying to be helpful, and I think the best way to understand it is that um well one of the points I want to make is that Kant, as an opponent of metaphysics, is a modern artifact. I mean, this is the guy who wrote the metaphysical foundations of natural science, prologometer to any future metaphysics, um, you know, the metaphysics of morals, I'm probably forgetting others, but you know, those are titles of his books. So this was not a guy who thought that uh metaphysics was uh something to be avoided at all costs. But the so the the the thing that I that I want to bring out is that metaphysics becomes this pejorative both for positivists in the 20th century, as the sort of thing that philosophy has to separate itself from, for Wittgenstein, who was sort of close to the logical positivist but never was that, uh, but also for um continental philosophers, neocantians, and particularly also Heidegger, all of whom uh had a particular idea of metaphysics and used it as a kind of polemical term.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:58

Okay, I hope that's not just opening more cans of worms.

unknown 1:05:03

No, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:04

All right, so we've got one there, Lesby, and then uh on the other side of the aisle.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:11

Yeah, so this is um, I mean, I'm a great fan of Kant, as I think you are, and um you in your conclusion you were talking about a narrower view of philosophy and a broader view of philosophy. And I think didn't Kant in a way get there with his distinction between constitutive and reflexive judgments? That's in the in the in the third critique, which I will think is the most important of his three critiques, but uh other people wouldn't agree with me. But the um So constitutive judgments are about uh what is actually as it were the case in the world and reflexive judgments come from our our need as human beings to see pattern and purpose in the world. And and so we we might project harmony into the world. And this then takes us from philosophy closer to poetry, closer to let's say a Coderidge and imagination, which after all Coderidge was inspired by the German idealists anyway. So I think what I'm saying is didn't get there already, because I I do feel that the critique of Ottar's craft is neglected in the Anglo sphere.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:33

Well I'm just asking you for a comment really thanks. Oh no no I'm not sure the comments then I have lots of comments. One is that I think Kant is poised in many ways between different ideas of philosophy. And one role so I think the person to whom we need to go back it's absolutely unsurprising is Plato and Plato thinks that philosophy will transform you and reconcile you to the world by making you a more virtuous person. Someone who will be in tune with reality so that you can meet in justice with equanimity as Socrates did. That's the, as it were, the ideal of philosophical sainthood. And one of the things that interests me about Kant is that he doesn't have that sort of maximal view about what philosophy is going to do for you because that might make it seem that people who aren't philosophers are somehow deficient and defective. And that I think is pretty much what what what what Plato thought but Kant was in his own way a Christian and he was certainly despite what some people have said about him a deep egalitarian. So he thought that it would be catastrophic to think that only philosophers are in possession of knowledge about how to live and to reconcile themselves. So that said, come to the third critique yeah so you know I've I've been reading Kant for a long time and my current view of the third critique is it's the place where all the bits that don't fit together in Kant come. So a lot of people say oh yes no in the third critique he manages to somehow sort it all out whereas I think that in the third critique the unresolved tensions come out. So to my mind there's one way of reading him which is the one that you've just put in on the table which is certainly one way which says to say look all we've really got is mathematical science of nature all of these causal explanations that's what the science is then we've got human agency and and the moral law and then we've got a lot of kind of ways in which we see the world which will somehow make it seem less bleak and anonymous but actually when you get down to it he also he doesn't think that that this teleological and functional set of explanations are just kind of you know faces in the clouds. He really does think that organisms reproduce themselves in ways that can't be explained. So he hovers between a very kind of subjective and impressionistic account of what purpose is and some other ways which seem a lot more substantive. But that's just my just me. I'm not on oath or committed to publishing this particular defense. But I think of the the third critique as a place where the the the you know it's tremendously interesting because some of the deepest tensions in Kant are are apparent there.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:10

And then on the yes on the other side of the case hi and thank you for your talk so um so um when when I I got this leaflet that says what does progress look like in philosophy? How can we learn from it? Right and then you talked about philosophy having a history where I think it's rather limited to Western philosophical tradition. Right if we if we have to look at history from the perspective of the world today we must put other other philosophies into the equation so I need philosophy for example I'm not an expert but uh like anything for example it's not about reasonable argumentation at all. So if we have to reconceptualize the history of philosophy today how much or in what ways can we incorporate um non-Western traditional and non-Western philosophies into that historical understanding?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:21

That's a great question a very complicated question but you remember at the end I talked about broader and more narrow understandings of philosophy and it's very evident that global philosophies contain a great deal of this broader conception of how human beings come to terms with the world and very distinctive ways of doing that. Now there's a very interesting book which I strongly commend to anyone who's a specialist by a man called Peter Park and I forget the exact title but he describes how in the late 18th and early 19th century for the people I'm very much talking about there came a movement to try and define philosophy in a way that would separate it from religion. And Park who I believe is Korean in origin thinks that this was a racist strategy to exclude from consideration forms of philosophy that were non-Western. And I you know he has some very very interesting things to say as it seems to me it's certainly true that just as I've been talking about the way in which in the early 20th century philosophy tried to separate itself from the natural sciences so in the 18th and early 19th centuries philosophy was very concerned to separate itself from religion to the point at which in you know for the French enlightenment les philosophes were just people who really weren't religious. So what Voltaire called a philosophie de l'histoire a philosophical history was just a history that didn't include religious revelation. And I think that it's not unfair to see many non-Western philosophies as having still a strong intercollation between the philosophical and the religious part of there. I mean Confucianism it seems to me very hard to detach religious ideas about the way and so on from what we can think of as an ethics or a political philosophy. So I think that there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a sense in which you're absolutely right that more broadly a philosophy needs can be enriched by looking at different forms of thinking about reconciliation but there's also something that's quite distinctive about the Western tradition so far as I know in as much as it involves this self-separation from religion.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:48

Thank you yes over here I'm curious about the three images of the history of philosophy that you provided and in your closing in closing your talk which image you ended being most sympathetic to? Am I correct that it's the Cytophean image? And if it is then how do um you combat the vulnerability that you outlined in relation to that image?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:32

I think that I'm not committed to endorsing any of the three I think you're not wrong to say that I'm closer to the Sisyphian but what I think is that if we see philosophy as an exercise in self-understanding in the end you can either see it as an exercise in self-understanding which points upwards to a unique philosophical realm of truth the Platonic or the Hegelian answer or one which can be seen as having its function for particular people at a particular time and one which it's open to people to say well you know that works for you John Stuart Mill but doesn't work for me or works for you can not for me. So mapping these understandings the challenge for me then is does that still leave a place for reason in philosophy? And what does it look like? Does it look like simply bringing to consciousness prejudices we already have or is there a way of undermining no not undermining of giving rational grounds against certain pictures I'm going very fast here but you could see a sort of historicist picture of what philosophy is as being simply descriptive as Rorty once said that's the way we do things around here and that's the end of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:25

Whereas I have um would like to defend a conception of philosophy that isn't limited and self-enclosed but not necessarily committed to universality okay I can see several hands so let's just work our way forward.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:47

Yes you go first in the spirit of talking to people who don't work in philosophy um I work in tech so completely different set of fields well I've got the philosophy I think whatever else and as I've kind of left philosophy and work in other fields I'm kind of drawn to the Bennett quote of put it just one thing after another and obviously words a bit more in that quote I guess what is the value of this question? Are we just overcomplicating it for ourselves?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:18

Which question?

SPEAKER_07 1:18:20

The question that we've posed at the start of this lecture like the value of history and philosophy and thinking about them as interconnected like study.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:28

Well there's nothing you know things have value intrinsically and if you're gripped by questions you want to be able so that I think and I'm not saying that you're not on the contrary I think the the the the the the counter is not these questions aren't gripping but that we just come up with such a series of different answers that you are left shrugging your shoulders. I think that's a different thing from saying the questions don't have intrinsic force. But I do think that that rests on a kind of all or nothing picture. I think there are reasons to be drawn to one picture rather than another even though it they're not conclusively demonstrable. So that you know I gave you this Gardamirian picture of the history of the West and Charles Taylor's picture of you know the the this is the advancing forces of science eroding realms of meaning and human interaction very powerful picture for a lot of people and not just people with trainings in philosophy. You can find it you know T. S. Eliot for instance that sort of thing. And there's also a powerful picture of advancing reason which is perhaps going to throw out various romantic conceptions of human specialness but one that we have to accept because that's what reason compels us to. And if you could think well okay if you're a real good philosopher you'd be able to adjudicate between those two once and for all whereas I think that whereas we can find reasons for and against for each of those pictures I doubt that it would be possible to find a way of refuting one to the defence of the other and so what's the point?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:38

Well I guess the point is well very personally I think it's incredibly important in a world in which liberal democratic values are clearly under challenge to preserve a sense that the people that we disagree with might also have reasons behind their views even if we find those repellent so reading Aristotle you know who thinks let's be honest about it that human beings are divided intrinsically in orders of value something which I find deeply repellent nevertheless this is a profound and very hardworking thinker who's taken uh taken this view um and looked at its consequences I think we'd benefit not because you know we suddenly say you know what you might be right at least that's not the temptation I have but um let's see how it affects people and let's look at it with a degree of understanding even if we don't endorse it Professor Rosen thank you very much for uh the talk uh very insightful uh my question is around you mentioned one sentence in the in the presentation about LLMs and uh I'm a computer scientist by um trade also in IT as well and uh my question is around what can the history of philosophy do in terms of helping us to construct the ways uh that the philosophy of uh accelerationism that is really prevalent in the world right now uh how can we it help us inform the decisions that we're making in technology right now around how we're building LLMs the whole idea of the um what we call the problem of alignment how do we instill human values and concerns into machines that are starting to become self-recursive might be a little bit off topic but uh you did you did mention that in your uh in your talk and it is something that uh I think a lot of people are thinking about now well quite rightly um but I'm you know forgive me I'm I'm I've I've taken a very big subject this evening and only scratched the surface but that's only a real small part of philosophy so uh you know my title in in in America is that I'm a professor of ethics in politics and government and so yes this is but I don't think just doing the history of philosophy is going to solve that.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:55

Nevertheless I do want to say one or two things about your question. So one thing I think that's very striking to perhaps to professional philosophers is how far LLMs seem to have overtaken what was expected in philosophy. So you know around the turn of the 20th century people came along and said oh look here's a mathematical way of representing the structure of language and this is going to help us reconstruct the semantics of language and they spent most of the 20th century using the tools of um of of of logic to try and do that. And LLMs seem to have achieved what very very many extremely gifted philosophers of language fail to achieve by a kind of brute force and lots of computing power solution. So that's one thing that's for that's very bewildering for philosophy. So there are a lot of philosophers who thought that philosophy was going to you know logic and was and the study of semantics was going to help us elucidate the structure of thought and actually to the extent that LLMs are mimicking human capacities they're doing it in ways which were not at all expected by philosophers. So that's a problem for philosophers a problem for everybody is that this has come up on us much faster than anyone expected. You know people have seen what was going on in computing 20 years ago and what problems were being left were things to well it was the internet there is the internet which leaves us with massive problems about how to think about democracy how how to think about um the transmission of information all the assumptions that people made about how democracy was going to work also massive problems about intellectual property you know so those things we we you know we we but suddenly along come LLMs and it we're we're in a science fiction world or a world in which uh we're very where things are very very similar to science fiction and it seems to me that we've got two sorts of dangers one the danger of people having their heads in the sand and the other is a danger of a kind of hype that's uh that's that's that's you know very familiar with advances of technology. Sorry this is an example just because it's come to my mind recently um people like me who've been in higher education for a long time will remember that about 15 years ago we were all told that you know our jobs are going to be redundant because what was going to happen was that um higher education was going to be displaced by MOOCs uh massively open online courses and that the the you know people like Tony Blair and people who knew absolutely nothing about computing were and David Blunkett lots of new labor people were in the business of telling us this well the pandemic had many bad effects but one effect is that that particular nonsense has gone because people were unfortunately very painfully reminded about how far education depends on face to face interaction. And I guess That the you know that's a relatively minor matter because you know what's the worst that could happen is that funding for higher education would be cut even further. Well, you know, that's nothing new in this country. Um, but uh you know, with with with um LLMs, really bad things can happen and can happen really quite quickly. Can philosophers help? Well, I think everyone has to help. I don't think there's anyone who's a thoughtful and reflective person has to help. Um I suspect though that as very often, the limits of philosophers is the limits of how much they actually know about what is happening and how much they're simply taking a kind of boogeyman picture of what is happening. So those of us who spend more of their time asking questions of LLMs than they like to admit, you know, how am I going to care with my houseplant? Tell me, tell me please about my pain in my back. Those are the sorts of things that, you know, I don't ask LLMs to write. This this talk was not written by ChatGPT for better or worse. But you know, those sorts of things. I, you know, I use Chat GPT, as I suppose many of us do, a lot, and it is a massive advance for those sorts of purposes on things that went before. But it does have its limits, my goodness. If you ask it uh, you know, it says things, um, you ask it a factual question, and it gets it completely wrong, and you point out it's got it completely wrong and said, thank you for pointing that out. Is that your experience? And it's certainly mine. And these are these are things of the you know the most blatant kinds of things. And you think, well, okay, so we're gonna leave this to handle air traffic control, are we? I don't think so. Anyway, enough of my amateurism.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:06

I think we might have time for one more if it's a quick question and a quick answer.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:15

Okay, then slightly off topic, but um is a lot of the problem that reality is unknowable. The picture that reality is unknowable actually has a very interesting philosophical history, uh, and uh the idea that it is unknowable may be a picture that we can get away from. So there are obviously bits that we don't know, but that doesn't mean, it seems to me, that there aren't bits that we do know. So the idea that it is unknowable sort of presupposes that there is this thing in itself, to use a Kantian word, underlying everything. And uh perhaps that's the thing we need to get away from.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:09

An optimistic thought on which to conclude. Michael, thank you very much.