What Is Philosophy?
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WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Embodiment Signification Ideality Jere Surber What is Philosophy? Anamnesis Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re-collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis. a re.press series What is Philosophy? Embodiment, Signification, Ideality Jere O’Neill Surber re.press Melbourne 2014 re.press PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia http://www.re-press.org © re.press and Jere O’Neill Surber 2014 The moral rights of the author are automatically asserted and recognized under Australian law (Copyright Amendment [Moral Rights] Act 2000) This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatsoever and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more informa- tion see the details of the creative commons licence at this website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry O’Neill Surber, Jere, author. What is philosophy? : embodiment, signification, ideality / Jere O’Neill Surber. 9780992373405 (paperback) Series: Anamnesis. Philosophy. Analysis (Philosophy) Continental philosophy. Philosophy, Modern. 101 Designed and Typeset by A&R This book is produced sustainably using plantation timber, and printed in the destination market reducing wastage and excess transport. Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface 11 With What Must Philosophy Begin? 29 1. The Conditions Of Philosophy: An Informal Introduction 43 2. Kant’s Fundamental Question and the Problem of Judgment 55 3. The Analytic A Posteriori and The Conditions of Philosophy 65 4. The Question About Philosophy: A Preliminary Response 77 5. Conditions and Principles 87 6. Limits, Excesses, and Consequences 107 7. Trajectories of the Conditions: Withdrawal, Reduction, Com-Prehension 139 8. Philosophy as Activity and Its Components 159 9. Philosophy as Texts and Their Elements 179 10. Philosophy as Ideality 213 11. Philosophy and Its ‘Others’ 255 12. The Contours and Partitions of Philosophy 285 Concluding Considerations and Questions 321 v Acknowledgements Many of the shards and fragments of ideas expressed in this work trace back to my earliest encounters, even before my university studies, with that enterprise called ‘Philosophy’. However, these didn’t begin forming a recog- nizable assemblage until I became the director of the Philosophy Colloquium in my university’s Joint Doctoral Program. The Colloquium was typically held during the snowy Colorado Winter quarter, met in my ‘back cabin’ (well warmed by both the fire and good spirits), and usually consisted of no more than about a half dozen participants. It was mainly in preparing for and coordinating those meetings, and thanks to the intellectual honesty and generosity of now several ‘generations’ of those doctoral students, that this work assumed its present form. It is theirs almost as much as it is my own, and the blame for any errors or lapses of judgment that one may find in it I ascribe to them for not remaining at the meetings late enough, sharing one more round, and fully convincing me of the faults in my thinking. I would like especially to thank Drs. Rob Manzinger, Evgeny Pavlov, Jeff Scholes, and David Hale for, at different stages, serving as the Colloquium’s ring- leaders and provocateurs. Special gratitude goes to Jared Nieft, who patient- ly read and discussed the work with me as it was being written over about a two-year period. Also, much gratitude goes to my past and present GTAs, whose able assistance with my undergraduate teaching chores gave me a bit more time for research and writing. Besides such active collaborators and critics, completing projects like this also tends to require fairly complex support networks. The University of Denver and especially my colleagues in its Department of Philosophy have long provided a stable, congenial, creative, and blessedly conflict-free environment. Over the years, I have especially benefited from (and thor- oughly enjoyed) collaborative teaching ventures with Robert D. Richardson (English Literature), M. E. Warlick (Art History), Carl Raschke (Religious Studies), and Naomi Reshotko (Philosophy, and the World’s Greatest Chair!) During my many stays in Germany, Achim Koeddermann and his won- derful family have provided a ‘home away from home,’ as has William Desmond and his family in Belgium. vii viii What is Philosophy? My own household has born much of the brunt of the sort of absence, incon- sideration, and occasional crankiness that accompanies the tunnel-vision necessary to complete a lengthy writing project. My extended household includes my partner Cheryl Ward, our twin daughters Tanya and Jennifer, Linda Kalyris, Stan Weddle, assorted Celtic musicians, and trans-species members Biggie (who attended more Philosophy Colloquium meetings than any student!), M-Cat, Midder, Macy, Hobbes, Ringo, and Victoria. I sin- cerely apologize to all for meals cooked for me that went cold, feline feeding times patiently awaited but delayed, and playtime curtailed while I was ‘out back’ working away. But do know that I’m ever grateful for all your patience, support, and love. Preface By the turn of the last century—which also ushered in a new millen- nium—the enterprise of philosophy had reached a point of what is called in chaos theory a ‘phase transition.’ It was, and thus far to some degree still remains, a point where things could follow, quite unpredictably, any one of a number of trajectories arising from the same set of ‘initial conditions.’ However, even if we can’t predict which trajectory it will follow, we can de- scribe, in broad terms, the trajectories (or sets of them) available to it. I see four possibilities. 1. Philosophy continues on as before—it would just continue doing what it’s doing at present without any fundamental change. 2. Philosophy is absorbed and some, if not all, of its former activities as- sumed by some other discipline—mathematics, linguistics, cognitive science, psychoanalysis, art, poetry, or even religion. 3. Philosophy, in effect, hits the reset button, returning to some earlier state regarded as preferable to its present state. 4. Philosophy redefines and reinvents itself in a way that would make clear its fundamental differences from other human enterprises as well as its continuities and breaks with its own history and its present ‘initial conditions.’ This work is both a wager on the fourth alternative as well as an effort to as- sist in promoting this outcome. (1) As always, the ‘initial conditions,’ that is, the features of philosophy’s present state, are sufficiently complex and sensitive to prevent any linear causal determination or predictive certainty. Still, we can cite a few of them. A particularly conspicuous feature of the present state of philosophy is the persistence of a broad division of its field into what are typically called the ‘analytic’ and ‘Continental’ approaches. The reasons for this divide are as much cultural and political as they are intellectual. To see that this phil- osophical division was not rooted in any real intellectual divide, one need only recall that both branches grew from Kant’s Critical Philosophy and that many of the seminal figures of the analytic tradition, like Frege, Mach, 11 12 What is Philosophy? Meinong, Wittgenstein, and Carnap, were fully formed products of the in- tellectual culture of the Continent. It is also the case that Continental phi- losophy would not have been defined in the way it came to be without its em- brace and extension in the Anglophone world, especially after the Second World War. So, in some respects, attempts to bridge the gap between ana- lytic and Continental philosophy from either side often end up in a situation of ‘I met the other, and the other is me.’ Still, there has been an historically efficacious difference that had as its own initial condition the last great phase transition in philosophy: Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution in philosophy.’ Kant described his philosophical view as ‘transcendental idealism.’ Very roughly put, this involved two the- ses. One, the idealism part, asserted that human consciousness or subjectiv- ity was the ultimate source of the structures constituting the ‘world.’ The other, the transcendental aspect, was that these structures were ‘necessary and universal’ for all experience and knowledge. We might, then, broadly say that the Continental trajectory following from Kant tended to assume as its foundation and starting-point consciousness or subjectivity, albeit in forms much more complex and ramified than that found in Kant, allow- ing questions about necessity and universality to assume their place in rela- tion to this. The analytic tradition, by contrast, tended to take necessity and universality, whether interpreted in terms of logical or scientific ‘laws,’ as its primary concern and approached consciousness or subjectivity (when it did at all) in these terms. This difference in basic assumptions and approaches was already in full play by the beginning of the 20th century and manifested itself most dra- matically in the controversies between phenomenology (and its existentialist offshoots) and positivism, with American pragmatism (especially in Peirce and James), in a sense, splitting the difference.