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The Challenge of Rustic Skepticism As O N W H A T I T I S P E R S P E C T I V E S O N M E T A P H I L O S O P H Y On What It Is: Perspectives on Metaphilosophy On What It Is: Perspectives on Metaphilosophy Edited by Megyer Gyöngyösi, Zsolt Kapelner, Zsófia Ádám, István Faragó-Szabó Eötvös József Collegium | Budapest, 2016 The publication of this book was supported by the Student Union of ELTE University and the Student Union of the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE University. Published by the Philosophy Workshop of Eötvös József Collegium Budapest, 2016 Director of publication: Dr. László Horváth Edited by Megyer Gyöngyösi, Zsolt Kapelner, Zsófia Ádám, István Faragó-Szabó Cover design by Hunor Gyöngyösi Designed by Zsófia Machó isbn 978-615-5371-71-4 © 2016 Philosophy Workshop of Eötvös József Collegium © The authors Contents 7 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction Zsolt Kapelner 17 History as the Fundamental Reality Nenad Miščević 47 Naturalism, Quietism, and the Concept of Nature Thomas J. Spiegel 63 Meta-Skepticism, Experimentalism, Cartography Tamás Paár 87 The Challenge of Rustic Skepticism as Metaphilosophy Vítor Hirschbruch Schvartz 101 Incongruence of Philosophy and Theology Tamás Hankovszky 113 Advocacy of Science vs. Scientific Methodology Tolgahan Toy 131 The Overlaps between Philosophy and Science Serdal Tümkaya 149 Philosophy without Art Adrienne Gálosi 173 Aesthetics and Its Histories Botond Csuka 203 Philosophers’ Salon des Refusés Ádám Smrcz 215 The Optics of Philosophy Marosán Bence Péter 233 “at least as we like to think” Ferenc Takó 269 On the Origins of Carnap’s Aufbau Ádám Tamás Tuboly 305 On the Psychodynamics of Doing Philosophy Josef Ehrenmüller 333 What Can We Offer? Zsolt Kapelner Acknowledgements This volume is the result of a conference held at Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest, Hungary on 13–15 February 2015. We are greatly indebted to the scholars who have travelled from all around the world to give outstanding presentations as well as to the keynote speakers and chairpersons leading the individual sections of the conference. We would like to further acknowledge the support of the Eötvös József Collegium, the Student Board of the Collegium, the Student Union of ELTE University, Budapest, the Student Union of the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE University, Budapest, and the members of the Philosophy Workshop at the Eötvös József Collegium, especially Olivér István Tóth, and Ferenc Takó for their invaluable contribution to the success of this event. Introduction Zsolt Kapelner Philosophy is unique in that its metadiscipline, metaphilosophy, belongs to it. While the theoretic tools and principles of physics cannot reveal what physics is, it has to turn to the philosophy of science for such insight, the corresponding question in the case of philosophy can and should be answered through philosophical rea- soning. From Plato’s Sophist (and his missing dialogue the Philos- opher) to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is philosophy, and Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy philosophers have been implementing vast theoretical resources to characterize the prop- erties and methods of philosophy, and the nature of philosophical knowledge. When the world in which philosophers need to work and on which they ought to reflect starts changing rapidly, asking such questions becomes especially pressing for the philosopher. When new scholarly disciplines pop up radically restructuring the aca- demic world, problems concerning the place of philosophy among other disciplines need to be addressed. When new kinds of prob- lems enter the world and the public consciousness, philosophers have to be able to tell whether their conceptual tools make them suitable to deal with those. And when the very purpose and nature of academic research and scholarship transforms due to technolog- ical, social, and economical advancements, philosophy has to rede- fine its place in academia and society. 10 Introduction Today these changes seem to take place more rapidly and more frequently than ever before, which makes it necessary again to reconsider the very foundations of philosophy, and to put on the table ancient as well as novel puzzles and questions concerning its purpose, methods, and the possible directions it might take in the coming decades. Upon observing this, the students and teachers of the Philosophy Workshop of Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest decided to bring together senior experts and young scholars from all over the world to discuss issues in metaphilosophy. TheOn What It Is? conference took place in Budapest in February 2015, on occa- sion of the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the Philoso- phy Workshop. The three-day event is among the major successes of the Workshop as it attracted scholars from 11 countries and 4 continents. The papers in this volume are based on some of the most out- standing talks delivered in Budapest. As the conference itself, these articles address a wide range of topics all connected to the ulti- mate question: what is philosophy and how should it be done? This multi-layered question is approached from many different angles. Some take into account the connection between philosophy and other disciplines and types of inquiry, such as natural science, art, or even theology. Others attempt to provide answers to the much investigated question: is philosophical knowledge possible at all? Should we even bother studying philosophy? Yet others take a his- torical approach arguing that the inquiry of past philosophers’ con- ception of their discipline may provide useful lessons even today. In this short introduction we provide a brief overview of the colourful multitude of these papers which may serve as a guide for the reader. According to received wisdom, philosophy is, for almost a cen- tury now, divided into at least two large camps (the so-called ana- lytic and continental tradition) with a few rogue ones fitting to both or none. Nenad Miščević addresses the problem that according to some authors, we are far from being able to identify any real dif- ference between the two contemporary “incarnations” of philoso- phy, or identify their defining characteristics. He proposes another approach according to which these two belong to “family resem- blance” types; their differences are to be anchored in some key characteristics not necessarily shared by all members of the groups, Zsolt Kapelner 11 but still connecting them through Wittgenstein’s familiar notion of family resemblance. Thomas Spiegel’s article investigates a strange philosophical stance rooted in, though usually thought of as foreign to the analytic tradition. Stemming from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later thought, the philosophical stance of quietism holds that philosophical questions (or at least a significant subset of them) necessarily lack answers or even meaning, thus the best we can do is to stay quiet about them. Spiegel investigates quietism in the light of one of the most wide- spread metaphilosophical theories today, naturalism, showing that they are incompatible, due to their differing concept of nature, and “that quietism poses an alternative which is worth to be considered as a metaphilosophical stance, against the dominance of naturalism.” The question concerning the possibility of solving philosoph- ical problems is framed today most often in terms of skepticism. In recent years many have argued that the current abundance of philosophical theories and arguments, and the seeming inability of philosophers to decide between them gives rise to a form of skepti- cism. On this view, it is impossible to have philosophical knowledge because for any philosophical statement one can find, apparently, equally strong arguments and counterarguments, and there is no way for one to decide which one to believe. This stance of metaskep- ticism is addressed by Tamás Paár’s paper. His aim is to show that metaskepticism is deeply connected to two other views of what phi- losophy is, namely, cartography and experimentalism. By arguing that these two views ultimately lead to the untenable conception of metaskepticism, he attempts to show that these notions are dead- ends for philosophical inquiry. The problem of skepticism is approached rather differently by Vítor Schvartz. A devoted skeptic himself, he rejects Paár’s claim that metaskepticism is an untenable stance. However, the kind of consistent skepticism Schvartz defends is from a different breed than most of his contemporaries’. He argues for a neo-Pyrrhonian view derived from the works of Sextus Empiricus according to which one must suspend judgement concerning all matters, including philo- sophical and everyday ones. Schvartz also sets out to defend this idea against a serious criticism according to which neo-Pyrrhonian skepticism is a metaphilosophical theory par excellence. If that is so, 12 Introduction by accepting this theory, the skeptic refuses to withhold judgement at least on one issue, thus her project collapses into contradiction. Those who hold onto the idea of philosophical knowledge need to answer the question: what is the nature of such knowledge? Tamás Hankovszky’s essay attempts to shed light on this issue by compar- ing philosophy, and a discipline often neglected in today’s literature, theology. His erudite argument attempts to show that philosophy, despite the many shapes it has taken during the last two and a half millennia, retained its claim for an all-encompassing coherent body of knowledge, while it is at the very essence of theology to embrace apparent paradoxes as resolvable, or at the very least bearable, only through faith. The most frequently raised questions about the nature of philo- sophical knowledge concern its relationship to science. Two papers in this volume are dedicated to this topic. Tolgahan Toy investigates the idea of scientific philosophy in the context of the history of ana- lytic philosophy comparing the views of W. V. Quine, and an alleged follower of his, Theodor Sider, arguing that while both are driven by the idea of a scientific method, their conceptions of what it is to be scientific are quite dissimilar.
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