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The World Philosophy Made THE WORLD PHILOSOPHY MADE iii THE WORLD PHILOSOPHY MADE From Plato to the Digital Age SCOT T SOAMES PRINCE TON UNIVERSITY PRESS Prince ton & Oxford Copyright © 2019 by Prince ton University Press Published by Prince ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press . princeton . edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Soames, Scott, author. Title: The world philosophy made : from Plato to the digital age / Scott Soames. Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019545 | ISBN 9780691176925 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy and civilization. | Philosophy—History. Classification: LCC B59 .S63 2019 | DDC 306.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019545 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Rob Tempio & Matt Rohal Production Editorial: Ali Parrington Text and Jacket/Cover Design: Chris Ferrante Production: Merli Guerra Publicity: James Schneider, Katie Lewis & Alyssa Sanford This book has been composed in Baskerville 10 Pro and Futura PT Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 1 ​3 ​5 ​7 ​9 ​10 ​8 ​6 ​4 ​2 This book is dedicated to my dear wife Martha without whom it could not have been written and to my friend Frank Price the wisest man I know CONTENTS Introduction ix Timeline xiv 1 The Dawn of Western Philosophy 1 2 A Truce between Faith and Reason 20 3 The Beginnings of Modern Science 40 4 ­Free Socie ties, Free Markets, and Free People 73 5 Modern Logic and the Foundations of Mathe matics 92 6 Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age 113 7 The Science of Language 133 8 The Science of Rational Choice 157 9 Mind, Body, and Cognitive Science 188 10 Philosophy and Physics 220 viii Contents 11 Liberty, Justice, and the Good Society 250 12 Laws, Constitutions, and the State 303 13 The Objectivity of Morality 341 14 Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in the Face of Death 373 Appendix: The Noble Deaths of Socrates and David Hume 386 Bios of Leading Figures 397 Acknowl edgments 405 Notes 407 References 425 Index 435 INTRODUCTION In May of 2016 I published an article, “Philosophy’s True Home,” at the New York Times Opinionator blog. The article was written in response to an earlier piece, “When Philoso- phy Lost Its Way” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, which contended that western philosophy’s institution- alization in the university in the late nineteenth century separated it from the study of humanity and nature, and diverted it from its central task of guiding us to live vir- tuous and meaningful lives. I responded that recent and con temporary philosophy in the west had not lost its way, but, on the contrary, was continuing its record of impres- sive success both in laying the conceptual foundations for advances in theoretical knowledge and in advancing the systematic study of ethics, po liti cal philosophy, and human well- being. After the article appeared, my editor, Rob Tempio, at Princeton University Press, suggested that I ex- plore the topic in a book-length work, which I was initially not inclined to do. Before long, however, I became intrigued by the idea and convinced that it might serve a larger purpose. Having spent my adult life trying to advance the areas in philoso- phy at which I am most adept, I had not given sufficient thought to the overall shape of the discipline and its place in the modern world. I knew that, in the aggregate, we phi los o phers have many productive, though rather spe- cialized, professional contacts with mathematicians, physicists, biologists, psychologists, linguists, cognitive x Introduction scientists, neuroscientists, economists, politi cal scientists, law professors, historians, classicists, and others. As chair- man of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, I was also aware of positive recep- tions our philosophy-led interdisciplinary undergraduate majors Philosophy, Politics, and Law and Philosophy and Phys- ics have received, which I hope our new offering, Philoso- phy, Politics, and Economics, will too. But I had, I am afraid, tended to dismiss, as unalterable, the depth of ignorance about who we are and what we do among the general edu- cated public, large swaths of academia, and, most impor- tantly, among many of the young who might other wise profit from what we have to offer. Thinking more about it, however, I have become more optimistic. I now believe that the ignorance I previously deplored is due, in part, to our own failure as phi los o phers to seriously address a larger audience. This book is an at- tempt to correct that by explaining what western philoso- phy is, what it has been, and what, I am convinced, it will continue to be. Contrary to the opinion of many, the study of western philosophy today is not the study of a frozen historical canon from Socrates and Plato to Kant, Hegel, and Nietz sche, offering a smorgasbord of previous responses to unanswerable questions yielding no genuine knowledge. Although history remains an important part of the subject, today’s phi los o phers generate new philosophi- cal questions, while offering better answers to traditional questions than those given by earlier thinkers. As a result, philosophical knowledge is increasing and the canon in phi- losophy is always expanding. Philos o phers have been, and continue to be, deeply involved in all impor tant areas of intellectual concern, in- cluding the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Properly understood, philosophy is not an isolated discipline, but the partner of virtually all disciplines. Nor is western phi- Introduction xi losophy the whole story. Although this book is concerned with it alone, many of the remarkable advances in civiliza- tion that western philosophy has helped to bring about have become the common property of all cultures. As more works in dif­fer ent philosophical traditions are translated and new bodies of secondary lit er a ture grow up, new syn- theses will become pos si ble, sparking new philosophical departures. In sum, this book is about the contributions philos o- phers have made, and continue to make, to our civilization. Of course, it wasn’t phi los o phers alone, whether western or not, who made the civilized world we enjoy today. But the effects of their efforts have been more profound and far- reaching than is commonly realized. Our natu ral science, mathe matics, and technology, our social science, po liti cal institutions, and economic life, our education, culture, reli- gion, and our understanding of ourselves have been shaped by philosophy. This is no accident; it is due to the essen- tial interconnection of philosophy with all foundational knowledge. Philosophy never advances against a background of rank ignorance. It flourishes when enough is known about some domain to make great pro gress conceivable, even though it remains incompletely realized because new methods are needed. Phi los o phers help by giving us new concepts, re- interpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing questions to expand their solution spaces. Sometimes phi los o phers do this when sciences are born, but they also do it as disci- plines mature. As science advances, there is more, not less, for philosophy to do. Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves grows like an expanding sphere of light from a point of illumination. As light travels in all directions away from the source, the volume of the sphere, representing our secure knowledge, grows exponentially. But so does the surface area of the sphere, representing the border where xii Introduction knowledge blurs into doubt, bringing back methodologi- cal uncertainty. Philosophy monitors the border, ready to help plot our next move. The readerwill, I hope, gain a sense of what this means when moving through the book. The first six chapters cover ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Re nais sance, and the sixteenth through eigh teenth centuries, followed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There youwill see remarkable advances by all manner of intermixtures of philosophical thought with mathematical, scientific, po liti- cal, and religious thought—sometimes in single minds and sometimes in communicating minds. The focus will shift a bit when chapters 7 through 10 move you deeply into the twentieth century and beyond, examining the genesis of modern theories of rational decision and action, the efforts to advance our understanding of language and mind, and the strug gle to make sense of what modern physics is tell- ing us about the universe. Here the focus is less on the ori- gins of easily recognizable tangible benefits we enjoytoday (though there are some), and more on the role of philos - o phers, sometimes leading, sometimes merely supporting and supplementing, the work of specialists trying to bring order to natu ral phenomena that are difficult to conceptu- alize in both emerging and well-established sciences. The final chapters, 11–14, attack pressinglegal, po liti cal, moral, and even existential questions. Here no prob lems are de- finitively solved. The contributions, if they are such, lie in articulating productive perspectives for attacking them. I close with an invitation and a warning. Much in this book reports on the impact of philos o phers and their work on broader areas of thought and action, as well as the impact of developments outside of philosophy on philosophy itself. But not all of the reasoning you will encounter is about philosophy. Some of it is philosophy itself— expositions of some leading ideas of the great phi- Introduction xiii los o phers, criticism and assessment of those ideas, and in- de pen dent reflection on philosophical themes.
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