Historically motivated advice about how to do philosophy in the 21st century.

*soften the criticism* We need above all renewed and deepened paradigms for how to do it. 5 -14 below. We also need to resolve some central historical questions about the validity of various philosophical approaches -- esp those of Descarates, Kant, phenomenology ... 1-4 below. 1. *Everyone* knows we need to criticize Cartesianism. But where do we draw the line? The awful dualism aside, he was a major instigator of the Mechanical Philosophy. Is that dead too? The idea was that God talks mathematics and that mathematics is clear and distinct, amenable to the human intellect. Physics seems mathematical, but the mathematics has very little that's congruent to the intellect. Philosophy is still too Cartesian. Are there qualia? Can they be explained physically? These are not only extremely at home in the Cartesian problematic -- we can specify which of the 6 Meditations they belong in (respectively Meditation 2 and Meditation 6). Is there a part of philosophy that deals metaphysically with human beings? Look at some late 20th century examples. We can bracket and do phenomenology. Thats the Second Meditation. We can consider the mind-body problem. Thats the Sixth Meditation. We can ask whether machines can think. Thats Part 5 of the Discourse on Method. Finally, we can claim to be anti-Cartesian. Thats bad faith. As Ryle observed: (concept of mind 328): (Psychologists) have ... continued to suffer unnecessary qualms of anxiety, lest (the) diversion of psychology from the task of describing the ghostly might not commit it to tasks of describing the merely mechanical. But the influence of the bogy of mechanism has for a century been dwindling because, among other reasons, the biological sciences have established theit title of sciences. The Newtonian system is no longer the sole paradigm of natural science. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher animal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

research program. Draw the line! 2. Does that mean in some areas we return to forgotten insights and paradigms from ancient Greece? and reason. One such insight. The distinction between intellect (contemplation)

Think of Platos 50 year olds. And think of the way you did philosophy when you got out of graduate school ... by contrast. (part of this: the way you need to be physically in good shape to be a chess player. another part of it: you might have to be morally good to be a good moral philosopher, to participate in spirituality to be a good philosopher of religion ...) Much of conventional academic philosophy supposes that without too much radical questioning of one's views, procedures, prejudices and the like, something of excellence can result. There are sociologically intelligible explanations for this attitude but it is not realistic. the idea (tied to that failure to take account of the faculty of the intellect) that all I need in order to be a good philosopher is high IQ, cleverness, and a set of technical tools. This produces material like Cassams recent book, entirely filled with the drawing of lines between this and that thesis, and containing no discussion at all of whether any thesis squares with reality. This is a perversion ... 3. A lot of the inspiration for Kant derives from the rationalist tradition -- Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff. *Everyone* who does philosophy seriously takes Kant seriously and has for 200 years. But *no one* in that population takes D/L/W seriously and most of us are actively antagonistic. To what extent was Kant fatally infected with what he picked up from these people? Between the Inaugural Dissertation and the First Critique, Kant concluded that we have two utterly distinct faculties: sensibility and understanding. Sensibility allows intuitions of individual entities. Understanding is the faculty of thought through concepts. The consequence is that sense gives apprehension of individuals entirely nonconceptually.

Another. The idea that philosophy when done well ought to be hard.

This is only one of the major philosophical errors at the very foundation of the First Critique. Kant thinks very hard about how things must be given those foundational errors and insights. One gets the sense of enormous depth. One is right. But this is the depth of a coal pit. Deep though the thought may be, it is just about impossible to describe the resulting metaphysics coherently. That is a striking contrast between Kant and most classical metaphysicians. We ought to honor Kant for the depth and purity of his efforts, not for the viability of the picture they generate. That is important. Just about all important western philosophy in the last 200 years is a form of Kantianism. Exceptions are neo-Thomism, Wittgenstein, perhaps Whitehead. In particular, analytic philosophy is a form of neo-Kantianism. Phenomenology is another form of neo-Kantianism. Much continental philosophy derives from Kant just as really though more indirectly, perhaps via Hegel or Dilthey or Habermas as well. But both analytic and continental philosophy as done today are unthinkable without their Kantian inheritances. I claim that if philosophy is seriously done, it will be seen that much of the very foundations of Kant will have to be rejected. When that happens, the same will occur in the foundations of present day neoKantianism. Should analytic and continental philosophers have greater dialogue, become reconciled, attack the same problems from different standpoints? No. They are both dinosaurs. They should simply become extinct. Of course something living will emerge from their ashes; neither is entirely worthless. But in the long perspective, far too much at their foundations is suspect for us to continue to take them seriously as sources of understanding. The interesting dialogue in the 21st century wont span the very small philosophical gap that corresponds to the English Channel. It will span the gap between eastern philosophy and the philosophy that rises from the ashes of Cartesianism and Kantianism. Indian philosophy contains serious logic. Chinese and Japanese philosophy contain serious studies of consciousness -- no doubt the best work there is. We ignore it only by becoming parochial and by denying the seriousness of the enterprise. How can a 21st c. philosopher remain coherent at bottom adopting a Kantian framework and renouncing Cartesian dualism, the primacy of the subject epistemologically and metaphysically, the centrality of epistemology initiated by Descartes and Locke, rationalist theology, etc etc? How can someone like Heidegger and his 21st

c. followers take phenomenology seriously as a method to gain access to Being, while maintaining that all of philosophy -- not only since Descartes but since Aristotle and maybe Plato -- was radically off track? 4. The way of doing philosophy I learned at Berkeley and Stanford was not in practice viable. We thought ordinary language mattered but it reflects lots of ordinary prejudice and unimaginativeness. Our models were people like Davidson, Ryle, John Austin, Quine, Chisholm, Armstrong ... and I am sure that none of these stars of the last generation have now anything to offer. It would be valuable to try to understand in a serious historical way which of the current models are viable. Thus: who in the 20th c. has something important to say to people who want to do real philosophy in the 21st century? I have not approached that question seriously, but it would be a start toward being serious to think who I might now mention. It might be: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Frege Godel Wittgenstein early and late Heidegger Wilfrid Sellars Strawson Alasdair MacIntyre Dewey Whitehead

Am I missing someone? Not those people I listed above. Not Sartre, Husserl, Putnam, Rorty, Goodman, Hampshire, Shoemaker, Nozick, not Russell (how great *was* the theory of definite descriptions??), and last but maybe least not Kripke. 200 years from now people will be reading Leibniz even though absolutely no one will accept his world view. Most of accept the world views of the people I'm writing off, but even so we can agree that 200 years from now no one will be reading them. *** 5. Before Descartes philosophy was predominately in the service of providing support for a way of life -- whether religious, Epicurean, Stoic, skeptical or whatever. Foucault suggests it should return to that job. Should it? Philosophy as a way of life. To stop drawing the boundary this side of what is practical.

Philosophy today struggles not to be simplistic, e.g. to take account of current science. A step in the right direction. But for Plato it was essential that philosophy transforms the mind of the philosopher -- and the being of the philosopher. There is a dialectic of love (eros) and knowledge that needs to be acknowledged and lived. 6. If we struggle to gain perspective concerning responses to "modernity", we see, I would say, a failure of heart. We see many people saying that it is hopeless to try to understand what the world is like, what a good way of life is, and so on. It's just power, ego, cocktail party talk. I think philosophy can give understanding but it's damned hard and people have given up. They want to express this and conceal their guilty consciences. Social defense ... Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Plato said that philosophy begins in eros. Nietzsche understood that love and fear are the great enemies in human life. Mevlana ... love, ego 8. I could go on ... when I am really awake ... but my idea is that a long perspective from the vantage point of the history of western philosophy suggests that 21st century philosophers need to confront certain issues about how their philosophy is to be done. In most of the areas I've mentioned above, I'm no expert. In a few, I am to some modest degree. But I'd like to say something of a global nature (excluding only those domains where I'm just incompetent and I won't admit to very many of them out of sheer ego and obstinance). Philosophy begins not just to integrate angloamerican and continental but east and west. a serious concern for truth will jump those boundaries. Pico, Leibniz, Heidegger, Nishida -- some examples of philosophers who worked to synthesize results from both east and west, from all known sources. Only if were not serious like Heraclitus will we keep inside the lines. 9. A question I asked the morning of August 17: which philosophers can I think of who approach philosophy with the seriousness that the questions themselves demand? There are a few:

Plato Aristotle Plotinus Augustine Aquinas Leibniz Kant Hegel Nietzsche Kierkegaard Marx Wittgenstein Heidegger Husserl Davidson Frege Spinoza Now, out of those (I'm sure there are more but I don't think that many more who are at the same time extraordinarily gifted), how many are disqualified by reason of (a) bizarreness in emotional ways that impact their philosophy or (b) commitment to views that should have been deeply looked into? (a) Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Leibniz, Hegel (b) Aquinas, Davidson, Marx, Leibniz, Hegel (Both (a) and (b) are incomplete too ...) The result is that if you want a model you can take seriously, in order to begin to create your own philosophy on a serious scale, there are just vanishingly few candidates. I'm not sure if it was Kant or Aristotle who was the most recent ... but perhaps there's a little too much pessimism here. Frege Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine Spinoza Kant Nietzsche Husserl

10. We described philosophy 25 years ago as a tree from which the sciences were branching off. Now we see at the growing tip of each branch more philosophy. And this is a special tree -- the branches self-consciously seek to make connections with each other. And each tip autonomously nourishes the rest of the tree.

11. Philosophy needs to be radical in Kuhns sense. It is the search for better paradigms, not work within the present ones. Science is sometimes normal and sometimes revolutionary and by its nature cant always be the latter. Philosophy must always lay itself open to revolution. Philosophy is essentially anarchic. Philosophy is essentially open!! Its too serious to let us join a school and think excludingly. 12. Philosophy needs the help of technology: -- computer graphics. And: movement, life, sound, feeling, emotion. Not just a word processor. mind, spirit -- holography. 3 dimensional models of the universe, life,

-- exploration of our love of hi-tech concepts in doing philosophy (computer world, sci fi, inhuman thought experiments) -- to ask in a serious way which of our philosophical applications of late 20th c tech world may be seriously misguided. A meta-look at how *much* philosophy needs technology. 13. Philosophy needs new meta-paradigms. Andre Agassi, the sema? (to replace the idea of philosophy as math, philosophy as linguistics, philosophy as religion, as cultural study ...) The big developments in hist of west phil. -- transformations of its face, some still going on, some needing new appropriation by the 21st century. 1 knowledge 2 reason 3 4 5 6 7 Socrates: to force me to face myself. Varieties of selfPlato: to imagine the good life as the life of an immortal Augustine: to make philosophy theology Descartes: to make it mathematical and bright Kant: to make it transcendental Hegel: to make it historical and cultural Nietzsche: to make it human

8 It is time for new transformation. It needs to fully appropriate what is living in the 7 previous revolutions. But it needs to be revolutionary in new ways we cannot anticipate. If you look at 1-7, for any step n, no one could have foreseen step n+1. That is just as true today.

From Socrates, we need to face our own humanity, our own philosophical flaws and prejudices, our limits, as he induced Alcibiades to face his own. It is time we ceased imitating our dissertation advisors so closely. From Plato and Augustine, we need to recall that philosophy originates in eros. That its possible that when philosophy is well done a life will be lived well. From Nietzsche we can remember that we have not yet understood what a human life can be. From Heraclitus we recall. Man is most nearly himself when he has the seriousness of a child at play. Philosophy has always entertained a tension between being human and being gods. (The Nicomachean Ethics vacillates between the idea that a good man is a good man and the idea that a good man is divine.) It reinterprets the tension with each revolution. The 8th revolution will need a new reinterpretation. Socrates. A daemon -- who gives only negative advice. A wisdom that is only human. Plato. A soul modeled after a god -- capable of immortality, of chariot rides with the gods. Augustine. Only God is worthy of my love. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. I am finite and sinful by nature, still Im made in Gods image. Descartes. The Ego can stand outside of human life. It can gain absolute certainty and security. Kant. The transcendental ego as creator of the world. Hegel. The possibility of ending philosophy, another Ego outside of human life. The continuity between the finite spirit and the absolute spirit. Nietzsche. God is dead -- and as a consequence the sea, our sea, lies open before us. All-too-human, perhaps, but we can become as gods, at least as bermenschen. The tension is perhaps resolved better in eastern philosophy. The Hindu believes quite simply: That art thou. The Taoist believes that the ten thousand things are the ways in which the infinite and perfect Tao manifests itself in the world.

14. Its our fault if they blame us (critics of philosophy, whom we often dismiss, probably have valid points we need to grasp. philosophy is removed from life, artificially simple, whatever)