Professor Kristin Boyce (Mississippi State University) will present her paper, “A Philosophical History of Analytic Philosophy of Literature“; graduate student Elliot Trapp (NSSR) will respond.
February 27th Friday 4:30-6:30, 80 Fifth Ave. Room 529, The New School
Abstract:
The history of analytic philosophy of literature could be written as a narrative of the efforts to formulate and solve a series of interrelated paradoxes. This kind of approach will strike many as uncontroversially part and parcel of an analytic philosophy of literature. I argue, though, that this is neither the only nor the best form that a distinctively “analytic” philosophy of literature can take. Instead of writing a survey of paradoxes formulated and solutions attempted, I shift to what I call “the paradox of philosophy and literature.” On one hand literature (along with the arts more generally) has consistently been of marginal importance as an object of philosophical reflection. On the other, or so I will argue, it has been of special methodological importance for analytic philosophy from the beginning.
The marginalization of aesthetics within analytic philosophy is no secret. By contrast, the methodological centrality of the literary arts for analytic philosophy has not until recently been recognized at all. From its inception, the analytic tradition has worked hard to disentangle itself from other humanistic enterprises, especially art and religion, and to secure its proximity to modern science. Recent work in the history of early analytic philosophy by Cora Diamond and others, though, has made it possible to see how deeply tied the “analytic” ways of doing philosophy that emerged were not just to developments in the sciences, but to those in the literary arts and criticism as well. I argue that this work has important implications for aesthetics generally, and for philosophy of literature in particular, that have not yet been recognized or explored. A philosophical self-understanding, which more adequately reflects the proximity of the work of philosophy to the work of literature, should make possible new and by some measures better ways of reflecting philosophically on art.
*For a copy of the paper, please email nycwittgensteinworkshop@gmail.com
In the seventeenth century Descartes fundamentally transformed mathematics, and this transformation enabled in turn Newton’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics. It was left to Kant, in the eighteenth century, to revolutionize the practice of philosophy. In nineteenth-century Germany, the practice of mathematics was again transformed, this time by Riemann, Dedekind, and others, and this transformation enabled in turn both Einstein’s revolution in the practice of fundamental physics and the emergence of quantum mechanics. Has philosophy similarly been again revolutionized? Some, I think, would say that it has as evidenced, and catalyzed, by the development of mathematical logic and concomitant rise of analytic philosophy. But this is a mistake. Mathematical logic, in particular, our standard first-order quantificational logic, as well as the philosophical work to which it has given rise, remains merely Kantian. The revolution in philosophy that is needed in the wake of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in mathematics and physics has yet to happen. I aim to help it along not only by showing that it has not yet been achieved but also by uncovering some of the resources required for a transformed logic.
In my talk, I wish to outline an alternative to a chapter in the history of modern philosophy, and present Kant’s tenets in the Critique of Pure Reason in the spirit of the Vienna Circle, the origin of analytic philosophy.
According to the traditional narrative, Kant overcame the limitations of British empiricism (Hume) and German rationalism (Leibniz) and with his “transcendental philosophy” raised philosophy to a new and superior level. Contemporary Leibnizian critics failed to appreciate the novelty of his approach. Although Kant complimented Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) for having best understood him among his critics, he saw no reason to accept Maimon’s criticism.
From the point of view of the Vienna Circle in the 1920-1930, the traditional narrative should be reversed. In the view of its members, there are no synthetic judgments a priori, and the Kantian project was therefore misconceived in principle. The “Kantian intermezzo”, as Neurath called it, should be skipped and philosophy should rather return to Hume and Leibniz. Exactly this was Maimon’s position. He characterized himself as a “rational dogmatist and empirical skeptic”, referring explicitly to Leibniz and Hume respectively.
I will present Maimon’s criticism of Kant’s synthetic judgments a priori and claim that it is valid. With this, questions concerning the progress of philosophy and its historiography will naturally rise.
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Gideon Freudenthal is professor emeritus at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University.
He is the author (or co-author) of:
Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton (1986)
Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics (1991)
Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis (2009)
No Religion without Idolatry. Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (2012)
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.