Many Individuals currently identified within the academic world as ‘“professional”Footnote ¹ philosophers’ spend a great deal of time arguing about the meaning of their discipline. The situation has recently become so critical that the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, for example, self-consciously excludes the term ‘philosophy’ from its list of entries.Footnote ² An outsider might get the impression that members of the profession suffer from a recurrent kind of intellectual amnesia Footnote ³ and need constantly to be reminded about who they are and what their function is.

The simple response to this predicament is that most of us do know what philosophy is. The present puzzlement if not obfuscation is the result of three factors: (1) intellectual flaws in the two dominant movements in the profession today (analytic philosophy and deconstruction); (2) the locus of those movements is the university; and (3) the university has become the home of self-alienated intellectuals.Footnote ⁴ We shall have more to say about this later.

The complex response to this situation can be summarized in the following argument:

1. 1. There are alternative and conflicting perspectivesFootnote ⁵ on what constitutes philosophy.

2. 2. These views are articulated within the framework of a larger conversationFootnote ⁶ or cultural context.

3. 3. These conflicting perspectives on what constitutes philosophy have been present from the very beginning of the history of the discipline.

4. 4. Within this seemingly vast variety of perspectives we can identify three fairly stable patterns in constant dialogue with each other.

5. 5. Each of these three alternatives provides both an account for why there are alternative and conflicting views, that is, on why (1) is the case; proponents of each of the recognized perspectives in (1) provides an account of the alleged errors in the other perspectives.

6. 6. There is at present no consensualFootnote ⁷ or conceivable way in which to adjudicate among these perspectives. That is, there is no set of premises on which all of the disputants can agree and from which we can deduce a specific and contentful conception of philosophy.Footnote ⁸

7. 7. My claim is that the recognition of the foregoing is a profound truth that (a) tells us something important about ourselves, and (b) has normative implications for the practice of philosophy as a discipline. This claim is an instance of one of the perspectives.Footnote ⁹

Alternative Accounts of PhilosophyFootnote ¹⁰

To say, as I do, that there are alternative accounts of philosophy is to recognize the following historical claims: (a) the classical Greeks first articulated alternative accounts of philosophy; (b) much of the classical intellectual inheritance, including these philosophical viewpoints, was preserved as well as incorporated by Christianity and then transmitted to modernity; (c) the vast variety of perspectives can be fairly neatly categorized as one of three that I identify as Platonic, Aristotelian, and Copernican; (d) all philosophical movements up until now can be explained by reference to this Platonism-Aristotelianism-Copernicanism categorization; (e) the alternatives perspectives have an on-going history of interaction. This dialogue is integral to the history of philosophy; it explains why philosophy can never truly distance itself from its history; Footnote ¹¹ and why part of the great philosophic conversation is the question ‘What is Philosophy?’

The History of Philosophy Illustrated by the PAC Categorization

Let me briefly note some examples of the on-going dialogue among the three main philosophical perspectives. One might refer to these as alternative accounts of the alternative accounts.Footnote ³⁹ A good deal of the history of philosophy can be understood as a conversation among these three conceptions of philosophy.

1. 1. The Sophistic claim that ‘Man is the measure of all things’ is an early (anachronistic) expression of Copernicanism, and Socrates' attack on Protagoras is an early ‘Platonic’ reaction to it.

2. 2. Recall that Aristotle's initiation of philosophical discussion typically begins with a seemingly condescending review of the inadequacies of his predecessors all of which contribute to a teleological progression to his own views.

3. 3. Aristotle's relation to his predecessors is recapitulated by Aquinas' treatment of his predecessors. Aquinas refers to Aristotle as ‘The’ philosopher not ‘a’ philosopher.

4. 4. Varro and even Cicero recognized the unique character of historical explanation as opposed to (Aristotelian) philosophical explanation. Both of these writers heavily influenced Hume. Hume's History of England is a Copernican account of the rise of modern commercial republics as opposed to Hobbes' and Locke's appeal to the original contract, an Aristotelian notion.Footnote ⁴⁰

5. 5. Notice the usual epistemological classification of medieval philosophers as either Realist (Platonic), Conceptualist (Aristotelian), or Nominalist (Copernican).

6. 6. Epistemological skepticism is a recurrent position throughout the history of philosophy. I understand ‘skepticism’ generically to mean a recognition of the limits of discursive reason, limits revealed by identifying whatever is the failed current version of Aristotelian naturalism. All Aristotelian naturalistic anthologies of the so-called problems in philosophy invariably begin the epistemology section with a critique of skepticism.

7. 7. Aristotelian naturalists (e.g. Spinoza and Hobbes) can find no room for the radical ‘freedom of the will’. Platonists from Augustine to the present and some Copernicans (e.g. Kant) take this (internal) ‘freedom’ seriously and they do not confuse it with ‘liberty’ (mere absence of external constraint).

8. 8. Hume holds the most radical version of the Copernican position; he claims only to identify how human beings structure their experience (‘as long as the human mind remains the same’Footnote ⁴¹); he speculates on physiological, psychological, and cultural reasons for this structuring; but he denies that either he or anyone else can give a further explanation.Footnote ⁴²

9. 9. Kant ‘Platonizes’ the Copernican revolution by insisting on the absolute and timeless character of the mind.

10. 10. Hegel ‘Aristotelianizes’ the Copernican Revolution both by collapsing the subject-object distinction and construing ultimate reality as teleological.Footnote ⁴³ If there are no further permutations, then Hegel should be the last philosopher to offer a system of philosophy. And so he is.

11. 11. When modern Aristotelians need to respond to the incontrovertible historical dimension to thinking that modern philosophers (usually Copernicans of some sort) have identified, they invariably teleologize that history. Positivists, for example, even though they deny the relevance of history nevertheless endorse (without being able to establish intellectually) a progressive reading of the history of physical science such that objective truth is what scientists ultimately and eventually will agree upon ‘in the end.’Footnote ⁴⁴

12. 12. One modern version of Aristotelianism is Enlightenment Project scientism: The Enlightenment Project is the attempt to define and explain the human predicament through physical science and a derivative social science as well as to achieve mastery over it through the use of a social technology. This project originated in France in the eighteenth century with the philosophes. The most influential among them were Diderot, d'Alembert, La Mettrie, Condillac, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Turgot, Condorcet, Cabanis, and Voltaire. The Project continued during the nineteenth century in the work of Comte, the founder of positivism.Footnote ⁴⁵

13. 13. This vision of philosophy is proclaimed in the Positivist Manifesto of 1929 in which Comte is himself named as a precursor. The leading spokesperson for positivism was Carnap, and it was Carnap who officially co-opted and incorporated the work of Bertrand Russell. Moritz Schlick once characterized positivism as the rejection of the view that there are synthetic a priori truths. Here we have the Aristotelian rejection of Kant's version of Copernicanism.

14. 14. The dominant Aristotelian view in the profession today is analytic philosophy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Given its position of dominance, it is important to examine whether it and the discipline are illuminated by the PAC categorization. I have done so at length in my book The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation.Footnote ⁴⁷ I specifically exclude from the designation ‘analytic philosophy’ the movement known as ordinary language philosophy that originated with G.E. Moore. OLP was Aristotelian but it was never scientistic.Footnote ⁴⁸

15. 15. Wittgenstein's revolt against analytic philosophy was a Copernican reaction to positivist Aristotelianism. Carnap understood early on that Wittgenstein was not a member of the club. Michael Dummett's Aristotelian response to Wittgenstein's Copernicanism is to call Wittgenstein a ‘defeatist’. Analytic philosophers like to critique their Copernican opponents as ‘anti-foundationalist.’

16. 16. Heidegger's philosophical relationship to Husserl is parallel to Wittgenstein's relationship to Russell. In both cases we have a Copernican rejection of Aristotelianism.

17. 17. Collingwood has critiqued positivism (what I mean here by analytic philosophy) for assimilating philosophy ‘to the pattern of empirical science’Footnote ⁴⁹ and for being anti-philosophical.

18. 18. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) MacIntyre developed his theme of cultural cacophony, but also defended a special kind of Aristotelianism – the Thomistic theistic version, as the most coherent account of the moral life and its justification. He sets forth the thesis that some traditions are superior to others. His criterion is that a tradition is superior to others if it can resolve the problems and anomalies in those other traditions in such a way that supporters of the other traditions can come to understand why they cannot resolve those problems using only their own intellectual resources. MacIntyre illustrates this by showing how Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelianism and Augustinianism produces a tradition allegedly able to resolve problems unresolvable in both of its predecessors. He would later retract that claim and admit that you could not prove the superiority of any of the alternatives.Footnote ⁵⁰

Allow me to offer one extended example. Modern philosophy is usually focused on seven thinkers: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (so-called rationalists) as well as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (so-called empiricists), and finally Kant. This traditional and almost universally despised distinction nevertheless survives largely because so many contemporary philosophers are engaged in the intellectually incestuous activity of thinking that philosophers only read other philosophers and because of the continuing obsession with naturalistic epistemology.

In reality, the great ages of philosophy and the great philosophers are responding to much larger intellectual challenges. It is impossible to understand modern philosophy, that is, the philosophy of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, unless one realizes the extent to which that philosophy was a response to developments in modern science. It is no accident that Descartes, a mathematician and scientist, is almost always singled out as the first modern philosopher. Among other things, modernity begins with the collapse of the Aristotelian medieval world view with its organic, teleological, and hierarchical conception of the world. One simple way to capture that difference in scientific terms is to say that whereas Aristotelian physics was based on the assumption that rest was the natural state, modern physics from Galileo on starts with the assumption that motion is the natural state.

Confronted with this new view of the physical universe, how did scientists respond? They responded in two different ways that became identified with Descartes and Newton. Descartes argued for a homogeneous and pleonastic universe in which there is no distinction between space and matter; Newton took up and advocated Gassendi's atomism (along with Galileo's momentum). We thus had two conflicting scientific paradigms.

How did philosophers respond to the new science and its major protagonists? Some poured this new wine into old bottles and others fashioned a new bottle. The old bottles were the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Committed as they were to the belief in an autonomous reason, these philosophers could not see that Platonism and Aristotelianism were themselves constructs based on earlier views of the physical universe. To be a Platonist in this context is, among other things, to believe in a dualistic universe within which first principles are allegedly known a priori. To be an Aristotelian in this context is, among other things, to believe in a monistic universe within which first principles are allegedly ‘abstracted’ from experience.

The new bottle is expressed as the Copernican Revolution in Philosophy, wherein the first principles are structures that we project onto the world. The Copernican turn is the full articulation of looking at the world from a Newtonian point of view.Footnote ⁵¹

The geography of modern philosophy looked like this:

Current Debate on the Meaning of Philosophy: Is the Existence of Alternatives a Problem? a Crisis?Footnote ⁶⁴

If competing conceptions of philosophy is the historical norm, why is there a current debate? The current debate reflects a peculiar intellectual crisis. But what kind of crisis is this? No Copernican, for example, would be surprised by the existence of alternative conceptions of philosophy. That is exactly what one would expect in a world where order is a construct of the human imagination. I shall have more to say about this below. Moreover, a Platonist might be saddened but never surprised. There are those who see and those who do not; the latter live in the world of shadows.

The current crisis reflects the following:

1. 1. Philosophy is now housed within the University.

2. 2. The recent history of the university has involved three competing models described below as the Ivory Tower Model, the German Research Model (Enlightenment Project scientism), and the Utilitarian Model.

   1. a. The German Research Model has combined with the Utilitarian model,Footnote ⁶⁵ and given the spectacular success of the physical sciencesFootnote ⁶⁶ and government subvention, they have jointly triumphed over the Ivory Tower Model.

   2. b. As a consequence the traditional humanities (philosophy, history, and literature) have declined.

3. 3. Philosophy has survived by becoming a social science. In its analytic form, philosophy aspires to be the social science of science.

4. 4. Demise of philosophy as a legitimate discipline.

   1. a. If scientism is correct, then philosophy is superfluous.

   2. b. Analytic philosophy has failed intellectually to legitimate scientism. (Quine → Kuhn → Feyerabend)

   3. c. Analytic philosophy, by espousing a model of social scientific thinking called exploration, has failed in its attempt to deal with norms, that is, to identify, explicate, or legitimate them.

   4. d. Exploratory analytic philosophy has given rise to deconstruction.Footnote ⁶⁷

   5. e. Deconstruction has abandoned the Socratic role of philosophy and substituted an adversarial role.

The locus of philosophy is now in the academy. Philosophy as a discipline is being marginalized in the academy (higher education). Philosophy is being marginalized in three ways: absolutely, relatively, and intrinsically. Philosophy is being marginalized absolutely and this can be seen in the declining numbers of jobs and programs.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is being marginalized relatively in the sense that even where apparent growth takes place it is at a lower level than within other disciplines. Most of all, it is being marginalized in the sense that few people within the academic community see any crucial or central disciplinary role for philosophy in higher education, and the number dwindles as we speak.Footnote ⁶⁹

Why is Philosophy as a Discipline Being Marginalized? Try to understand the sense in which this question is being raised. We should not be misled by the willingness of people outside the academic world to pay lip service to the importance of philosophy. In reality, the educated public finds most of what academic philosophy has produced in the last half-century unintelligible and/or boring. Nor should we be misled by the self-congratulatory and reasonable surmise within the academy that academic philosophers are probably brighter than academics in other fields. Idiot savants get the same recognition. Nor should we be lulled by the frenetic activity we see at national meetings.

How did Philosophy lose its place? Philosophy lost its essential place along with the other humanities. So a further question is how did the humanities in general lose its place? This presupposes that we answer the question what was the place of the humanities? Going back to their origins at the University of Paris in the Middles Ages, the humanities were custodians of the Ivory Tower and as such their essential task was the articulation, preservation, critique and transmission of the fundamental values of civilization. Higher Education was understood as the initiation into that inheritance and as an adventure in self understanding. This conservative conception of education was ‘what ancient Athenians [had] called paideia… it was passed on…from the schools of the Roman Empire to the cathedral, the collegiate, guild and grammar schools of medieval Christendom. Moved by a vivid consciousness of an intellectual and moral inheritance of great splendor and worth, this was the notion of education which informed the schools of renaissance Europe and which survived into… [British] grammar and public schools and their equivalents in continental Europe.’Footnote ⁷⁰

The humanities defined and explicated the human condition. This role has been lost. Its usurpation began in the last half of the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment Project: (a) the cosmic order can be accessed through an autonomous human reason, freed of any higher authority, that (b) the human condition can be exhaustively defined by the sciences, and (c) that all human moral, social, and political problems could be resolved through a derivative social technology. Recall that this Project was doctrinairely and programmatically espoused by French philosophes. The Enlightenment Project was developed further in the 19th century by both Comte and various schools of German scientific materialism, and transmitted to the contemporary university with the German research model of higher education during the last half of the 19th century.

For almost a century, three paradigms vied for the attention of the university: the ivory tower paradigm, largely in liberal arts colleges with a religious affiliation, the German Research model and the utilitarian paradigm. The German research model is the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, perceiving the university as a set of graduate programs training professionals by focusing on the accumulation of knowledge in the spirit of the Enlightenment Project.

The utilitarian paradigm is the one wherein the university is seen as an institution for solving various and sundry social problems. In this model, the university exists as a means to social ends defined externally to the university itself. The spectacular successes of science and engineering and government subvention of higher education combined to make it possible for the German research model and the utilitarian model to uniteFootnote ⁷¹ in the form of the Enlightenment Project and displace the ivory tower, and along with it went the displacement of the humanities. We are familiar with this transition in the work of C.P. Snow on the ‘Two Cultures.’

Philosophy survived as a discipline by embracing the Enlightenment Project. Philosophy survived as the discipline which, allegedly, articulated the fundamental truths about Science, as the social science of Science, as well as the progenitor of scientific hypotheses about social phenomena from knowledge acquisition to public policy. In practice, this is indistinguishable from other social sciences. Philosophy becomes one of the social sciences! We see as well in the academy the (pseudo)social scientization of the other humanities (history, literature, and the arts).

Analytic philosophy is the current embodiment both of Aristotelianism as a conception of philosophy in general and the Enlightenment Project in particular. Aristotelians, as we have maintained above, are keenly interested in the operation of institutions. They see healthy institutions as having a clearly defined goal and successful individuals as those who help in the pursuit of that goal. Analytic philosophy as a version of Aristotelianism thereby tends to be hegemonic and monopolistic.Footnote ⁷² Aristotelians in the form of analytic philosophy insist upon an extraordinary intellectual hegemony, but they have been incapable of achieving it. My claim is that the intellectual failure of analytic philosophy, a form of Aristotelianism, exacerbates the loss of academic (and cultural) legitimacy.

The problem with the role that analytic philosophy has assumed is that it only makes sense if science is the fundamental way of accessing the cosmic order and the place of humanity with it. Philosophy as such is the self-appointed supreme discipline only if scientism is true. By scientism I understand the doctrine that science is the truth about everything and the ground of its own legitimacy. The difficulty is that science cannot legitimate itself intellectually. The Great tradition of Western philosophy has known this and repeatedly asserted this for about two thousand years (repeated critiques of Aristotelian naturalistic epistemology), but we had to spend the last half of the twentieth century waiting for most analytic philosophers to acknowledge this state of affairs. Please note that this is not a problem for the hard sciences, for they make no cosmic claims. It is a problem for those whose status depends upon the enthronement of scientism.

There is an even stronger way of identifying the crisis. If science could legitimate itself intellectually, what need would it have of philosophy (as its social science)? Philosophy appears as no more than a pre-scientific intellectual endeavor that has been superseded by science. Technology has passed philosophy by. To establish its importance in its own eyes, analytic philosophy needs the premise that scientists, as opposed to science, are incapable of articulating self-legitimation. Philosophy is the (self-appointed) supreme discipline because it alone has the rhetorical and intellectual resources to legitimate a practically powerful science whose practitioners, it is alleged, nonetheless cannot provide for its foundation.

Unfortunately, Aristotelians in the guise of analytic philosophers have failed to legitimate scientism. The current story of the demise of scientism is by now a familiar one.Footnote ⁷³ In ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Quine undermined traditional empiricism by asserting (a) that there is nothing independent of different conceptual schemes and (b) that different conceptual schemes are alternative readings of experience. Thesis (a) is an ontological relativism that contradicts the ontological empirical realism of (b). That is, Quine denied that there is an independent position from which to judge whether a conceptual scheme matches reality but embraced the semantic enterprise by asserting that the totality of knowledge must match reality. Kuhn in the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions used the history of science to discredit the conception of scientific theories as experimentally confirmable or disconfirmable. As Kuhn showed, scientists operate with paradigms that structure the way in which experiments are interpreted. Kuhn's work was followed by the more radical views of Feyerabend, who, in Against Method, argued that paradigms constituted the entire pre-theoretical context within which theoretical science operated. Science could not, therefore, serve as the arbiter among competing paradigms.Footnote ⁷⁴

By the time the failure of scientism was recognized, analytic philosophy had already done irreparable harm to the discipline. It had modeled the profession as a pseudo-social science with all of its trappings. Philosophers and students of philosophy read only articles by other philosophers in philosophical journals. The issues discussed therein were deemed worthy of discussion because other philosophers had discussed them. Whatever the larger framework that had given rise to the discussion was soon forgotten.Footnote ⁷⁵

For the explication of fundamental norms it has substituted research programs. It engages in a form of speculation I call exploration, that is, beginning with our ordinary understanding of how things work it goes on to speculate on what underlies those workings. It aims to change our ordinary understanding. The new understanding does not evolve from or elaborate the old understanding; rather, it replaces the old understanding by appeal to underlying structures. The underlying structures are allegedly discovered by appeal to some hypothetical model about those structures. Unlike legitimate physical science, the alleged hidden structures to which pseudo-social science appeals never get confirmed empirically. What we get is an unending series in which one faddish language replaces another. ‘As a consequence immense prestige is accorded to those individuals skillful in formulating clever, ingenious, and sometimes bizarre hypotheses. Ingenuity becomes the benchmark of success, and like present day movements in the arts leads to sudden shifts in fashion. Philosophy is the only discipline where whole careers and reputations are made on the basis of failed research programs.’Footnote ⁷⁶ In addition to these spurious research programs, we find bogus intellectual enterprises like philosophical psychology and artificial intelligence. In real science the hidden structure explanation saves the phenomena; in bogus philosophical psychology we dismiss or we redefine the phenomena to fit the theory. The appearances are called ‘folk psychology’ or we deny that beliefs and desires cause action.

A further consequence has been the special damage to axiology. By turning philosophy into a speculative social science, analytic philosophy revives the whole issue of the relationship between facts and values and thereby puts itself in the position of being hopelessly unable to deal with norms. In place of the identification and explication of fundamental norms, we are given hypotheses about the hidden structure of those norms. We have witnessed things as preposterous as the idea that one can provide a ‘theory’Footnote ⁷⁷ of ‘justice’.

It works something like this. The ‘theorist’ identifies in some arcane fashion a particular set of practices; the theorist speculates on the hidden structure behind those practices and formulates a model of that structure, complete with seemingly technical vocabulary; the alleged substructure licenses the theorist to decide which parts of the surface practice are legitimate and which are not. This turns axiology into a mask for private political agendas.Footnote ⁷⁸

And it gets worse. The only growth areas in philosophy are ‘applied’ ethics, bioethics and business ethics.Footnote ⁷⁹ To begin with, this creates the misleading impression that axiology is the application of a theory to practice – again, another invitation to promote private agendas. Many textbooks in these areas begin by treating the work of axiologists like Kant and Mill as theories called ‘deontology’ or ‘utilitarianism’. This is not only a caricature of the work of great philosophers but a gross misrepresentation. To make matters even worse, the textbooks go on to provide summaries of the major alleged flaws in these alleged theories, thereby leaving the reader with both a new ethical vocabulary and a cynical nihilistic attitude about normative issues. Curiously, applied ethicists are in great demand for providing you with a (sophistic) choice depending upon whatever public policy conclusion you want to legitimate.

The ultimate irony of the social-scientization of philosophy is that it has legitimated deconstruction.Footnote ⁸⁰ Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida embrace scientism by arguing that mathematical science is the best and only defensible ideal construct for thinking. They relentlessly pursue the consequences to which the scientific ideal has led. They begin with a hidden structure analysis of some textFootnote ⁸¹ or social phenomenon. They then find themselves confronted with the existence of a multiplicity of competing exploratory hypotheses. Denied independent and objective criteria for choosing among rival hypotheses, committed to the notion that their own hypothesis has some superior validity,Footnote ⁸² they offer a hidden structure analysis of the faults of rival hypotheses.Footnote ⁸³ That is, they offer a hidden structure analysis of other hidden structure analyses. Instead of civil discourse we see the rhetorical assassination of the character of our opponents. Socratic clarification has given way to adversarial confrontation.

Far from establishing the hegemony of analytic philosophy (scientistic Aristotelian naturalism), analytic philosophers have brought philosophy into disrepute, and they have opened the flood gates to irresponsible deconstruction. By making philosophy a kind of social science, analytic philosophy has promoted exploration as the model of thinking. Exploration encourages the formulation of hypotheses about hidden structure. Deconstructionists have carried this form of thinking to its logical conclusion. Both analytic philosophers and deconstructionists have abandoned the explication of the larger cultural context and have substituted programs of radical reform. They are no longer Socratic but adversarial. We have moved from the idea of rival visions of philosophy to the question of whether there is any such thing as philosophy!

Retrieving Philosophy

What they, namely, analytic writers and deconstructionists, should both argue, but have failed to, is that the pre-theoretical context of human values cannot be explained by any kind of theory about hidden structure. It is the failure to see this point that makes both groups anti-philosophical.

What is this pre-theoretical context? We find ourselves immersed in the world, a world in which it is not possible to talk about either it or ourselves independently of that immersion. How are we to understand ourselves? Our interaction with this world is not given to us ready made but requires an interpretive response on our part. Both our freedom and our responsibility are revealed in these interpretive responses. To be sure, our interpretive response does not occur in a vacuum but originates in a cultural context, that is, a context which is both social and historical. Epistemology is always social. Nevertheless, the cultural context does not dictate the response. There are no rules for the application of rules. This cultural context is itself something that we confront, that must be apprehended. In the course of that apprehension we are free to recognize its dissonant voices and internal tensions, to challenge parts of the cultural context, to reject parts of it, to modify parts of it. We are also free to extend the cultural context in ways that are not dictated by the context itself. What we are not free to do is to pretendFootnote ⁸⁴ that we can stand outside all frames of reference and by the appeal to an alleged autonomous reason privilege certain practices and de-legitimate others. Analytic philosophy proceeds from the assumption that we can rent the luxury skybox at the Archimedian Point. This is worse than epistemic hubris (thinking one can find the luxury skybox at the Archimedian Point); it's bad metaphysics—there is no skybox to rent because there is no Archimedian Point.

How can we best characterize this larger context? Since the time of the classical Greeks there has been a continuous set of reflective activities called philosophy. Those activities are designed to identify the norms of the other activates in the larger cultural context. As such, these activities fall into two categories:

First, philosophy has sought to identify the procedural norms of our thinking and discourse. We know this as analysis: explications of the logic of certain practices, and the clarification of the concepts that inform that practice. This is something that all three versions of philosophy can share. The analytic part is something that can always be taught and learned in varying degrees; from this springs the tendency for so much of philosophy to revert to a kind of scholasticism, especially in the academy.Footnote ⁸⁵

Let me list just a few of the prominent analyses from the history of philosophy. Notice that most if not all of these are negative in their import.

1. 1. Logic

   1. a. Socrates' stress on the importance of non-contradiction

   2. b. The recognition that first principles cannot be proven (Plato's Socratic notion of reminiscence, Aristotle's conception of teleology, Hume's notion of custom, Kant's conception of the synthetic a priori, Gödel on incompleteness, Wittgenstein's notion of practice, and Heidegger's ‘retrieval’)

   3. c. Aristotle's insistence that validity is not truth

   4. d. Epistemological skepticism is self-defeating (everybody)

   5. e. Discursive reasoning has limits (Kant)

2. 2. Science

   1. a. The substitution of Newtonian science for Aristotelian science means that all causation is efficient causation (Hume)

   2. b. The principle of verification is not itself an empirical truth

3. 3. Social world

   1. a. We cannot directly apprehend the self

   2. b. Norms are not ‘facts’ (but ‘facts’ presuppose norms)

   3. c. The Distinction between causes and reasons

4. 4. Philosophy

   1. a. philosophy is not a body of specific knowledge

   2. b. philosophy is a meta-engagement of human immersion, studying the other forms of immersion/activity and their relation to each other (Socratic)

   3. c. argumentative discourse is only one form of discourse, and it presupposes a larger cultural context that is more than discourse

   4. d. When philosophy is detached from the larger context it becomes dogmatic and eristic (Adversarial)

Second, there is the identification of the normsFootnote ⁸⁶ that undergird the larger cultural context. This is synthesis, the attempt to achieve a coherent vision of a culture's practices. The synthetic activity requires a breadth of imagination that is much rarer and cannot be taught in the sense that there is an algorhythm.

Let me note just a few of the prominent syntheses from the history of philosophy.

1. 1. Aristotle'sFootnote ⁸⁷ explication of the Greek Polis.

2. 2. Augustine's explication of Christianity integrating its Hebrew, Greek and Latin sources.

3. 3. Locke's explication of modernity integrating science, commercial economies, and representative government.

4. 4. Oakeshott's delineation of a civil association.

Notice what all of these syntheses have in common: they are conservative. They are conservativeFootnote ⁸⁸ in the senses that they presuppose a prior moral community; they seek to identify the norms inherentFootnote ⁸⁹ in current institutional practice and to raise the issue of their coherence.Footnote ⁹⁰

What distinguishes the exploratory thinking of so many analytic philosophers and deconstructionists is that their agenda is to delegitimate current institutional practice. They are adversarial. It is not the case that being adversarial is always wrong; it is the case that being adversarialFootnote ⁹¹ requires or presupposes agreement on, or explication of, a prior normative framework. What analytic philosophers and deconstructionists have done is to be adversarial without prior philosophical explication.Footnote ⁹² This is disingenuous. Current attempts to address normative issues by both analytic philosophers and deconstructionistsFootnote ⁹³ are a travesty of philosophical speculative thinking.

Summary

Philosophy has a special role to play. That special role is comprised of two parts, pedagogical and cultural. The pedagogical role is making us self-conscious, aware of our basic presuppositions. This is analysis; it can be taught; and, thankfully, it can be practiced outside of the discipline, the profession and the academy. The cultural role is the fashioning of a narrative that brings the presuppositions of an entire array of cultural practices into some sort of coherent synthesis. This is a role that has been unique to philosophy or to those we identify as great philosophers, even though many of them have played that role outside of the academy.Footnote ⁹⁴

This is a special role, but it is not an authoritative role.Footnote ⁹⁵ To engage in this activity is to offer a vision that is not an argument, although it may contain arguments within it. Moreover, identifying presuppositions is different from the application of those presuppositions or the challenging of some of those presuppositions in the light of others. It is a role that acknowledges the freedom of the imagination, the autonomy of choice, and in the contemporary context the goodness or validity of a civil Footnote ⁹⁶ association. It is a role that can never be played by self-alienated and self-proclaimed elites who strive to reveal to others their respective roles and beliefs and actions within an enterprise association. So many prominent members of the profession are so unreflectively hostile to modern commercial societies that they have incapacitated themselves from providing a vision: Rorty, MacIntyre, Blackburn, Derrida, Foucault, to name just a few.Footnote ⁹⁷ A large part of the hostility of many intellectuals to modern commercial societiesFootnote ⁹⁸ is that such societies are not enterprise associations requiring a clerisy.Footnote ⁹⁹

Let me elaborate. Oakeshott distinguished between an enterprise association and a civil association. An enterprise association has a collective goal to which everything and everyone is subordinated; when the society overall is an enterprise association it is traditional, authoritarian or even totalitarian; no other enterprise associations are tolerated. A civil association has no such collective goal but is characterized by procedural norms within which individuals pursue their personal goals. A society which is overall a civil association may contain within it a multitude of enterprise associations (families, religions, the military, a business, etc.) such that individuals may voluntarily enter and exit from them. This is what a liberal society is in the generic sense. Modern western polities are civil associations held together by agreement on the procedural norms (e.g. due process). Different individuals may belong to a variety of different substantive moral communities which function for them as enterprise associations.

In civil associations such as our own, intellectuals do not play a leadership role. At best they may help to identify the procedural norms and even offer a larger vision of how the norms of various institutions interact (see below), but they cannot offer an authoritative account of the substantive norms of the entire society. Intellectuals (including clergy) cannot offer an authoritative account of the good life for that is something that each individual determines for herself or himself. In civil associations such as ours leadership comes from the business and legal community. Both Platonists and traditional Aristotelians reflect the enterprise associations of the classical and medieval world, and that is why they (a) find appeals to group membership irresistible and (b) invariably favors top-down direction of society by the government. The adherence to classical models in the modern context leads to hostility to modern economic, political, legal, and social institutions. You cannot provide a comprehensive philosophical understanding of a cultural context to which you are in permanent adversarial opposition. Modern civil associations are best captured by Copernicans.

The further analogy I would like to draw is the following. Just as Platonists, but Aristotelians especially, are unhappy with modern civil associations so they are unhappy with the idea of living with competing conceptions of philosophy. They are inexorably driven by the logic of their position to seek hegemony.

The existence of rival versions of philosophy leads to rival versions of the university. Each of these rival views has a different conception of epistemology and therefore of academic practice. Consider some of the current standard alternatives: Bloom's notion of the Great Books is to select them, read them and discuss them from a pre-modern but non-theological Aristotelian point of view. Analytic philosophers focus on the lecture as the authoritative presentation of fact, but offer quasi-socialist hidden structure analyses of social institutions disguised as scientific fact. Deconstructionists use the lecture as a rhetorical discrediting of the analytic agenda and the ‘smuggling in’ of their own. MacIntyre advocates a university where ‘rival and antagonistic views of rational justification’ can be debated and where teachers “initiate students into conflict.” What all of these foregoing views share in common is hostility to modern commercial societies.

For Oakeshott, on the other hand, liberal learning is the unique ordering of our experience in our imagination. It is what makes us individuals with a voice of our own. Before we can have that voice we must participate through the voices of others. Our inheritance is a set of cultural achievements and practices, not a doctrine to be learned (contra Bloom and MacIntyre). The inheritance is recreated through appropriation, is not homogeneous and has no definitive formulation. The Great Authors do not speak as one voice with one message, but they do provide the context in which we achieve and sustain our freedom. To hear and respond to different voices is not to be initiated into conflict. The teacher who facilitates this initiation both into the inheritance and into discovering one's own voice, in the end, helps others to discover their own freedom and responsibility. It is only through interaction with our inheritance that we become what we are. It is in this sense that education is a conversation with many voices. The role of the teacher is to help the student come to know his/her voice by hearing it echoed in the conversation and to join the conversation first by speaking in the voices of others and, eventually, in his/her own voice. Rather than initiation into conflict, the student learns the ethics of conversation.

If the discipline of Philosophy is to play a significant intellectual role, then it must provide a coherent narrative of our intellectual inheritance, situate itself within it, and accept the challenge of achieving a coherent cultural framework. In its present major forms, the discipline is unable or unwilling to do that. Contemporary philosophy must find an alternative way of proceeding if it is to avoid being marginalized within the larger cultural context, and if it is to play a significant role in the articulation of our fundamental procedural values. We are not suggesting an entirely new direction. On the contrary, we have urged a return to the main track of western philosophy, a recapturing of the richer understanding of ourselves that is preserved in the western philosophical inheritance.

The act of retrieving this common framework is neither reactionary nor anachronistic. Retrieving our framework is not a simple matter of uncritically returning to the past. Instead, it is the re-identifying of something that is a permanent part of the human condition even though it is always expressed in specific historical contexts. The framework is not a rigid structure but a fertile source of adaptation that not only evolves but also expands to incorporate things that might from an earlier perspective seem alien. The fact that these truths are always contextualized means that the act of retrieval through explication inevitably involves a reformulation. To encompass the past is to make it our own in some fashion. Since the retrieval is not solely an intellectual act, we should not be surprised that there is (a) no definitive articulation, (b) inevitable controversy over its articulation, and (c) a necessary act of faith in its continuing apprehension.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Controversy is not a problem to be solved but an inevitable condition that requires a moral response.

In sketching an alternative to analytic philosophy and deconstructionist philosophy, we can recapture the central cultural role of philosophy – the articulation of the inheritance and the provision of a coherent framework.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Philosophy can be restored as the conscience of the culture and in a way that is Socratic. As long as professional philosophy confuses its Socratic role with an adversarial stance it cannot perform that role. A coherent narrative does not preclude (a) different voices, (b) internal tensions, or (c) critique, but it does presuppose the endorsement of the fundamental norms of one's community of discourse. Given the present estrangement of University intellectuals from modern culture, perhaps this is a welcome opportunity for philosophy as a discipline to provide constructive leadership for the entire intellectual and academic world.