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Abstract
In this essay I consider what is (or should be) meant by the description ‘great’ philosophy and then offer some broadly applicable criteria by which to assess candidate thinkers or works. On the one hand are philosophers in whose case the epithet, even if contested, is not grossly misconceived or merely the product of doctrinal adherence on the part of those who apply it. On the other are those – however gifted, acute, or technically adroit – to whom its application is inappropriate because their work cannot justifiably be held to rise to a level of creative-exploratory thought where the description would have any meaningful purchase. I develop this contrast with reference to Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘normal’ science, and also in light of J.L. Austin’s anecdotal remark – à propos Leibniz – that it was the mark of truly great thinkers to make great mistakes, or (on a less provocative interpretation) to risk falling into certain kinds of significant or consequential error. My essay goes on to put the case that great philosophy should be thought of as involving a constant (not just occasional) readiness to venture and pursue speculative hypotheses beyond any limits typically imposed by a culture of ‘safe’, well-established, or academically sanctioned debate. At the same time – and just as crucially – it must be conceived as subject to the strictest, most demanding standards of formal assessment, i.e., with respect to basic requirements of logical rigour and conceptual precision. Focusing mainly on the work of Jacques Derrida and (at greater length) Alain Badiou I suggest that these criteria are more often met by philosophers in the broadly ‘continental’ rather than the mainstream ‘analytic’ line of descent. However – as should be clear – the very possibility of meeting them, and of their being jointly met by any one thinker, is itself sufficient indication that this is a false and pernicious dichotomy.
Notes
1 Jonathan Bennett, ‘Spinoza on Error’, Philosophical Papers 15 (1986), pp. 59–73, p. 59.
2 See especially J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
3 Ibid., p. 80.
4 See especially P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966).
5 Jonathan Bennett, Learning from Six Philosophers, Vol. One: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
6 Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); also Norris, ‘Catching Up with Spinoza: Naturalism, Rationalism, and Cognitive Science’, in Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason, and the Venture of Thought (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 139–64; esp. pp. 140–43.
7 Bennett, ‘Spinoza on Error’, p. 59.
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964); also – of particular relevance here – Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
9 For some highly informative discussion, see Beth Lord, Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (London: Macmillan 2011).
10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
11 See Gottlob Frege, ‘Review of Edmund Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik’, trans. E.-H. W. Kluge. Mind 81 (1972), pp. 321–37.
12 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Phenomenology’ and ‘Phenomenology versus The Concept of Mind’, in Collected Papers, Vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1971), pp. 167–78 and 179–96; also Leila Haaparanta (ed.) Mind, Meaning, and Mathematics: Essays on the Philosophical Views of Husserl and Frege (Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer, 1994).
13 Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytic Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993).
14 See for instance Christopher Norris, Minding the Gap: Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) and On Truth and Meaning: Language, Logic and the Grounds of Belief (London: Continuum, 2006).
15 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph, Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 172–97; John R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences’, ibid., pp. 198–208; Derrida, ‘Limited Inc abc’, Glyph, Vol. 2 (1977), pp. 75–176; also Derrida, ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Conversation’, in Gerald Graff (ed.) Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 111–54.
16 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
17 See especially W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); also Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
18 For further argument to this effect, see Norris, On Truth and Meaning; also Susan Haack, Deviant Logic: Some Philosophical Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
19 See also Paul Livingston, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (London: Routledge, 2011) and Christopher Norris, Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative (London: Continuum, 2012).
20 Jacques Derrida, ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri.C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981); Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
21 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005); also Christopher Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2009).
22 See for instance Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003); Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004); Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005); Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006); The Century, trans. Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Conditions, trans. Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2009); Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (London: Polity Press, 2011).
23 Kurt Gödel, ‘On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems’, trans. B. Meltzer (New York: Basic Books, 1962); see also S. G. Shanker (ed.) Gödel’s Theorem in Focus (London: Routledge, 1987).
24 See esp. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy.
25 See Badiou, Being and Event and Manifesto for Philosophy; also his Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
26 Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’.
27 See Alain Badiou, ‘Theory of the Pure Multiple: Paradoxes and Critical Decision’, in Being and Event, pp. 38–48; also – for an excellent primer – Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
28 See Badiou, Being and Event; also Ethics: An Essay on Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso 2001).
29 See Badiou, Metapolitics.
30 Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.
31 Paul J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York: W. Benjamin, 1966).
32 For an earlier text that treats these issues from a different though closely related standpoint, see Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009).
33 See Badiou, ‘Platonism and Mathematical Ontology’, in Theoretical Writings, pp. 49–58; Plato, Meno, ed. J. Seymer Thompson (London: Macmillan, 1901).
34 See especially Paul Benacerraf, ‘What Numbers Could Not Be’, in Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (eds) The Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 272–94; also W.D. Hart (ed.) The Philosophy of Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
35 See especially Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy.
36 See for instance Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982) and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
37 Kim, Supervenience and Mind.
38 For further discussion of these issues in philosophy of science, see Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); also Christopher Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) and Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism (London: Routledge, 2004).
39 Philip Kitcher, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
40 Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1993).
41 J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (New York: Harper, 1874), pp. 430ff; Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, trans J. L. Austin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974); also Kitcher, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge and Christopher Norris, ‘Who’s Afraid of Psychologism? Normativity, Truth, and Epistemic Warrant’, in On Truth and Meaning, pp. 12–40.
42 Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), Book II, Proposition vii.
43 Plato, Parmenides, trans. Mary L. Gill and Paul Ryan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). For further discussion see also John A. Palmer, Plato’s Reception of Parmenides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
44 Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis.
45 See Notes 10, 17 and 36, above.
46 Paul de Man, ‘Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 246–66.
47 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), Sections 201–92 passim.
48 Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); also Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright (eds) Rule-Following and Meaning (Chesham: Acumen, 2002) and Norris, ‘Kripkenstein’s Monsters: Anti-Realism, Scepticism, and the Rule-Following Debate’, in On Truth and Meaning, pp. 155–202.
49 See Note 17, above; also Norris, ‘The Blank and the Die: More Dilemmas of Post-Empiricism’, in On Truth and Meaning, pp. 102–29.
50 Norris, Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative.
51 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010).