To school with the poets: philosophy, method and clarity

Abstract

There is a longstanding difficulty in distinguishing philosophy (and philosophy of education) from other kinds of writing. Even the notions of clarity and rigour, sometimes claimed as central and defining characteristics of philosophy at its best, turn out to have ineliminably figurative elements, and accounts of philosophical method often display the very rhetoricity that they describe philosophy as concerned to avoid. It is tempting to wonder how far notions of philosophy as austere and analytic are responsible for ideals of educational research as unnaturally tidy and formal, and even for conceptions of the practice of education in schools and universities as focused on targets, performance indicators and statistics. Perhaps the nature of philosophy is best understood through its history. Then the philosopher must “go to school” not only with the poets, but also with the historians, so that the disciplinary divisions here become ever harder to mark out, to the enrichment of those who practise them.

Keywords:

• philosophy
• rhetoric
• poetry
• clarity
• rigour

Notes

¹ Much here would also turn on whether we have in mind the UK, Anglophone countries, or continental Europe. This paper makes no reference to Eastern philosophical traditions, which are outside my competence.

⁵ Ibid.

² R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 1.

³ Ibid., p. 2.

⁴ Ibid., p. 210.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid., p. 209.

⁸ Ibid., p. 210.

⁹ Ibid., p. 211.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 211.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 213.

¹² Ibid., p. 212.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 212–213.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 213.

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 214‐5.

¹⁶ Ibid., end of p. 213.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 214.

¹⁸ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 213.

²¹ Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 3.

²⁵ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), section 6.53.

²² Bertrand Russell, letter to Ottoline Morrell, quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 47.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, early draft of the foreword to Culture and Value, quoted by Monk (ibid.), p. 300.

²⁹ Ibid.

²⁶ John Wilson, “‘Mental health’ as an aim of education,” in Education and the Development of Reason, ed. R.F. Dearden, P.H. Hirst and R.S. Peters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 90.

²⁷ Richard Peters, The education of the emotions, ibid., p. 472.

²⁸ Hugh Sockett, “Curriculum planning: taking a means to an end,” in The Philosophy of Education, ed. R.S. Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 154.

³² Randall Curren, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 3. The emphases are in the original.

³⁰ Randall Curren, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 3.

³¹ Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (London: Faber, 1972), Act I, Scene 2.

³³ Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 48.

³⁴ Jenni Russell, “‘Balls’ test answer? More of the futile, top‐down plans that Labour loves,” Guardian, 28 July, 2008.

³⁵ Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), p. 20.

³⁶ For Hume, Newton’s achievements and his stature are such that he feels no need to mention Newton’s name explicitly: “a philosopher, at last, arose, who seems, from the happiest reasoning, to have also determined the laws and forces, by which the revolutions of the planets are governed and directed. The like has been performed with regard to other parts of nature. And there is no reason to despair of equal success in our enquiries concerning the mental powers and economy, if prosecuted with equal capacity and caution.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), I. 9.

³⁷ The case is made energetically by Toulmin, ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid., § 133.

³⁸ “A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’…. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), § 122.

³⁹ Ibid., § 309.

⁴² Letter to Norman Malcolm, quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 475.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), § 130.

⁴⁴ Ibid., § 97.

⁴⁵ Ibid., § 108.

⁴⁶ Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 8.

⁴⁷ Jonathan Rée, Philosophical Tales (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 3.

⁴⁸ Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 26.

⁴⁹ Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 25.

⁵⁰ Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 115, 118.

⁵¹ Barbara Johnson, “Rigorous unreliability,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 76.

⁵² Johnson continues: “philosophy’s self‐definition relies on a claim to rigour that is subverted by the literariness of its rhetoric of truth, but it is precisely that literariness that turns out to be the very model for philosophical rigor. Philosophy is defined by its refusal to recognise itself as literature; literature is defined as the rhetorical self‐transgression of philosophy.”