This past spring at the Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, the Society for Modern Philosophy hosted a panel about the Modern Canon featuring Lisa Shapiro and Justin E. H. Smith. Despite the panel occurring at dinner time on the final evening of the program, it was well attended, and led to some lively discussion during the Q&A. I am pleased to share the following documents with anyone who wasn’t able to attend the session.*
Lisa Shapiro: What is a Philosophical Canon
Justin Smith: The ‘Two Libraries Problem’: Poetry, ‘Fancy’, and the Philosophical Canon
The session and subsequent discussion were extremely interesting, and I hope that future SMP panels continue to be as fascinating and thought-provoking. Joining the society is free, and means receiving a handful of e-mails from me over the course of the year, as well as giving you the opportunity to help plan society events or projects.
*The piece by Smith shared here is a different—but related—work to the one presented at the session.
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Lewis Powell
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Stewart Duncan
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Kirsten Walsh
Thanks for posting these essays, Lewis. I was struck by the following passage in Lisa’s thought-provoking piece: “Philosophy, more than any other area of study, is distinguished not by the conclusion of its investigations, nor by the methods by which it arrives at those conclusions, but rather by how the investigation begins — by the questions that drive the philosophical investigation.” I’m not sure I agree with Lisa about this. I can start with a philosophical question, for example, “What is free will?” I can then write a poetic riff on the question: “What is free, you and me, and you see, not a tree, or a bee…” But the riff will not be philosophical unless it (a) proposes a (preferably general) thesis that counts as an answer to the question, and (b) defends the answer by means of arguments. Investigation that is shorn of such arguments is not philosophical. The arguments need not be in canonical form. They can be expressed in different ways. But if there is one thing you will find in the canonical figures, it is argumentation. This is not, I think, an accident. Although there is some argumentation in Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, we tend not to read it in philosophy courses. The same thing is true of Pope’s Essay on Man. We *will* assign parts of The Brothers Karamazov, but only the parts that involve arguments: “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”. So: poetry and fiction *can* belong in the philosophical canon, but not just because they raise philosophical questions: those questions must be approached in a certain way, a method that involves argument. Having said this, what I find notable about the exclusion of many women from the canon is that it is unjustified, even when the question-and-method conception of philosophy is accepted. Cavendish, Conway, Cockburn, Astell, Shepherd, Elisabeth, and more are all practicing philosophy by providing arguments for their general conclusions.
I’d like to reply to Sam’s objection by opening a can of worms. We like to think that philosophy essentially involves arguments, and there is some sense in which that is correct, but it is also not clear at all just what an argument is. In particular, in the context of the early modern period, we should not take an argument to be a syllogism. One of the ruptures of the 17th century is, quite interestingly, a rejection of the Aristotelian syllogism as capturing the order of reasoning. Logic, or the Art of the Thinking is a counter logic, one that appeals to an intuition we have about natural and conventional relations of ideas. If an argument is simply a relation of ideas that reflects the order of things, I don’t see why we cannot take works of literature or poems (good poems, not simple rhymes (or, ahem, limericks :)) as having arguments. In reading these fictions philosophically, we aim to make explicit the philosophical ideas and the reasons for them in terms that reflect our contemporary modes of expression. Equally, sometimes fictions provide us with complex thought experiments through which features of a philosophical position (and problems with it) are made clear. Think of Nicole Krauss’s _Man Walks into A Room_ and the problem of personal identity. That is, we aim to explicate the arguments that are there (whether that is the way the author presents it or not). I don’t think that we only need to read self-identified philosophers in philosophy classes, but I also don’t think we need to read philosophical texts that present arguments in the way we think either. Some more complicating cases: polemics — they are certainly argumentative, but are they philosophy (note: The Genealogy of Morals is subtitled a polemic).
I should also be clear that I am not advocating that every one teach the Essay on Man or Paradise Lost. But if someone has an interesting way of bringing it to bear in a philosophy class or an article, why not? Denying that these are philosophical, as Sam does, seems to me to be too prohibitive.
Hi Lisa,
I do not deny that Pope and Milton write philosophical prose. But this happens when they engage in argumentation. One *could* assign the parts of Paradise Lost in which Milton tries to justify the ways of God to human beings. But this is not optimal, given that poetry (at least, the form of poetry that is subject to constraints of meter and rhyme) is not the optimal way of representing an argument. There are better texts that make similar points, and those are the ones that should be assigned.
I agree that the 17th century marks the beginning of the end of the syllogism. Syllogistic logic is replaced by a theory of ideas connected, as Locke would put it, by relations of agreement. But this account of demonstration is loose and unhelpful, and has itself been superseded. I certainly wouldn’t want our choice of which texts to read to be determined, in whole or in part, by the patently inadequate theories of logic purveyed by the Arnaulds and the Lockes. An argument just isn’t a relation of ideas that reflects the order of things. So I deny the premise that you are using to justify assigning works of poetry (including limericks!) and fiction in philosophy classes.
I suspect, though, that what appears to be meta-philosophical disagreement here may end up as agreement *in practice*. I am happy to assign The Blazing World if it contains arguments. I am happy to assign Three Dialogues if it contains arguments. I am happy to assign “Rebellion” if it contains arguments (which it does). I am certainly happy to assign De Rerum Natura. But this is because it contains arguments, rather than musings or fancies or wordplay. In the end, I think we are drawn to assign similar texts, and I am opposed to the exclusion of, say, a text like The Blazing World merely on the grounds that it is not written as a treatise or essay. But if the work contains a great deal of irrelevant material (e.g., material setting up a plot, developing characters, etc.), then I will probably be looking for something else that will make the same points without the non-argumentative material. What I take issue with is the idea that what matters, more than anything else, is what questions a text raises. I think it far more important how the text *treats* the questions it raises.
Thanks Sam. I’m now losing sight of where we are disagreeing, because I am not clear that I understand what you mean by a method of argument. My point in appealing to 17th century logic was to maintain that there could well be a range of discursive activities that would rightly be called arguments within the period. But you are rejecting both that historical contextualisation and the view that all arguments are syllogistic, so I am not clear what you count as an argument *in a text*.
I suppose that I am less concerned with how the text treats the questions it raises than how *as readers* we engage with the texts we read. I would certainly agree that we engage philosophically with texts by explicating arguments we take to be contained in them regarding philosophical questions. Those arguments may be right on the surface of the text, but they can also be implicit, or tacit, and we, as philosophical readers, extract them. That makes the way that we, philosophers, approach a text different from the way that a literary scholar approaches a text (in many instances at least). But I suppose I don’t want to say that the text itself is doing much there. So here is an interesting text case: The Princess of Cleves is an early French novel (or really novella), and French literature folks look at it for all sorts of interesting innovations in writing character development. But it is also innovative in presenting the inner thoughts of its characters. My question (and I want to emphasize that this is a question, because I am not sure yet whether this is really workable) is whether this work can be taken to figure in the development of accounts of consciousnesss and concept of self that we do identify as happening precisely at the time the work was written. It is an empirical question of a sort whether the work can be read as in some sense of providing an argument by example for a particular view of self or of consciousness, but that is a way of _reading_ the text. Whether the text treats the questions in that way is a matter of the success of the reading, and not the matter of the text itself. My sense is, however, that you want to rule out the very possibility of the Princess of Cleves being a philosophical text because it does not wear its arguments on its sleeve, such as it were.
One way of thinking about the Princess of Cleves is as an radical case of illustrating the importance of interpretation. A less radical case that I take to illustrate the same point: Hume’s Treatise. I would suggest that what arguments one takes to be in the text depend on whether one reads the text as three discrete books, or as one work that contains an extended argument. So even in that most canonical cases, the arguments one finds in the work depends on how one reads it.
Thanks, Lisa. I think I was reacting to the quote with which I began my initial comment. It seemed to me that you were distinguishing philosophy by the questions that drive the investigation, rather than by the method(s) of arriving at an answer to them. I took it that these methods include argument. So I took it that you were suggesting that what method is used to answer a question is not relevant to whether the answer is philosophical.
Yikes about La Princesse de Cleves. Believe it or not, I read this in French Literature class as part of my preparation for the Bac in 1981. That’s taking me back, gee, I stopped counting how many years. An argument by example for a particular view of self or consciousness? That may be stretching the concept of an argument a bit further than makes me comfortable. Is the idea that Madame de La Fayette had a particular theory of the nature of the self or consciousness, one that she was illustrating through the novel? Is the thought that if one finds the characters’ expression of their own thoughts realistic, then that will confirm the theory? But that would be a rather indirect way of providing evidence for the theory. It might make sense to suppose that Madame de La Fayette has a particular psychological theory that lies behind the way in which she depicts her characters’ inner lives. But I’m not sure that that helps us read the novel as some sort of *argument* for the theory.
I am getting the sense that your conception of argument is quite a bit broader than mine. I am working with a conception according to which an argument consists of premises designed to establish the truth (or probable truth) of a particular conclusion. I’m thinking that philosophical works contain these sorts of arguments, but that the absence of such arguments takes one into different domains. There are, I think, borderline cases. Here I am thinking of works that consist in loosely connected or unconnected aphorisms or statements that constitute answers to philosophical questions. Because these works contain answers, I don’t mind thinking of them as philosophical. But without any arguments for the conclusions, I don’t see much reason to include them in the (new) canon. Anyone can offer answers. The hard part is backing them up with reasoning.
Reblogged this on Feminist Philosophers and commented:
Lewis Powell kindly posted the drafts of two great papers from the Pacific APA 2015 panel for the Society of Modern Philosophy. Lisa Shapiro and Justin Smith address questions about the nature of the philosophical canon, and in particular about why it is so narrow and excludes in particular women authors.
Reblogged this on Feminist History of Philosophy.
The discussion about genre, and in particular the differing genres of Descartes’s works, in Lisa’s essay had me wondering: is the modern genre to which Descartes’s Discourse is most usefully compared the genre of grant proposal? After all, look at the sections it contains: (1) personal narrative; (2) aims and methodology; (3) appeal for funding; (4) sample of previous and ongoing research. That certainly puts a new spin on things!
Thanks Sam. I do agree that I have a broad conception of an argument, but I worry that the conception that you are defending is too narrow. The idea that an argument is a set of premises designed to establish a truth (or probable truth) seems to me to bypass some quite important philosophical ideas. An obvious case, perhaps, is the cogito (I think the idea that the cogito is an argument has been rightly buried by now). But there is also Spinoza’s Causal Axiom EIA4, or Hume’s distinction between the vulgar, the philosopher, and the true philosopher (if there was an argument for that distinction, ‘Skepticism with Regard to the Senses’ would not be so challenging a read.)
The idea behind the Princess of Cleves is this: Starting with Montaigne, say, but certainly marked by Descartes, the early modern period involves a new conception of thought as involving necessarily consciousness or awareness, and associated with that is a conception of self. But explaining just what consciousness is, how it is tied to a notion of self, what the claim means, is particularly challenging and even the very notion is contested. (The exchange between Descartes and Gassendi in the Fifth Objections/Replies and Descartes and Hobbes in the Third Objections/Replies is some evidence of this.) So the premise of my argument is that the topic of consciousness and selfhood is a live philosophical question that is being discussed. Second premise: the discussion does not jump from Descartes to Locke. Locke is developing his conception of personal identity in the context of a larger discussion. Might not the Princess of Cleves be part of that context: an effort to demonstrate (not argue but demonstrate) a particular perspective on a contested concept of self-awareness. I suppose that is the hypothesis: the hopeful conclusion. But the argument needs to be fleshed out, and I would be the first to acknowledge that there is a lot of work to do.
One more thing, I did not take myself to be arguing for a new canon, if a canon involves central texts necessarily. Rather, I would prefer the canon to consist of a set of philosophical questions, to which an array of texts can be brought to bear in exploring a range of answers to those questions. I think there a lot of advantages to downplaying central figures while playing up the issues — not the least of which is providing an easy and intellectually principled way of diversifying the curriculum. But that being said, I recognize that some central figures will have staying power. Early Modern Philosophy without Descartes is hard for me to imagine (though of course, it took till the early 19th century and Victor Cousin to get people reading him religiously again), not unlike English without Shakespeare.
I’ve been thinking about this discussion between Sam and Lisa in the past few days. I find the need for an argument less compelling than Sam does, ever since,in my first years of teaching, when I was thrust into one of those Humanities deals where you had to teach a certain amount of everything. What got me through it was the realization that you could teach almost anything as philosophy if you put your mind to it. But what had to happen is that you had to be able to find significant philosophical questions. But I’m really drawn to the idea of arranging an early modern syllabus around questions which would allow naturally the introduction of more marginal figures, and if you can amuse the students with a piece of fiction on occasion, so much the better, although like Sam my memories of the Princess of Cleves are foggy but dubious.