Jun 3, 2016 06:26 PM
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/socrates-of-amazonia/
EXCERPT: [...] "The Philosopher: A History in Six Types" is an iconoclastic account of what philosophy has been over the longue durée. It makes sense to talk about the long-term when it comes to philosophy because unlike most departments in the modern university philosophical activity seems to have a niche in every society in recorded history, and therefore it has perhaps more in common with age-old professions like war, storytelling, and sex-work than with the other humanities and sciences. Philosophy is so primitive and socially basic that its domestication in the university can seem a dubious proposition or a laughable reduction.
But it’s also a credentialed and systematized modern discipline: that’s not a mere fantasy of professionalization. Thus [J.E.H] Smith concludes that “philosophy,” over the long history of the word and the concept, has meant several distinct (albeit closely related) professions or kinds of activity: there is no single definition of philosophy or the philosopher that can account for its history or present variety. "The Philosopher" offers a typology of these kinds: the philosopher as curiosa, sage, gadfly, ascetic, mandarin, and courtier.
“This list,” Smith cautions, “is not exhaustive, and it is not obtained by rigorous deduction […] but what we will find is that our six types, and various hybrids between them, give us enough to make sense of the life work and the social impact of more or less everyone called a ‘philosopher’ over the past few millennia.”
The book undermines academic pieties not just in its thesis but in its form: it combines a bewildering variety of expository genres. These range from straightforward conceptual or philological analysis of the word “philosopher,” to fictional interludes presenting first-person dramatic monologues, to historical anecdotes and autobiographical reminiscences. [...]
Of course in order to defend his claims about the variety of things philosophy has been, Smith has to defend his pluralism from the artificial boundaries set up by modern professional philosophy. Academic philosophers are very keen to say what philosophy isn’t, often without regard for the history of the term or the possibility that philosophy, even today, can be found in places outside the university. So in the course of expounding his types Smith rejects one by one several spurious distinctions between the philosophical and non-philosophical.
The first such distinction is between the study of particular things and universal or abstract truth. Most philosophy PhDs would reject the idea that the study of intestinal worms or the classification of new types of fern are philosophical activities. But in fact the oldest usage of the word philosopher, and what it has meant for long stretches of its recorded history, is precisely the study of particular things. This fact blasts the essentialist distinction between philosophy and science that practically defines the modern self-conception of philosophers since Kant. Although there are several contemporary strands of philosophy that attempt to assert the unity of philosophical and scientific knowledge, most notably the “experimental philosophy” movement, Smith argues that,
[...] Perhaps the most controversial and interesting of his polemics is against the idea that philosophy belongs to a specific historical tradition stemming from the ancient Greeks. [...] there is a tradition—which he calls Philosophia—stemming from the ancient Greeks. [...] The six darsanas of Hindu philosophy overlap in unmistakable ways with some of the conceptual territory in Philosophia. The darsana known as Nyāya, for example, involves ideas and inquiries that would make perfect sense to a modern logician, and much material from the Mīmāṃsā darsana would sound familiar to a philosopher of language. [...] What sort of thing is philosophy, then? Smith proposes three analogies to sort out our options....
EXCERPT: [...] "The Philosopher: A History in Six Types" is an iconoclastic account of what philosophy has been over the longue durée. It makes sense to talk about the long-term when it comes to philosophy because unlike most departments in the modern university philosophical activity seems to have a niche in every society in recorded history, and therefore it has perhaps more in common with age-old professions like war, storytelling, and sex-work than with the other humanities and sciences. Philosophy is so primitive and socially basic that its domestication in the university can seem a dubious proposition or a laughable reduction.
But it’s also a credentialed and systematized modern discipline: that’s not a mere fantasy of professionalization. Thus [J.E.H] Smith concludes that “philosophy,” over the long history of the word and the concept, has meant several distinct (albeit closely related) professions or kinds of activity: there is no single definition of philosophy or the philosopher that can account for its history or present variety. "The Philosopher" offers a typology of these kinds: the philosopher as curiosa, sage, gadfly, ascetic, mandarin, and courtier.
“This list,” Smith cautions, “is not exhaustive, and it is not obtained by rigorous deduction […] but what we will find is that our six types, and various hybrids between them, give us enough to make sense of the life work and the social impact of more or less everyone called a ‘philosopher’ over the past few millennia.”
The book undermines academic pieties not just in its thesis but in its form: it combines a bewildering variety of expository genres. These range from straightforward conceptual or philological analysis of the word “philosopher,” to fictional interludes presenting first-person dramatic monologues, to historical anecdotes and autobiographical reminiscences. [...]
Of course in order to defend his claims about the variety of things philosophy has been, Smith has to defend his pluralism from the artificial boundaries set up by modern professional philosophy. Academic philosophers are very keen to say what philosophy isn’t, often without regard for the history of the term or the possibility that philosophy, even today, can be found in places outside the university. So in the course of expounding his types Smith rejects one by one several spurious distinctions between the philosophical and non-philosophical.
The first such distinction is between the study of particular things and universal or abstract truth. Most philosophy PhDs would reject the idea that the study of intestinal worms or the classification of new types of fern are philosophical activities. But in fact the oldest usage of the word philosopher, and what it has meant for long stretches of its recorded history, is precisely the study of particular things. This fact blasts the essentialist distinction between philosophy and science that practically defines the modern self-conception of philosophers since Kant. Although there are several contemporary strands of philosophy that attempt to assert the unity of philosophical and scientific knowledge, most notably the “experimental philosophy” movement, Smith argues that,
Quote:a more thorough reunification [of philosophy and science], one that is closer to the spirit of early modern […] philosophy, would be one that does not simply adopt the methods of one branch of empirical science—psychology in the case of recent experimental philosophy […] Rather, it would see the making of contentful claims about the world as themselves fully and unproblematically philosophical.
[...] Perhaps the most controversial and interesting of his polemics is against the idea that philosophy belongs to a specific historical tradition stemming from the ancient Greeks. [...] there is a tradition—which he calls Philosophia—stemming from the ancient Greeks. [...] The six darsanas of Hindu philosophy overlap in unmistakable ways with some of the conceptual territory in Philosophia. The darsana known as Nyāya, for example, involves ideas and inquiries that would make perfect sense to a modern logician, and much material from the Mīmāṃsā darsana would sound familiar to a philosopher of language. [...] What sort of thing is philosophy, then? Smith proposes three analogies to sort out our options....