User talk:MilesMoney/OCP

In order to allow reasoned debate about Ayn Rand and Objectivism as amateur, I've taken advantage of fair use to bring you the "popular philosophy" entry from Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd Ed., complete and unexpurgated. I've very lightly wikified it to preserve italics and to make a table of contents. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but for the purpose of understanding this debate, you just have to read the first paragraph and the second sub-section. MilesMoney (talk) 15:45, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Anthony Quinton on "popular philosophy"

popular philosophy. There are three main kinds of popular philosophy: first, general guidance about the conduct of life; secondly, amateur consideration of the standard, technical problems of philosophy; thirdly, philosophical popularization.

Type 1: General guidance

At the start some recognition should be given to a movement explicitly called ‘popular philosophy’ in mid and late eighteenth-century Germany. Its leader was Moses Mendelssohn, and it set itself against obscure technicalities and systematic elaboration, in the interests of closeness to experience and usefulness for life. The acquisition of imperial authority by Kant soon put an end to this project, and installed a style of German philosophy from which even Christian Wolff would have shrunk.

General guidance about the conduct of life is what is colloquially meant by the word ‘philosophy’ and is what most people expect from philosophers and are, for the most part, disappointed not to receive from them. Dispensing such guidance soon became an important aspect of Greek philosophy. It began with Socrates’ attacks, through the mouth of Plato, on the calculating amorality of his Sophist contemporaries, permeated Aristotle’s Ethics, and became the main substance of philosophy in the long epoch from the reign of Alexander the Great to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Stoics and Epicureans did not wholly ignore logic and ‘physics’, which Aristotle saw as making up philosophy, together with ethics. But, especially in the Roman period, in Epictetus, Seneca, and others, the ethical element was overwhelming.

In the Middle Ages, only the clergy were literate and educated, and guidance for the conduct of life became professionalized and legalistic. The moral life, directed as it was towards the eternal, disdained man’s earthly existence and took little account of personal individuality. Philosophy, in so far as it touched non-philosophers, was official and authoritative. The humanism of the Renaissance reversed all that. The diversity of human beings was celebrated, as in the Colloquies of Erasmus. The rational, if unsystematic, exposition of Leben-sweisheit emerged in the form of the essay, in Montaigne and, then, by imitation, in Bacon (whose essays were, in fact, congelations of aphorisms). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the moralistes of France, such as the rather laboriously cynical La Rochefoucauld, had an earnest British associate in Samuel Johnson, a lively American one in Benjamin Franklin, and a brilliant German one in Lichtenberg. Chamfort, who died in 1794, is a latter-day moraliste; the rough and hearty William Cobbett of Advice to Young Men is a more likeable Franklin. Addison’s Spectator essays are a bland English version of the same sort of thing. By the end of the eighteenth century, prudence, and the idea of rational management of life, had been obscured by the clouds of romanticism.

One major philosopher of the nineteenth century applied himself with supreme wit and penetration to Lebensweisheit: Schopenhauer, mainly in the non-technical parts of his Parerga und Paralipomena. Nietzsche may be seen as carrying on the same task, for which he was marvellously equipped as a writer but hopelessly unfitted as a human being. Earlier in the century Emerson had addressed himself to the subject; towards its end Shaw, particularly in his prefaces, dispensed a great deal of advice, in the style of Samuel Butler, whom he much admired. Together they dismantled Victorian respectability for the English-speaking world.

Perhaps the most distinguished popular philosopher of the present century was Alain (Émile Chartier), who published his thoughts in several thousand 600-word pieces in a daily paper. Havelock Ellis, John Cowper Powys, and Aldous Huxley were less copious but comparably influential. On a more modest level is the American Sydney Harris, a syndicated columnist, raised above such writers as Ann Landers and Abby by the generality of his concerns. G. K. Chesterton contributed marginally to the tradition, as did such aphorists as Logan Pearsall Smith and Gerald Brenan. In the last three decades professional philosophers, after a long period of abstention from anything but the most abstract and uncommitted attention to problems of conduct and practice, have resumed a measure of direct involvement, mainly at the political or collective level, but to some extent more personally, as in Richard Robinson’s An Atheist’s Values and Robert Nozick’s unkindly treated The Examined Life.

Type 2: Amateur philosophy

The second kind of popular philosophy, namely amateur philosophy, presupposes the existence of professional philosophy to define itself against. That, in effect, is much the same thing as institutionalized philosophy, which was to be found in ancient Greece with Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and the other Athenian schools; emerged again, by way of cathedral schools, in the medieval efflorescence of universities from the twelfth century onwards; but subsided, with the Renaissance, until the slow revival of universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that last gap all notable philosophers, from Descartes to Hume, were, formally, amateurs. Amateur philosophy as a genre is really a creation of the nineteenth century with its mass literacy and self-education

Coleridge, for all his plagiarism and incoherence, is too substantial to count as an amateur. Carlyle was a prophet rather than any sort of philosopher, as was Ruskin. Herbert Spencer achieved a sort of professionality by the sheer bulk of his output. The historian of philosophy J. D. Morrel was a school inspector like Arnold. J. H. Stirling, the enraptured expositor of Hegel, was a doctor. Shadworth Hodgson was a gentleman-philosopher with private means. More perfect cases are the eighth duke of Argyll, Secretary of State for India among other things, and James Hinton, author of The Mystery of Pain. A. J. Balfour was about as grand as, and a better philosopher than, the duke of Argyll.

In the twentieth century amateur systems increasingly failed to find their way into print; most of them languished in typescript and photocopy. One arresting exception is The Social Contract of the Universe by C. G. Stone, a most ambitious piece of deduction. There are also the works of L. L. Whyte and George Melhuish, and, in the United States, Ayn Rand, stren-uous exponent of objectivism and self-interest.

Type 3: Philosophical popularization

Philosophical popularization, the third of the kinds mentioned earlier, was made necessary by the conjunction of ever greater professional obscurity and difficulty with a public demand for enlightenment. G. H. Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy is the first important book in English to respond to this opportunity. The introductions to philosophy by Paulsen and by Windelband were fairly soon translated from German after their late nineteenth- century publication. A. W. Benn wrote excellent little histories of ancient and modern philosophy. But the best piece of philosophical popularization remains Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. In the years between the wars there were Olaf Stapledon, the stylish John MacMurray, pioneer of philosophy on the radio, and the irrepressible and in every sense fluent C. E. M. Joad. Since 1945 what was a modest cottage industry has become a large productive field as university populations have increased. Hospers’s Introduction to Philosophical Analysis and Human Conduct may be singled out for their scope, reliability, and well-deserved circulation, although the former, at any rate, first published in 1956, is, understandably, showing signs of age. The most convincing successor to Hospers’s Introduction (which has been badly watered down in later editions) is Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy (London, 1994), which covers a great deal of ground, is replete with historical references, and mitigates its passages of comparative toughness with plenty of wit. Only the most austere of professionals nowadays seem able to resist enticements to explain themselves to a wider public. There are two recent new developments in the field of popularization by professionals. The first is the appearance of very short books covering most, or at any rate a large part, of the subject, such as Thomas Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987) and Simon Blackburn’s Think (Oxford, 1999) and Being Good (Oxford, 2000). The second is the publication of books by professional philosophers on subjects of direct general human interest that are the topics of current public controversy: for instance, Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (Hassocks, Sussex, 1978), Jonathan Glover’s Causing Death and Saving Lives (London, 1977) and What Sort of People Should There Be? (London, 1984), and Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics (Cambridge, 1979). There was a period after the deprivations of war had driven people back to almost Victorian levels of reading and thinking in which there was much philosophical popularization on the British radio and television, and even in the colour magazines of Sunday papers. The profit motive and dumbing-down egalitarianism have since turned television into a mirror in which Caliban can contemplate himself and the Sunday magazines into vehicles for fashion advertising. A.Q.

[see also] philosophy of life; pseudo-philosophy.

Extract from the Preface

Finally, my gratitude, of which there is a lot. I am grateful to many people, first the 291 contributors. They did not do too much satisficing. Contributors to the first edition put up with a change of mind about entry lengths. Many of them put up with a lot more, including a lot of letters about revising their work or making new starts. Some were stalwarts who did a goodly number of entries very well. They rush to mind, and produce glows of gratitude there. Some were philosophical about the sad fact that their prize entry, say the Frankfurt School or the indeterminacy of translation, did not get into the book because the editor had blundered and earlier assigned it to someone else. Some contributors and others were decent or anyway silent when their proposed entries, say marital act and Ayn Rand, did not penetrate my fortress of philosophical principle.