Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

...Austin...

...Judging from some remarks he has made in interviews, Ayer has been interested in Collingwood for a while, a good sign since Collingwood was perhaps the only major British philosopher of the early twentieth century to demand that his colleagues pay attention to intellectual developments outside the range of philosophy and the natural sciences...

...But the problem with this book is not its partisanship, for Ayer makes no bones about that...

...Philosophy has no audience among anyone engaged in public life, which, as Collingwood pointed out, has not always been the case...

...Perhaps the change is for the best, but it is worth asking how it came about and what the trade-offs have been...

...It is a highly partisan history, the bulk of it devoted to those philosophers who influenced Ayer most: Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle...

...On the other hand, when important philosophers turn to public issues, the usual result is disaster, as witness Russell's support for the Munich agreements and the North Vietnamese, or Noam Chomsky's apologetics for Pol Pot...

...His most interesting-and disappointing-chapter is oh Colling-wood...

...Like most philosophers today, Ayer has no audience...

...To whom can historians, religious people, journalists, political scientists, critics, and other philosophical amateurs look for philosophical guidance...

...It seemed to me that his excursions into social and political history did not throw much light upon the views of the philosophers with which he sought to associate them and I did not believe I could improve on his performance...

...Ayer has long since abandoned logical positivism-as have almost all professional philosophers -but he clings to the issues that concerned him in his youth: problems of perception, epistemology, and especially what he calls "the study of evidence," i.e., "elucidating the content of our beliefs . . . [and] our warrant for holding them...

...For Green, religious concerns were still an important part of philosophy...

...As Ryle put it, "philosophers had now to be philosophers' philosophers...

...Everyone understood why Nobel Prize-winner George Stigler was invited to the White House, for the relevance of economics to public life is taken for granted, though the political naivete Thomas Main is managing editor of the Public Interest...

...But Ayer then shrugs: "It is difficult to know what comment to make...

...as a liberal evangelical, though, he believed that religion was less a matter of saving individual souls than one of achieving and upholding a good society...

...Collingwood, the last philosopher in this tradition, put it, "The school of Green sent out into public life a stream of ex-pupils who carried with them the conviction that philosophy, and in particular the philosophy they learned at Oxford, was an important thing, and that their vocation was to put it into practice...

...Most of the other movements and philosophers dealt with are within the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy: pragmatism, Popper, physicalism, J.L...

...It is from this standpoint, firmly ensconced within the tradition of British empiricism, that Ayer writes his history...

...Green...

...How is it that a historian of ideas can as a matter of principle ignore the social and historical context of those ideas...

...Interested nonprofessionals and their concerns-which is to say most of humanity and most of human life- were left in the dust...

...The details of Green's philosophy are not important here-it is enough to say that he was usually described as a neo-Hegelian...

...He writes: There is, however, one area in which I have deliberately failed to follow Russell's example...

...The last 100 years of Anglo-American philosophy thus exhibits a curious trade-off...

...To answer that, we must see what became of the idea- of philosophy that held sway in Britain before 1910 or so, when such contexts were taken seriously...

...The omission is largely understandable, since as a technical philosopher Green was not in the first rank (although the same probably cannot be said of some other idealist philosophers of this period, especially Bradley and McTaggart...

...In fact, given our current situation and history, that is probably the case...

...This set the stage for the second big change-the professionalization of philosophy...

...That philosophy can be either professionally competent or socially significant but never both at the same time...

...Ayer's latest book, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, is a fine example of modern philosophy's irrelevance to the rest of society and so is a good place to begin asking these questions...

...Green was dedicated-as the manifesto of an essay society he helped establish put it-to "earnest effort to bring speculation into relation with modern life instead of making it an intellectual luxury...

...Green and most other Victorian philosophers consequently believed that even the most abstract philosophy had a bearing on what the good society would be and how it could be realized, or rather maintained, since the idealists were by no means alienated from the society around them...

...Such was British philosophy before 1910, of which there is hardly a word in Ayer's book...

...He believed historical philosophy was something that students, amateurs, and even the public could participate in to some degree or other without any loss of intellectual rigor...

...not detailed enough for the professional, and not likely to arouse much interest among laymen...

...Collingwood's question has a contemporary ring to it...

...But the idea of a similar invitation being proffered if an American philosopher like Donald Davidson or W.V.O...

...As R.G...

...The technical rigor of philosophy rose as philosophers aped those disciplines already established as autonomous: mathematics and the physical sciences...

...His seemingly endless discussions of various theories of sense data-e.g., Broad's emergent materialism compared to James's neutral monism compared to Carnap's logical construction of the world-lie dead on the page...

...For example, Ayer describes Collingwood's claim that to understand past events we must think as the actors did, and to that extent we become like them...

...But for all the time he has spent on Collingwood, Ayer seems to remain baffled...

...Quine won a similar prize sounds a bit absurd...

...To be fair, there is a sense in which many of these theories are necessarily intractable, but Ayer's problem is more his refusal to put these theories in their proper contexts...

...But it was an unrigorous philosophy, its conclusions fudged by its spirit of "woolly uplift," to use Ayer's phrase...

...To themselves, it seems: the big questions regarding the world of human affairs are simply not being asked, let alone answered, by professional philosophers...

...He approached this position, along a somewhat roundabout path, through religion...

...This revolution produced great philosophers, but not great audiences...

...Collingwood asked himself, "Why is it that nowadays no Oxford man, unless he is either about 70 years old or else a teacher of philosophy at Oxford or elsewhere, regards philosophy as anything but a futile parlour game...

...The problem is that he fails to live up to another of his intentions-to write a sequel to Russell's popular History of Western Philosophy...

...of his remarks there suggests that perhaps it shouldn't be...

...Ayer dismisses existentialism and phenomenology in a short chapter he seems to have included only out of a sense of duty...

...The dismaying thing is not that Ayer disagrees with Collingwood, but that he apparently doesn't even understand him...

...What is important is his realization that philosophy occurs in a social context which philosophers cannot ignore...

...Now, a popular history is almost by definition one where relatively esoteric subjects are placed in a larger context...

...Still, the reaction against, and eventual overthrow of, the idealist school remains one of the most colorful episodes in modern philosophy, one no storyteller should omit...

...thinking people who are not themselves philosophers-that is to say nearly all intellectuals-pay almost no attention to the subject...

...This school was in turn replaced by a more esoteric philosophy that produced great technical advances but left discussion of public issues pretty much to political ideologues...

...I have, therefore, been content to give a few biographical details about the philosophers on whom I concentrate and in certain cases to refer to the ways in which they influenced one another...

...Unfortunately, Ayer's book does not bode well for such a reconciliation...

...The first major change Ryle notes was the banishment of theology from philosophy...

...The gulf between public-spirited and professionalized philosophy remains as wide as ever...

...Whatever one thinks of Collingwood's specific ideas, it is clear that Ayer needs something similar to counterbalance his own lack of a historical sense...

...But Ayer leaves this out...

...They provided the liberalism of their day with the "ideas"-the general philosophical orientation-that modern liberalism (and conservatism for that matter) so notoriously lacks...

...Thus," Collingwood says of the historian, "his own self-knowledge is at the same time his knowledge of the world of human affairs...

...Before the rise of the analytic and linguistic schools, British philosophy was dominated by the idealist school, led by T.H...

...He sharply criticized '"realists' [who], unlike the school of Green, did think pfiilosophy a preserve for professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians and other amateurs...

...What are we to conclude...

...Ayer simply has none of Russell's flair for popularization, at least not in this book...

...Ayer is most famous as author of Language, Truth and Logic, a brilliant broadside for logical positivism, the school of thought best known for its advocacy of the verification principle, which holds that no non-tautological statement can be meaningful unless there is some evidence relevant to determining its truth or falsity...

...With theology gone, nothing took its place and philosophy ceased to be concerned with anything outside itself...

...That the historian should literally incarnate a multitude of persons seems to me incredible...

...Gilbert Ryle at least broaches the subject in his introduction to the appropriately titled Revolution in Philosophy...

...Green and his followers, though they were considered highly technical philosophers, nonetheless had a profound impact on public life...

...We began with a public-spirited philosophy that set out quite consciously to provide the religious, political', and social institutions of its time with an intellectual ground...

...In directing philosophers to look at the intellectual context within which they did their work, Collingwood was in effect asking them to develop a sense of the importance of the history of culture for philosophy...

...Old-style philosophy still has its adherents, but they are usually embarrassments like Mortimer Adler, who continues to produce books with such titles as Difficult Thought Made Easy, on the apparent assumption that shooting the breeze with Bill Moyers on public TV somehow elevates public discourse...

...But, again, theology was the avenue through which philosophy was able to pass on to other human affairs...

...Is there any hope of getting the representatives of these two styles of philosophizing to understand each other well enough to synthesize their strengths into a philosophy at once responsibly public-spirited and technically rigorous...