Philosophic Explanations

...As such, a professional temptation is to avoid expressing that uncomfortable fact by fooling around...

...Squeezing freedom into mathematics is an impossible trick...

...The arguments are not stated in some highly specialized jargon, but that may make them all the more difficult to interpret since the ordinary reader may semi-understand half of the words...

...Sophistry could be regarded as the oldest philosophic tradition, and it is the fooling around tradition par excellence...

...How, could anyone fail to rejoice in the walk this book takes us on about the world of the great questions": John Wheeler...

...It can be a grand style for philosophy-as Spinoza himself illustrates...

...V. Quine, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam...

...We know that "sophistic" has come to mean sheer cleverness in argument, but Paul Shorey was also correct when he characterized the sophists as the full professors of a kind of Hellenic university extension school...

...Quine is one of our outstanding mathematical logicians, and Kripke and Putnam have made significant contributions to theories of logic...

...My already considerable admiration for Alisdair Maclntyre rose as a result of that comment...

...Insofar as Nozick adapts Quine, Kripke and Putnar: he is adapting philosophical turns which have their natural roots in a "mathematical style" of philosophizing...

...The entire section is devoted to a very heady set of current puzzles about the nature of self-identity, e. g., if half of my brain was transplanted into another body and the other body acquired all my memories, etc., would it be me too...

...If, as Whitehead claimed, the history of Western philosophy is a "series of footnotes to Plato," Plato himself is a compendium of complaints against sophistry...

...The reader should expect no explication in this book about Godel self-reference, indexicals, or tokening...

...As for triangles: to know one is to have one...

...Aristotle is hardly an existentialist in the manner of Kierkegaard, Sartre, et al...

...If it were pure technical talk, one would at least demand a translation...

...It is for this reason that he has no problems with free will-a fact that has annoyed his mathematical opponents for centuries...

...The mathematical style in modern philosophy is pervasive...

...The problem with intelligibility as a watchword is "intelligible for what world...

...I prefer Spinoza...

...Socrates gives a fanciful rationalization of the tale and then says that he really has no leisure for such inquiries...

...If one conjures a mathematical setting for this issue, one can see how intractable the problem becomes...

...Nozick, MacIntyre asserts, has brought intelligibility, elegance and precision to these great issues by the ingenious adaptation of the works by "W...

...When Michael Harrington reviewed Nozick's earlier work, Anarchy, State and Utopia in Commonweal, he said that it was not "simply wrong . . . (but) for the most part, cutely, cleverly and irrelevantly wrong...

...To accuse someone of "fooling around" with the deepest problems of human life sounds terribly harsh-and it is not exactly meant as a compliment- yet there is something to be said for "the fooling around tradition" in philosophy...

...One need not defend the murkiness and rhetorical enthusiasms of continental existentialists to suggest that Maclntyre is just dead wrong about Nozick's accomplishment...

...Times salutes Nozick for writing a book "addressed simultaneously to professional colleagues and the common reader...

...The ultimate or "unlimited" (which Nozick labels by the Hebrew Ein Sof: without end) may well be "beyond existing and non-existing"-a favorite claim of mystics and mathematicians whose ultimate is quite indifferent to existence...

...The philosopher's task is indeed a kind of fool's labor...

...Gilbert Harman suggests that Nozick's work "will change the way philosophy is done...

...It makes absolutely no difference to the geometrical being of a triangle whether there are any existent triangles or not...

...this weird geometry is really a better description of actual space," that is an interesting irrelevancy to the mathematics...

...When Peter Ramus argued in 1536 that "Everything that Aristotle taught is false," one has to assume he was doing some creative fooling around at the end of a medieval Aristotelian tradition and before the emergence of the Cartesian questions that have dominated philosophy almost to the present day...

...Arresting, original, extremely brilliant": Marshall Cohen...

...I suppose these puzzles may have some bearing on the nature of the self, but it seems a vast distance from the traditional (and layman's) worries...

...Sophistic playfulness tends to appear whenever a mainstream tradition has lost its vitality -or, historically, before the Platonic mainstream starts to flow...

...When I rejoiced least in Nozick's work, it was when I felt he had succumbed to the ludicrousness of philosophy...

...Am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simple sort...

...If you can formulate a consistent postulate set for geometry in which parallel lines meet, than you have invented a new (non-Euclidean) geometry...

...Alisdair Maclntyre's review of Philosophical Explanations in the N.Y...

...Aristotle, for one, is a consistently non-mathematical type...

...The metaphysical character of mathematical objects is wholly contained in their intelligibility...

...scorned by Maclntyre, but all these "existentialists" suggests that existence is an important concern and that it wholly eludes the mathematical cast of mind...

...First I want to know what I am, then I will worry about what I would say if my Typhonic self is cloned, resurrected or duplicated on Io...

...Since existence is irrelevant and unintelligible in mathematics, it is no wonder that philosophers who muck around in that stuff seem to Quine, Kripke, et al...

...The sophist named Phaedrus (in a Plato's dialogue by that name) runs into Socrates on the banks of the Illisus...

...In a charming aside, Nozick notes how anyone must feel addressing such transcendental themes...

...Isn't it ludicrous for someone just one generation from the shtetl, a pisher from Brownsville and East Flatbush in Brooklyn, even to touch on the topics of such monumental thinkers...

...In a short review, I will be bold enough to say that Aristotle is an "existential" philosopher, at least insofar as he holds that real objects, which come to be in time and are made out of various material goods, cannot be understood on the model of timeless mathematical forms...

...To be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous...

...In a mathematical world everything must follow by necessity once the system is set up...

...Of course it is...

...I failed to rejoice...

...If philosophers were to all become Nozickeans, however, it would be a revolution which returned to the elegant sophistic roots of the discipline: a time when professors knew how to argue brilliantly with one another but hadn't accomplished the Socratic revolution of shuttling forth into the agora to mix it up with poets and politicians...

...The power of the mathematical style for unconsciously structuring problems is present throughout the bulk of Philosophical Explanations...

...Philosophical Explanations begins with one of the most profound and persistent issues in philosophy: the nature of the self, who am I? Does Nozick enrich our understanding of that issue...

...It is always embarrassing to say such things about a book which eventually won the National Book Award, but I am inclined to repeat the same adjectives for large parts of the work at hand...

...I believe it would be unfair to Nozick and the state of philosophy, however, to engage in airy dismissal...

...If our ordinary logical geometries should turn out to be as inaccurate for the ethical world as Euclidean geometry turned out to be for the physical world, one or the other of Nozick's tangential logics may prove vastly important...

...Few philosophers have been bold enough to pursue unintelligibility though many seem to have found it...

...The metaphysical status of mathematical objects is directly reflected in mathematical method...

...It is not, however, the only intelligible style...

...Nozick struggles valiantly - he admits to floundering - with the issue but has to end with a theory of freedom in which all events are caused (the mathematical vision) but some are "caused" by the weighting we give to reasons in a decision...

...Mathematics has to be the most non-existential of all intellectual disciplines...

...If philosophy could create its own world as Babbitt's music can, this would be all the praise necessary...

...The answer can be found in a deep background assumption about the nature of philosophy that is so ingrained in the academic tradition from which Nozick comes that it is as indetectable as it is unquestionable...

...Why then does this dazzling display of erudition and technique strike me, me, at least, as razzle dazzle...

...I must first know myself...

...it is the spirit of mathematics that is important...

...A mathematical style of philosophy may or may not use mathematical symbolization and techniques...

...We are all just a few years past something or other, if only childhood...

...Whether it is Nozick's stunning sophistication or Der-rida's punning deconstruction, there appears to be a hankering for a pre-Platonic philosophy...

...After some preliminary banter, Phaedrus asks whether Socrates believes that Boreas actually carried off Orithyia from those very shores...

...The fact that the new geometry appears to have no interpretation for this material universe makes no difference to the mathematician, if later, some physicist comes along and says, "By Einstein...

...Under the three great headings of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Value, Nozick tackles such perennially deep problems as personal identity, why is there something rather than nothing, how is knowledge possible, the problem of free will and the good, philosophy and the meaning of life...

...For instance, in discussing how human beings can talk about themselves or self-refer, Nozick writes sentences like the following: "A non-reflexive Gbdel self-reference without indexicals is necessarily self-referring, while 'the yellow token on the black board' may self-refer in virtue of a feature of the tokening...

...Spinoza (who gets only one reference from Nozick) redid philosophy in a thorough geometrical mode and appropriately denied human freedom...

...Just barely...

...My guess is that Socrates would have about as much interest in Nozick's treatment of the transposed self as he had about the transposed Orithyia...

...confused and unintelligible...

...Nozick directly, and for analogical purposes, uses analytic devices developed within contemporary theories of logic and linguistics...

...As a philosophical menu, it is clearly Plato du jour...

...The problem of the self as Socrates set it, and as it has persisted, has been what sort of a thing am I? If Socrates had fallen asleep by the Illisus and awakened as a full professor at Harvard looking like Robert Nozick, presumably he would still wonder whether this Nozick-Socrates was a monster of passion or something of a gentler sort...

...It is also evident from the book that he has a deep human passion to discover "how we are valuable and precious...

...Free will is a special concern for Nozick-particularly given the wide play for freedom he advocates in Anarchy, State and Utopia-but it seems intellectually very puzzling to him how there can be such a notion...

...Considering the number of announced philosophical revolutions in the history of the subject, some scepticism seems in order...

...Maclntyre hails Nozick's work because it addresses issues of "human value and significance" that have been dealt with in an "impoverished and barren" fashion by such continental philosophers as "Kierkegaard, Sartre, Marcel, and Buber...

...Yet it was ludicrous for them too...

...The mathematical spirit influences Nozick's treatment of traditional issues in two ways: metaphysically and methodologically...

...evidently he had a much easier time with the text than I. MacIntyre refers to the arguments as "semi-technical,'' which is a fair enough description...

...Nozick is indeed many of the things that his admirers claim: confident, brilliant, and inventive...

...Sophistry combines a certain professorial expertise with a species of verbal experimentation that often proves surprisingly fruitful...

...Such hankering suggests we stand at the end of an era in philosophical thought...

...Milton Babbitt applauds Nozick's "multiple modes and imaginative spirit...

...One way of looking at Nozick's work would be to regard it as a set of alternate logical geometries which are tangential to the ordinary logical geometries we use to measure out our ' talk about the self, freedom and the good...

...Nozick's work is an extended examination (647 pages of text and 100 pages of footnotes) on a series of more or less connected topics of central concern within the grandest philosophical tradition...

...The continual resort in Nozick's arguments to self-referential hierarchies is characteristic of a realm where entities are created solely by linguistic rules, which rules can themselves be created by meta-linguistic rules, etc., etc., ad Ein Sof...

...Dennis O'Brien THE PRE-PUBLICATION reviews of Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations are certainly intimidating...

...For mathematics, intelligibility is the name of the game, and so it seems naturally attractive to philosophers who seek to make everything intelligible...