Lloyd P. Gerson - Platonism and Naturalism

Platonism and Naturalism

The Possibility of Philosophy

LLOYD P. GERSON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

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Versions of some of the material in this book were delivered as lectures and conference presentations at Bar-Ilan University; Hameline University; University of California at Berkeley; Temple University; Durham University; the International Plato Society meeting in Brasilia, Brazil; Cambridge University; UNAM, Mexico City; Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City; Duquesne University; and the University of Chicago. I am grateful to the audiences at these presentations for their spirited engagement with my arguments.

Among my colleagues and friends who have read all or parts of drafts of this book are Francesco Fronterotta, Franco Ferrari, Brad Inwood, and Eric Perl. Their thoughtful and collegial disagreement with some of my ideas were as welcome as their warm encouragement. I am especially grateful to Nicholas D. Smith, who read the entire book and made extensive critical comments, all of which prompted me to make changes and additions (and a few tactical subtractions). I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Cornell University Press who prompted me to clarify some highly compressed and allusive arguments.

In this book, all translations are my own except where noted.

The work was completed with the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CHAPTER 1

Some forty years ago, the late Richard Rorty wrote a provocative book titled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. with a particular philosophical position that is taken to follow from these principles, but more generally with the principles themselves. Hence, a rejection of Platonism is really a rejection of the principles shared by most philosophers up to the present. It is from these principles, Rorty thought, that numerous pernicious distinctions arose. As he puts it in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled Philosophy and Social Hope (published in 2000), Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopeshopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless societywith my antagonism towards Platonism. By Platonism Rorty means the set of philosophical distinctions (appearance/reality, matter/mind, made/found, sensible/intellectual, etc.) that he thinks continue to bedevil the thinking of philosophers as well as those who look to philosophy for some proprietary knowledge. Other important Platonic dualisms elsewhere rejected by Rorty are knowledge/belief, cognitional/volitional, and subject/object. These distinctions (among others) are the consequences inferred from the principles that together constitute Platonism.

Rorty maintained that the fundamental divide between Platonists (whether self-declared or not) and anti-Platonists is that the former believe that it is possible to represent truth in language and thought whereas the latter do not. On Rortys account, the differences among philosophers (and scientists) are far less significant than their shared commitment to representationalism. Hence, to identify Platonism and philosophy is not to fail to acknowledge that there are people who have called themselves philosophers and anti- or non-Platonists. It is, rather, to claim that what binds them together is a shared error in principle, an error that is most egregiously and fundamentally found in Plato and all those who follow in his path. Overcoming this error is tantamount to overcoming the enchantment of Platonism, that is, of philosophy.

Rortys rejection of all types of representationalism does not permit him to distinguish the sciences from philosophy in any clear way. But his insistence on the dualisms that bedevil Platonism does suggest a subject matter for philosophy, broadly speaking. By philosophy Rorty means systematic thought as opposed to what he calls edifying thought. The manner in which Rorty uses the word systematic is broader than the use according to which one might say that Hegel is a systematic philosopher and Hume is not. By systematic he means having a distinct content or subject matter. Thus, anyone who thinks that it is possible for a philosopher to discover a single truth about the world requiring one or more of the above dualisms is embracing a distinctive or special type of error. She is entrapped by the lure of the systematic, that is, of a distinctive content or subject matter for philosophy.

Most of those who would reject a distinct subject matter for philosophy do not share Rortys disdain for the sciences as a locus of truth about the world. The terms Naturalist and Naturalism are today embraced mainly is at least the unclear putative non-Platonic subject matter for philosophy is the fact that there is virtually no agreement about its identity. How can there be a real subject matter for philosophy if no one agrees on exactly what it is? Even if, for example, one maintains that metaphysicsNaturalistically conceivedhas a subject matter, it is doubtful that, say, any moral or political philosopher would identify philosophy with that. The disunity of subject matters among those who believe that philosophy has a subject matter but that it is not Platos is, as I will try to show below, one reason for thinking, with Rorty, that there is no real non-Platonic subject matter for philosophy and so no subject about which philosophers strive to acquire knowledge.

The inclination to dismiss this view is, one might suppose, easily supported by adducing, for example, the philosophy of physics or of biology. There is, it will be said, nothing necessarily Platonic about their content, though the content is distinctly philosophical. The use of the word philosophy for the theoretical foundation of a natural science in fact goes back to Aristotle. He distinguishes first philosophy ( ) and (implicitly) second philosophy. The former is in line with Platos position regarding knowledge of the intelligible world, the latter with the theoretical foundation of natural science. I take it that this is just an application of the general principle ubiquitous throughout the dialogues that philosophy is relevant to our understanding of the sensible world, even though it is a different sort of study () with a different subject matter.

Stoicism provides an illuminating perspective on the Aristotelian claim. Since Stoics deny in principle the existence of anything not composed by physical nature, they would have to face the Aristotelian challenge that, for them, physics must be first philosophy. And though Stoics conceive of the principles of physics differently from Aristotle, it is indeed the case that they do not recognize a science distinct from the science of nature. Stoic metaphysics is just Stoic physics; they do not recognize a science of being qua being or of the intelligible as opposed to natural world. Is Stoicism, then, merely edifying philosophy? I would say that the history of Stoicism divides between those who, like the early Stoics, examined the principles of nature and those who, like the Roman Stoics, aimed to be edifying. The former were in principle doing nothing different from the theoreticians of early natural science like Aristoxenus and Eratosthenes and the latter were doing nothing different from psychotherapy. These are not intended to be pejorative comparisons. I aim only to offer some confirmation for Rortys hypothesis that Platonism is philosophy and anti-Platonism is antiphilosophy. This ultrasharp division will have its most interesting results, I think, when, keeping it in mind, we consider various attempts by half-hearted Platonists to make strategic concessions to Naturalism and, mostly in our times, attempts by half-hearted Naturalists to make strategic concessions to Platonism.