On the Richness of Contemporary Philosophy

I’ve not written a lot this year. Maybe that will change next year. But I wanted to go out with a little note of appreciation for contemporary philosophy.

I’m prompted to write this after listening to an interview with Amie Thommason about her latest book, Rethinking Metaphysics. It’s rare for me to pay much attention to contemporary American philosophers - I tend to read the classics or fairly obscure Frenchies like Raymond Ruyer. So Thommason is new to me. Nonetheless, this episode popped up in my podcast feed and the description was enticing enough for me to line it up.

In her conversation with Carrie Figdor, Thommason lays out her view of what metaphysics is: the practice of “conceptual engineering.” Her examples of engineering practices include not just system-building, but also “reverse engineering” the logic of a given philosophical system and even quality-checking existing structures. Thommason calls this a “deflationary” view of metaphysics, and says that she drew upon the work of the philosopher Quine and the field of “systemic functional linguistics”. She make metaphysics something that works for us, as we can create concepts and arguments that can help us to achieve certain ends through changing how we think about the world. It’s a far cry from the traditional ‘inflated’ theory that sees the truth of the world as unwieldy and somehow out beyond us with our poor powers to add or detract.

This is an interesting coincidence! For Gilles Deleuze held a quite similar position, most famously posed in What is Philosophy? (co-authored with Felix Guattari), but voiced earlier numerous times. I presume Deleuze’s inspiration for this (meta)philosophical position is Henri Bergson, who said in his lecture The Possible and the Real:

I think that the big metaphysical problems are generally ill-posed, and that they resolve themselves when one corrects their givens, or maybe that they are problems posed in phantom terms, which vanish as soon as one inspects the formula’s terms up close.

Deleuze’s stance is that it is not a question of asking if a concept, articulated in a proposition, is true or false. To ask that would be to artificially separate the conclusion from the premises and thereby to miss the genetic ‘conditions of real experience’ while leading one into the metaphysical illusions that Bergson sought to “resolve.” Instead the thing to evaluate for truth or falsity is the problem or question as such. Someone can ask: “Is this really a problem? Is it well-posed (say, according to criteria laid out by Bergson in that lecture)?” Depending on the answer then the problem produces a more or less helpful concept. Concepts are what one uses to make sense of the world and advance the cause of living life. ‘Strong’ concepts help each to do all they can in their singular, precious lives while ‘weak’ ones prove detrimental to exercising their powers.

Clearly these two thinkers, despite their differences, chime. That is what I want to celebrate here. They have very different philosophical lineages, yet have converged on an apparently similar position. This is a testament to the flourishing of philosophy, and I think should be read as evidence that philosophy as a practice is still valuable; it’s still doing something for people and so people keep doing it.

To see what I mean, let’s look at an adjacent field: mathematics. In 2019 Philip Ording published 99 Variations on a Proof. The text showcases several ways that one can prove the possible correct answers to a given equation. The methods are fun, interesting, and give a sense of the depth of mathematics as a subject. That depth is derived from the many, many people who have devoted their lives and brain-power to a venerable tradition. They have found it deeply satisfying to put their powers to work in this way and that has sustained itself through that satisfaction, and it can keep on giving because each method and the variety that inheres in the tradition give more people more chances to contribute and find their own satisfaction. It’s a virtuous cycle.

I hold that philosophy has worked and is working in an analogical manner. Ording’s book is purposely based on Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which itself draws on earlier texts like Erasmus’s Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. That title puts the matter plainly: finding excess and a ‘copious’ amount of something indicates wealth and proliferation. It has sustained and is sustaining, and is something worth investing even more in. “Grow the good,” as I like to say.

Note, however, that the reward of this investment is satisfaction and the continuity of a cultural practice. Each participant plays their role in that practice and makes it available for others, and that is enough. The battle for prestige and percuniary returns is poisonous to this, for it only leads to bitterness as in the Leibniz-Newton priority debate about the origins of the calculus. Instead, I want to heed Santayana’s famous line:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Or, perhaps, let’s repeat the past but “with a difference,” as Deleuze might say. I can acknowledge Thommason’s variation comes out of analytic philosophy while Deleuze’s arrives from continental philosophy, yet I need not conceive them as oppositional traditions or as Thommason and Deleuze (or, rather, their acolytes) fighting for supremacy. I can engage with each and their influences, learn from them, and make my own contribution (this blog post).

That contribution, to be clear, is an attempt at a concept of flourishing. More on that to come.