A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

THE RECYCLED ARTICLE

Philosophy: Basic Readings
Ed. Nigel Warburton
Routledge, 1999

But let's look at these works closer, in turn.

History and Theory, is not only a recycled set of papers, the title is itself recycled. 'The editors of this collection have assembled in convenient from some of the best recent work in the theory of history', proclaims the book cover. 'By showing authors in debate with each other over some of the most compelling issues in historical studies today, this book serves both to highlight those issues and to offer an accessible point of entry into the philosophy of history in our time.'

The debate in question is taken here as starting with a paper by Hayden White, in 1973, called Metahistory, which argued that questions about what can be known (objectively?) in history, and comparisons with science, gave way to questions of narrative style and comparisons with story telling, fiction and even poetry. This was the so-called 'linguistic turn' in history, and its product was the 'Rhetorical Attitude'. 'The Rhetorical Attitude may emerge when reigning ideologies and rhetorical conventions are experienced as exclusionary and/or repressive by people who have gained sufficient power to give voice to their dissatisfactions', explains Brian Fay. The 'excluded' see what previously claimed to be a 'science' as mere rhetoric and for its replacement by hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, genealogy and so on. 'It is thus no accident that the Rhetorical attitude arose during the 1960s, at which time African-Americans, women, gays, post-colonialists and others felt not only that their stories were excluded from 'legitimate' (read 'scientific') history...[because] scientifically inspired grand narrative (including Marxism) necessarily prevented their inclusion.'

Of course things are more complex than simply good/bad history. Post-modernists, we are reminded, say that every historical occurrence is marked by discontinuity, accident and variability. Everything is 'contingent' and has many meanings. In fact, (confusingly,) the Scientific and Rhetorical Attitudes (Fay's capitalisation) both influence and need each other, in a kind of yin-yang dynamism. For this reason this collection 'aspires to maintain the tension between the Scientific and Rhetorical Attitudes' through its choice of articles. (Fay's italics.) After all, as Aristotle wrote in the Rhetoric (1355a), we must be able to employ persuasion in order to show clearly what the facts are. If, as Hayden White, in the first essay of the collection puts it, history is in a bad shape today, it is because it has forgotten its literary origins.

Actually, Nigel Warburton is sceptical of the lure of the anthology. Too many, he says, introducing his own collection, contain 'worthy but dull' articles, that 'kill the subject for the reader'. (History and Theory being a case in point.)It might be riposted, unkindly, however, that he has instead included interesting but worthless examples.

A scan of the anthology seems to bear this out. Why else choose Mary Warnock to introduce the volume with 'What makes someone a philosopher?' Lady Warnock may be many things, but a philosopher she is not. Here she claims philosophers are primarily communicators, (like historians?), rather 'than those who sit and think'. Next contributor out of the box is D.H Mellor, who quotes Bishop Berkeley's view: 'On the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have have hitherto amused philsophers and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves - that we have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see'. But then, Mellor reflects, the public want their philosophy to be unclear, the better to worship the philosophers as their 'gurus'.

This looks promising. But Mellor claims next, implausibly, that 'analysis', that misbegotten child of philosophy, is 'a kind of sprinkler system' to 'lay the dust that blinds so many'.

Ayer and Russell then follow. Russell points out that as philosophers uncover truths, the truths are split off from the subject and become new sciences, such as astronomy, physics, even psychology. 'The value of philosophy is', he declares, in an extract from Problems of Philosophy, 'to be sought largely in its very uncertainty.'

Other than a brief preface, unwisely locating himself in Oxford, and thereby aligning himself with a certain type of philosophy too, Warburton himself only appears in the middle 'political' section of the book where he defends (again unwisely, I thought) boxing, saying that arguments aginast it based on a calculation of the risks involved are inconsistent with acceptance of other risky activities. But little mention is given of the surely crucial ethical difference between intentional and accidental harm - the factor which makes the sport so controversial.

Later in the collection, we have Blaise Pascal arguing that belief in God is a better bet than not believing; Martin Gardner on the ontological argument,; both J.L. Mackie and Richard Swinburne on evil and finally old reliable, David Hume, on minds.

Topped off with a cherry of an article by the contemproary media zoologist, Richard Dawkins, suggesting that religion is a kind of computer virus, the rest of the book is given over to Bernard Williams to expound on 'Right and Wrong', and Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend to argue the toss about 'Science'. A final look at 'Mind' turns out to be rather taken over by Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts.

But Warburton never claims his articles are good. He only claim that they are interesting and will stimulate debate. In this, he is surely right. This shrewd and entertaining collection has identified a 'gap' in the market. We are likely to see many more such efforts in the future. 

Reviewed by Martin Cohen