Grice Now ---- palaeo-Griceanism and beyond

Speranza

To mark "Philosophy Now’"s 21st Birthday, we posted a questionnaire on various e-mail lists read by academic philosophers (where the reference to "Hekademos" is indirect), asking which thinkers (or philosophers), trends and books they regarded as the most interesting or important, or both.

This isn’t because we’ve suddenly decided that only the opinions of professional (as opposed to amateur, or gentlemanly) philosophers matter.

We just thought all our readers might be interested in the results.

--- where "all" is to be read _substitutionally_. Cfr. "Some of our readers would be at least interested in many of the results."

The 75 respondents were self-selecting.

57 were academics
12 graduate students and
6 ‘others’.

-- In Latin, 'alteri'.

Just under a third (24) were female.

Most respondents were from the British English-speaking countries and regions (including, but not excluding England) though there were a few each from Germany and Brazil -- where English is she not speek.

******************************************************************************

A)

Please name the five historical (i.e. dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.

PHILOSOPHER TOTAL VOTES

Aristotle -- Greek philosopher -- 44
Immanuel Kant -- German philosopher -- 37 -- Grice would have voted Ariskant/Kantotle
Plato -- Greek philosopher -- 31
David Hume -- Scots philosopher -- originally spelt "Home" 26
Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Austrian philosopher of Jewish descent -- 25
René Descartes Renatus Cartesius -- European philosopher -- 15
G.W.F. Hegel -- German philosopher -- 12
Friedrich Nietzsche -- German philsopher, friend of opera composer Richard Wagner -- 11
Bertrand Russell -- Welsh philosopher and aristocrat 10 -- cfr. Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"
Michel Foucault -- French philosopher -- 8
Gottlob Frege -- German philosopher -- 8
Willard van Orman Quine -- American philosopher of Manx descent -- 8
Martin Heidegger -- German philosopher 7
Simone de Beauvoir -- French philosopheress -- 6
Baruch Spinoza -- Jewish European philosopher -- 6
David Kellogg Lewis -- American philosopher of Scots descent -- 5
Thomas Hobbes -- my favourite English philosopher EVER -- 5
Edmund Husserl -- German philosohper -- 5
John Rawls -- American philosopher of Irish descent -- 5
Socrates -- teacher of Aristotle's teacher -- 5
John Locke -- my favourite English philosopher ever -- mostly influential in Oxford: The John Locke Lectures 4
Karl Marx -- German philosopher -- 4
Elizabeth Anscombe -- English philosopheress, married to Prof. Geach -- 3
Thomas Aquinas -- my favourite Italian philosopher -- 3
John Stuart Mill -- English philosopher almost, his father was a Scot. 3
G.W. Leibniz -- German philsopher -- 3
Wilfrid Sellars -- American philosopher -- 3
Bernard Williams -- London-born philosopher of Welsh descent -- Oxford educated. 3
Confucius non-Western "philosopher" 3
Chrysippus -- Greek philosopher -- 2
Cicero -- my favourite Roman philosopher EVER -- he was murdered -- 2
George Berkeley-- my favourite Irish philosopher and name of Grice's uni in California -- 2
Michael Dummett -- London-born philosopher, critical of Grice's Play Group 2
Epicurus -- Greek philosopher -- cfr. Walter Pater, "Marius The Epicurean" 2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- French philosopher of perception" 2
Thomas Reid -- Scots philosopher -- 2
Jean-Paul Sartre -- French philosopher -- 2
Schopenhauer -- German philosopher -- 2
Xunzi (Hsun Tzu) -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Zhuangzi -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Iris Marion Young 2

******************************************
In addition to those listed, 34 other historical philosophers received one vote each.

Aristotle came top, with Kant dramatically beating Plato to second place (though if Socrates’s votes are added to those for Plato, it would be a close thing).

David Hume, whose reputation has fallen and risen dramatically since his death, came 4th.

The subject of this issue, Friedrich Nietzsche, came 8th.

Fifty years ago he was often seen as a proto-Nazi, and twenty one years ago he was still dismissed by many philosophers as "more a poet than a philosopher" and as "more of a philosopher than a poet" by many poets.

*******************************************************************************
B) Please name the five living (i.e. non-dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important, and not just because they gave you a good grade in the course you took with them.

An astonishingly high total of 178 different living philosophers were named altogether, 45 of them women.

The philosophers mentioned most often were:

PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Saul Kripke -- American philosopher of Jewish descent -- 14
David Chalmers -- Australian philosopher -- 11
Timothy Williamson -- British philosopher, Stockholm-born, Wykeham prof. logic, Oxford 10
Daniel C. Dennett -- American philosopher, Oxford educated at All Souls -- 8
Hilary Putnam -- American philosopher of Puritan pedigree -- 8
Judith Butler -- American philosopheress -- 8
Jürgen Habermas -- German philosopher 8
Derek Parfit -- Oxford philosopher 7
Graham Priest -- Scottish philosopher -- 6
Martha Nussbaum -- American philosopheress -- 6
Alvin Plantinga -- American philosopher 5
Ian Hacking -- Canadian philosopher, married to Grice's collaborator, Judith Baker -- 5
John McDowell -- English philosopher, Oxford educated -- 5
John Searle -- American philosopher, Oxford-educated (tutor: Strawson) 5
Linda Martin Alcoff 5
Thomas Nagel -- a student of Grice's at St. John's, Oxford -- 5

***********************************************************************************
C) Please name the rising star among younger philosophers (under 40) who you consider the most worth watching.

A small number of philosophers were OUTRAGED (if that's the word) by us even asking this question, fearing that it would feed into a tendency towards ‘ranking’ young academics.

However, although 52 philosophers were mentioned in the responses to this question, nearly all of them were named only once each, which would make any kind of ranking entirely meaningless anyway.

They included thirteen women philosophers.


Only two philosophers were mentioned even FOUR times each.

They were the logician Dr Rachael Briggs and Prof. Mark Schroeder, who works mainly in meta-ethics.

Interestingly, both have published papers in recent years which have later been collected in

"The Philosopher’ Annual"

(This is a publication a bit like The Beano Annual, except that it contains what its editors judge to have been the ten best philosophy papers of the year just past.)


**************************************************************************

D) Other than palaeo-Griceanism, what current philosophical movement, tendency or approach do you consider to be the most interesting?

There was an extremely wide scattering of answers, with none being mentioned by more than two or three respondents.

One or two people said they expected the answers to this question to be dominated by experimental philosophy, as being the most visible current trend.

However, this was not the case.

The results suggested instead an astonishing variety of approaches in current philosophy.

Answers included, in alphabetical list:


analytical philosophy

anti-realism;

anti-theory in ethics

applied epistemology

 applied ontology

attempts to move beyond the analytic/continental divide

Australian realism

Buddhist ethics

causal modelling approach

Chinese philosophy

communism as defined by Badiou

Confucian virtue ethics

Constitutivism (in the theory of reasons and agency)

contemporary continental political philosophy

contemporary naturalism

debate about practical reasoning and rationality

definite description approach

dialethism and more generally paraconsistency in logic

disability studies

disjunctivism

dispositional essentialism

distributed cognition and extended mind

dynamic strict conditional approach

----
E
----

enactivism

experimental philosophy

---
F
----

feminist epistemology

feminist philosophy

formal epistemology

the Frankfurt School

---

G

---

genetic epistemology

grounding/fundamentality in metaphysics

Hegelian idealism

hermeneutic philosophy of science

indirect realist theories of perception

intersectionality

intentionalism

knowledge-first epistemology;

liberal naturalism in the philosophy of mind (i.e. panpsychism)

modal rationalism

moral psychology

narrative identity

naturalism

new materialisms;

new realism

non-ideal ethical theory

non-Western philosophy

normative dimensions of epistemology

phenomenology in relation to democracy

philosophers interacting with cognitive scientists

philosophy of management where it relates to continental philosophy

philosophy of music -- especially OPERA

philosophy of social and science policy

philosophy of technology

postcolonial (decolonizing) theory;

post-Lacanian readings of contingency and fate

pragmatism

promiscuous realism in philosophy of science

non-positivist analytic philosophy

social epistemology and feminist epistemology

studying and naming philosophical methodology

the (revived) attempt to ground normative judgments in emotional responses

the combination of ecological approaches and phenomenology in the philosophy of mind

the new dualism in philosophy of mind

the various critical replies to experimental philosophy

virtue ethics.

**********************************************************************

E) Which two areas of philosophy (i.e. ‘Philosophy of X’) do you consider to be the most active at the present time?

AREA OF PHILOSOPHY TOTAL VOTES

Philosophy of Mind -- or "Philosophical Psychology", as Grice corrected it -- 20
Epistemology 10
Metaphysics -- including Eschatology, alla Grice 8
Ethics -- or Moralia7
Metaethics -- alla R. M. Hare 6
Philosophy of Cognitive Science 6
Philosophy of Science -- alla Popper 5
Experimental Philosophy 4
Philosophies of Gender and Race 4
Applied Ethics 3
Marxism (Eastern and Western) 3
Philosophy of Perception -- alla Grice, "Causal Theory of Perception" 3
Philosophy of Psychology 3
Ecological Philosophy 3

There were many other areas of philosophy which received just one or two votes.


*****************************************************************
F) What is the most interesting (not necessarily the most expensive) philosophy book published in the last five years in a language that you understand?

*****************************************************************
Sixty one books were recommended, but no book was recommended more than once except for Derek Parfit’s recent blockbuster

"On What Matters", which was named four times.

Parfit’s masterly synthesis of leading ethical theories circulated in photocopied form for several years before finally being published, with commentaries by four other moral philosophers, in 2011. (It was reviewed in Philosophy Now Issue 87.)
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the survey.

You're welcome!

Cheers



David Chalmers
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher of mind perhaps most famous for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The problem is not in explaining how we can detect and respond to the world (mindless robots can do that), but explaining how what might generally be called our experiences (or ‘phenomena’), can be produced through the activity of the brain. Chalmers has argued that since zombies (i.e., mindless but animate human bodies and brains) are conceivable, there must be a conceptual distinction between brains and experienced phenomena, meaning that experiences are not just physical things.



Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke is an American philosopher from Princeton who is known for focusing on an analysis of language and on modal logic, which is concerned with how to talk about possible worlds. For instance, his 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that names are ‘rigid designators’ and refer to the same thing in all possible worlds, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon’ would refer to the same man whether or not he had become President. Kripke also makes the point that different names for the same thing can highlight how the way we refer to something can affect the truth of propositions about that thing, e.g. it’s true that Mary Jane knows that Peter Parker is Peter Parker, and that Spiderman is Spiderman, but it’s not true that she knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman.