Daniel Garber.
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Gavagai: The very name of our journal was inspired by one of your teachers, Quine. What was he like? Did he appreciate the relation between philosophy and history?
Daniel Garber: I was very lucky to be at that place at exactly the right moment, all of these wonderful teachers were there. I really think that philosophy and history have to work together. It’s complicated. I didn’t learn about the relation between philosophy and history through Quine and through Putnam, but rather in a certain way as a reaction against them. Because Quine did not believe in the history of philosophy, he was not interested in it and did not think is was interesting and important. Putnam was not quite as doctrinaire about that but he didn't actually know very much history of philosophy. I remember when I was a student there were complaints from the students that we were required to take an examination into the history of philosophy but nobody wanted to teach it. So Putnam volunteered to teach a course, "Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz", and it was a disaster! [laughter] He was one of the smartest people I have ever met but he was just not sensitive to the historical things. And right now I actually take myself to be more of a historian of philosophy than a philosopher, although I am still very interested in philosophical questions.
But I think that history of philosophy is very important to illuminate contemporary philosophy because in a certain sense it makes clear some of the decisions that have been made in terms of what the appropriate problems are and what the appropriate conceptual structure is. You take someone as Spinoza, or somebody like Descartes particularly, where physics is part of philosophy and it is one of the things that whatever you do it involves interconnections between of what we think as philosophical questions and of what we think as scientific questions. You go to contemporary analytic philosophy and this is not the case anymore. It is important to understand the way in which philosophy has changed, so that you can ask the question of whether this was really a good thing. I think it opens up a lot of philosophical possibilities to look back to how people used to do philosophy and see how it is different to the way in which we do it. It gives you a license into larger thoughts, to think outside of what people now happen to be doing under the name of philosophy. But also, these people were smart and interesting and it’s always a pleasure, even though we might not agree with them, to look at how they were looking at the world.
G: One of your areas of expertise is 17th century philosophy. What do you personally find fascinating about that period?
DG: Actually I've worked on a number of figures. I am interested in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Galileo, Bacon, and a lot of smaller figures from that period as well. Pascal is another major thinker.
What I find particularly interesting is the interconnection between science and philosophy. Because, what really influenced me was logical positivism and Quine, and the idea of scientific philosophy. The idea that philosophy and science are continuous with one another was an idea that, when I was a student, I found enormously attractive, according to which philosophy is doing science in a more abstract, but continuous, way. There is not a separate philosophical question, there not a separate philosophical mode of reasoning, there are no separate methods, standards etc; philosophy and science are both parts of a larger thing. For me, during the 17th century, that was really true about philosophy. And these are among the figures in which it was most vivid and there is this post connection between what we now think as philosophical questions, and of what we now think as scientific questions. What I find very curious, for example concerning someone like Descartes, is the way in which when I was student people read the Meditations but they didn’t read the Principles of Philosophy. They thought about the distinction between mind and body but not about the laws of nature. I think that when people read the whole period, they find out that there is a significant connection between the history of science and the history of philosophy.
G: Have any of the thinkers that you study made an impact in your personal life? Have you found any practical wisdom in their work?
I don’t know about anything practical [laughter], but one of the things I have been working on the last couple of years is Hobbes’s politics and Spinoza’s politics; more specifically about the relation between religion and politics. And I do find really interesting to look into the way in which they conceptualized politics. This is not quite practical but I think that there is a certain wisdom in that. I actually find Pascal enormously interesting in that respect as well. Pensées is enormously interesting, pace Montaigne who he is somebody who is very philosophical even if he is not a philosopher; he is somebody whose reflections on life I cant find value in (that’s not to say that I would like to following them completely).
G: Thank you very much!
DG: Thank you very much as well.
Daniel Garber: I was very lucky to be at that place at exactly the right moment, all of these wonderful teachers were there. I really think that philosophy and history have to work together. It’s complicated. I didn’t learn about the relation between philosophy and history through Quine and through Putnam, but rather in a certain way as a reaction against them. Because Quine did not believe in the history of philosophy, he was not interested in it and did not think is was interesting and important. Putnam was not quite as doctrinaire about that but he didn't actually know very much history of philosophy. I remember when I was a student there were complaints from the students that we were required to take an examination into the history of philosophy but nobody wanted to teach it. So Putnam volunteered to teach a course, "Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz", and it was a disaster! [laughter] He was one of the smartest people I have ever met but he was just not sensitive to the historical things. And right now I actually take myself to be more of a historian of philosophy than a philosopher, although I am still very interested in philosophical questions.
But I think that history of philosophy is very important to illuminate contemporary philosophy because in a certain sense it makes clear some of the decisions that have been made in terms of what the appropriate problems are and what the appropriate conceptual structure is. You take someone as Spinoza, or somebody like Descartes particularly, where physics is part of philosophy and it is one of the things that whatever you do it involves interconnections between of what we think as philosophical questions and of what we think as scientific questions. You go to contemporary analytic philosophy and this is not the case anymore. It is important to understand the way in which philosophy has changed, so that you can ask the question of whether this was really a good thing. I think it opens up a lot of philosophical possibilities to look back to how people used to do philosophy and see how it is different to the way in which we do it. It gives you a license into larger thoughts, to think outside of what people now happen to be doing under the name of philosophy. But also, these people were smart and interesting and it’s always a pleasure, even though we might not agree with them, to look at how they were looking at the world.
G: One of your areas of expertise is 17th century philosophy. What do you personally find fascinating about that period?
DG: Actually I've worked on a number of figures. I am interested in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Galileo, Bacon, and a lot of smaller figures from that period as well. Pascal is another major thinker.
What I find particularly interesting is the interconnection between science and philosophy. Because, what really influenced me was logical positivism and Quine, and the idea of scientific philosophy. The idea that philosophy and science are continuous with one another was an idea that, when I was a student, I found enormously attractive, according to which philosophy is doing science in a more abstract, but continuous, way. There is not a separate philosophical question, there not a separate philosophical mode of reasoning, there are no separate methods, standards etc; philosophy and science are both parts of a larger thing. For me, during the 17th century, that was really true about philosophy. And these are among the figures in which it was most vivid and there is this post connection between what we now think as philosophical questions, and of what we now think as scientific questions. What I find very curious, for example concerning someone like Descartes, is the way in which when I was student people read the Meditations but they didn’t read the Principles of Philosophy. They thought about the distinction between mind and body but not about the laws of nature. I think that when people read the whole period, they find out that there is a significant connection between the history of science and the history of philosophy.
G: Have any of the thinkers that you study made an impact in your personal life? Have you found any practical wisdom in their work?
I don’t know about anything practical [laughter], but one of the things I have been working on the last couple of years is Hobbes’s politics and Spinoza’s politics; more specifically about the relation between religion and politics. And I do find really interesting to look into the way in which they conceptualized politics. This is not quite practical but I think that there is a certain wisdom in that. I actually find Pascal enormously interesting in that respect as well. Pensées is enormously interesting, pace Montaigne who he is somebody who is very philosophical even if he is not a philosopher; he is somebody whose reflections on life I cant find value in (that’s not to say that I would like to following them completely).
G: Thank you very much!
DG: Thank you very much as well.