Markus Schrenk.
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Gavagai: Why and how did you become a philosopher? Was it by accident?
Markus Schrenk: No, not by accident. I was interested fairly early in philosophical questions, maybe first related to religious questions, at around the age of 12 or 13. Let’s just say I had a lot of doubts about religion; this is how my philosophical interests started. Then, by 14-16, I read my first philosophy book; it was an introduction to philosophy. But I was also interested in physics and mathematics, and maybe back then I identified these subjects. I actually though that physics could answer all the questions (maybe philosophers of science have this idea at one point in their life). I actually started with a physics degree at university but then very quickly I turned to philosophy because I realized that this was the subject that interested me most. Subsequently I had physics and logic as minors. But I knew all along that philosophy was my main interest.
Elina Pechlivanidi: Did any philosophical question come up during your physics lectures?
MS: No, not that early. Actually, more in mathematics. To study physics you have to study a lot of mathematics and in my first algebra courses we had a crash course in logic as well, which was extremely interesting from a philosophical point of view. But in physics not that early on because the things you have to learn from the very beginning are not so philosophically interesting. Also, I think I haven’t learned enough physics to get to that point. For example, philosophers of physics are concerned with the interpretations of quantum mechanisms. I know roughly what they are talking about, I can distinguish the different interpretations, but with physics as a second subject you cannot really get into much further detail.
Again my interest in philosophy really was initially very closely related with the question whether God exists or if there’s a meaning to life. Now, being a metaphysician of science I am not tackling these issues anymore but I would like to go back to them. When you study philosophy and your interests are within philosophy of science you are very remote from these questions. I would love to get back to questions where the metaphysical answers relate to my day-to-day life; where they matter.
Personal identity for example; it matters immediately to the idea we have of ourselves. What we are, who we are, etc. Philosophical questions have to shake us somehow, alter our views.
G: This question begs to be asked: since you are a metaphysician, how does analytic metaphysics, or the metaphysics of science, shake your everyday life?
MS: Well, it doesn’t. Or not enough. I am aware of this gap so I want to turn to these other questions more.
Yesterday we discussed Sokal’s hoax[1]; whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. First of all it is a funny thing! Maybe it reveals a weakness of certain aspects of continental philosophy (I put a “maybe” in front of it). My question after this hoax was: “Is an analogous hoax possible in analytic philosophy?” The answer is: not in this way, of course, because analytic philosophers are usually very precise in the use of their concepts and know their science; there is no way this article was going to be published in an analytic journal. Fair enough.
However, by analogous I mean hitting possible weaknesses of analytic philosophy. I think it actually happens without there even being such a hoax. Here’s what I think happens (I should say this is a very personal opinion): as I said already, I like philosophical discussions of philosophical subjects most when they shake my day-to-day experience or they shake my opinion of myself or of what the world is like. That’s great, if that happens. However, occasionally I have the impression that some analytic philosophy is just puzzle solving, chess playing with concepts, and it doesn’t relate to my life anymore. Let’s say the 25th round of counterfactual analysis of dispositions… there has to be another ceteris paribus clause… in order to avoid finks… and super finks… and super duper finks etc. There is a point when it becomes a mere play with words. I feel that this could and actually does happen. I think that is a Sokal hoax for analytic philosophy; where people just play with concepts and it becomes a matter of “Look how clever I am!”. At one point, at least for me, I lose interest. I know that some puzzles haven’t been solved and puzzle solving is a great, intriguing activity but at some it starts being tedious. Sometimes I have this impression whereas other times I am happy to do it myself! So, a Sokal hoax within analytic philosophy is it’s perfunctory puzzle solving.
EP: If the initial question is one that really matters and then changes according to the replies and counterexample, then it’s a matter of whether the next link of the chain is justified or not. So, if every step is justified in this sense, then even the trivial step is important because it aims at answering the initial question. How would you respond to such a defense?
MS: First answer: I think you’re right of course. Second answer: if such a path leads to refinement after refinement and counterexample after counterexample, maybe this indicates that we should follow some totally different route. Here’s an example: Timothy Williamson says knowledge is the basic term and not justified true belief (in his “Knowledge and its limits” (OUP 2000)). So, he proposed not to analyze knowledge in terms of justified true belief but to have knowledge as the fundamental term and not the other way around. Maybe within some “kuhnian” paradigms some signs of decay appear that indicate that we have to find a new paradigm to move on.
Third answer (again, drawing inspiration from a Timothy Williamson article: “Abductive philosophy”). Here’s an idea: In the special sciences (biology, psychology etc.) we allow laws to have exceptions or rules to have exceptions. We can do really good science even though we know there are these exceptions; we still accept that genes behave in such and such a way except when there is an x-ray pointing at the DNA etc. Maybe philosophical theories can be ceteris paribus. If this is so, then some counterexamples to a theory can be ignored because the overall picture can describe most things and we can tolerate it. That’s a thought. Of course, usually we want 100% accuracy; but maybe that’s the wrong idea. A paradigm shift would be to say: knowledge is true justified belief plus a ceteris paribus clause.
G: Sure but how do you know which ceteris paribus clause you are warranted to use? Depending of the question? If this is so then it seems like an ad hoc solution.
Yes of course. Just as in the natural sciences you have to say when a philosophical theory is definitely falsified. This idea should not be used as an immunization strategy. But hey, this is just the start of an idea!
EP: Do you think we could ever have a theory with no exceptions?
MS: It might be possible. But who ever told us that we humans are clever enough for grand unified theories? Maybe we are just too stupid! Examining the last 2000-3000 years of philosophy I could make the inductive claim that we are probably not up to the task.
G: Thomas Unger has this book called “Empty Ideas” in which he claims, more or less, that modern analytic philosophy has produced merely verbal but not substantial disagreement.
MS: This idea has been around. Logical empiricism says the same about metaphysics. I can see how someone can get into the mood to claim that. I’m not saying that it’s right, but there are moments of frustration where there is a feeling that this is going nowhere.
Yesterday we visited Aristotle’s museum and we asked ourselves what he would think if he were around. First of all, we said that he would freak out because of the traffic! Our second thought was that he would attend philosophy conferences and say that today’s philosophy is all footnotes to Plato.
I think it’s a critique that we must take seriously.
G: Should philosophy engage with public issues?
MS: I can read two questions into your one question. The first one is: should professional philosophers and philosophy graduates somehow interact with the public in order to make philosophical thought available to a wider audience? I think that’s very desirable because people do have philosophical questions and they want answers. Occasionally there are some books on the market which are not that well done and it would be great if some professional philosophers would write them instead. It’s actually fashionable in Germany right now. There is a guy who has not studied philosophy but who started writing these books. One can be opposed to these books, one could write them in a clearer way maybe, but it is a great achievement that the wider public became interested in philosophy through these publications. There are three philosophy magazines right now on the market in Germany and apparently they are doing well. There is a huge conference at Cologne, called Phil Cologne, which is five days long. It is a great conference for the wider audience. And I think this is a good thing.
The second question I can read into your one question is whether philosophers should have and share their opinions on politics. To a certain extent everyone should be involved in political life by voicing their opinion. Now, if you ask specifically a philosopher, what they can do as a philosopher, then my answer would be that we can contribute but maybe it should not be by opinion but by conceptual analysis; clarifying issues. Maybe that’s what philosophers can and should do.
G: As you might know there are Greek philosophers that are part of the Greek government right now. People could say that conceptual analysis is simply not enough. They should also venture at some sort of solution.
MS: Of course, but maybe they do so as citoyen/politicians, not as philosophers.
Stavros Ioannidis: Very often scientists say things like “Philosophy is dead[2]”. What is your attitude towards these allegations? Can metaphysics contribute to science or is it a completely separate domain?
MS: This is a very difficult question. You know of Peter Strawson’s idea to distinguish between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. Descriptive first: Peter Strawson thinks that from the way we speak in everyday language we can extract the hidden presuppositions about what must be metaphysically true about the world so that this way of speaking is possible or true. For example, a subject-predicate structure of sentences might indicate a properties-individual ontology. That’s doing descriptive metaphysics; you are not prescribing anything, you infer from the way we interact and speak what the metaphysical commitments are.
Revisionary metaphysics would question our ordinary day to day assumptions about the world. Revisionary metaphysics could make us realize that there is no time, there is no self etc. Maybe processes are the fundamental things in ontology and not things and their properties (something Whitehead would say for example). Descriptive metaphysics was meant to be applied to ordinary language. But you could apply descriptive metaphysics to the sciences, and extract their ontological commitments. This would be a task for philosophy.
But I now realize your question was the other way around: can metaphysics inform science? I’m not sure about this. Maybe not in the sense that: “Oh dear, relativity theory must be wrong because of this metaphysical idea”. Not it this sense. Even if the answer is “no” there is a value in metaphysics for at least two reasons.
What’s the use of an artwork? It has intrinsic value; we appreciate it. And that might just be the case with metaphysics as well. It has intrinsic value anyway.
Secondly, if we do descriptive metaphysics of sciences as outlined above and we find out there’s a clash with our everyday metaphysics, with what we thought the world is like, then some overall theory must do some explanatory, unificatory work. If a descriptive metaphysics of physics is a revisionary metaphysics regarding our everyday ontology then I also want a good philosophical theory to explain why we had this wrong opinion; why I have this sense that time is flowing, why I have this sense of self, why there are no individuals and just fields and electrons etc. Metaphysics definitely can correct our opinions it but correction means that it also shows how come I have this wrong opinion. If there’s no explanation for my wrong opinion I’m inclined to be an instrumentalist about the physical theory; I might think it is a good tool to make predictions but I won’t give any truth to it.
G: Why is that a metaphysical question in the first place? One could claim that it’s psychology’s job to explain why we have certain intuitions (you mentioned: time flowing, the self etc.). Maybe we have these intuitions because they are “useful” to our survival (according to some evolutionary story).
MS: In saying this you have granted already that psychology is true. Maybe as a scientific realist. My starting point is earlier. It aims to be more radical.
Of course we totally rely on technology and it would be silly to say that science is all wrong (here’s a mobile phone recording this talk). To be totally skeptical about science’s progress would be utterly silly. But why should it give me more certain truths about the fundaments of the world than my day-to-day phenomenology? That’s what I have been dealing with so far, and I have been dealing with it very successfully. Tables, persons… if they are not certain then I don’t know what is! There are really good reasons to say that this is our basic ontology and the whole rest is derived from that. One first of all has to get good reasons why it’s the other way around. I find myself in my day-to-day in a totally different world that the world described by science (by fundamental science at least). So, it’s quite an effort to get away from that, and that is something that psychology can’t deliver. If you’re saying that psychology can tell you that there is no “self module” in your brain, no homunculus, or some soul, that is already taking for granted that a scientific ontology is the fundamental ontology. It means that you have bought into that already. I say that what is primarily given to me looks different. Now, to give that up, to give up that time flows, to give up that there is a “self”, a lot of argumentation has to go into that. (I’m not saying that we should not get the scientific realists way but we should be aware that this needs philosophical argumentation. Thus, philosophy is not dead at all, pace Hawking.)
G: Any comments on the Analytic-Continental so-called “divide”?
MS: We had this discussion about Sokal’s hoax already and I think it maybe does reveal some weaknesses of the continental tradition. But as I spelled out you can equally reveal weaknesses about analytic philosophy too; if it is just playing with words etc.
More generally speaking I think it’s a very good sign that philosophers from both camps have started to talk to each other again. Most visible in the philosophy of mind where – and that relates nicely to what we discussed beforehand about metaphysics and science – phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have started to talk to each other. Maybe fruitfully so, maybe not (I am not into the debate much although I have read Dan Zahavi’s and Shaun Gallagher’s book “The Phenomenological Mind”).
In analytic philosophy of mind certain phenomena of the mind might have been neglected. In order to do philosophy of mind, to say what the relation between mind and body is, you have to be clear about what the phenomena are, what they are like, what range of mental phenomena there are. Phenomenology does a lot of that. Clarifying what the phenomena are, what kind of phenomena I am confronted with. How time feels like or how shame feels like, or how such and such feels like. And so, what phenomenology can do for analytic philosophy, at least, and I guess many-many more things, is to deliver the data. As far as I know, the idea to look closer at emotions is fairly new; it’s a newer “thing” in analytic philosophy of mind (I might be wrong of course). Our mental phenomena are so rich (It’s not only aboutness, consciousness and qualia. They are so many different ways we feel: moods, attitudes towards life etc.). Phenomenology is a great source to know what we want to analyze if we want to analyze the mind. So, that seems to me to be a great collaboration between analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology.
SI: Are there any internal incompatibilities between the two traditions?
MS: I guess there are. I am not so much an expert on continental philosophy as I am on some bits of analytic philosophy, so answering this question is difficult. Of course there will be clashes on methodology, clashes on what is a good argument etc. But I think that it would be utterly silly if one of the sides says that what the other camp is doing is stupid. So, even if methodology of analytic philosophy is really bad according to some continental view, there should be a discussion about how come this is regarded as bad or as good.
I think a dialogue is necessary and fruitful. To give an example: If I - and this is autobiographical - open a random page in Derrida I won’t understand what’s going on. It’s all too easy for me to say that this is all bullshit, there is no argumentation structure etc. But that’s all too easy. Compare: if you don’t know anything about his philosophy look at a random page of David Lewis’s work; possible world talk… and such like. If you are not informed enough about a philosophy then you can basically laugh about any philosopher. All I want to say is that we should be very careful to prioritize one of the traditions over the other. Again, I was brought up in an analytic tradition so that’s what I favor, but probably because it is the one familiar to me.
G: A point about Schopenhauer.
MS: I used to have a statement on my website saying that I like Schopenhauer! I took this off because he was a terrible misogynist. That was a good enough reason for me to take away that statement. Having said that, I very much like his philosophy. He’s maybe one of the last philosophers where there is a link between his metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics… (this link we discussed earlier). That is extremely visible in his work because his aesthetics, as well as his suggestion on how one should live one’s life is grounded in his metaphysics. He might of course be wrong but he links these areas; this is an aspect of Schopenhauerian philosophy that I really like a lot. I am familiar with some kind of eastern spirituality coming from Buddhism, and that’s also true for Schopenhauer; he was one of the first to discover eastern philosophy and his metaphysics, his ethics and his view of the world is very much influenced by that. I feel at home with Schopenhauerian themes in many respects.
G: Thank you very much for the interview!
MS: I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to think meta-philosophically about philosophy! This has been the first time for me and things I said were spontaneous and not well thought through. I hope readers (if there are any) will forgive the occasional naivety. Again, many thanks to you for the questions about which I will continue thinking.
[1] Referring to a discussion we had the previous day.
[2] "Stephen Hawking tells Google 'philosophy is dead'". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 17 June 2012
Markus Schrenk: No, not by accident. I was interested fairly early in philosophical questions, maybe first related to religious questions, at around the age of 12 or 13. Let’s just say I had a lot of doubts about religion; this is how my philosophical interests started. Then, by 14-16, I read my first philosophy book; it was an introduction to philosophy. But I was also interested in physics and mathematics, and maybe back then I identified these subjects. I actually though that physics could answer all the questions (maybe philosophers of science have this idea at one point in their life). I actually started with a physics degree at university but then very quickly I turned to philosophy because I realized that this was the subject that interested me most. Subsequently I had physics and logic as minors. But I knew all along that philosophy was my main interest.
Elina Pechlivanidi: Did any philosophical question come up during your physics lectures?
MS: No, not that early. Actually, more in mathematics. To study physics you have to study a lot of mathematics and in my first algebra courses we had a crash course in logic as well, which was extremely interesting from a philosophical point of view. But in physics not that early on because the things you have to learn from the very beginning are not so philosophically interesting. Also, I think I haven’t learned enough physics to get to that point. For example, philosophers of physics are concerned with the interpretations of quantum mechanisms. I know roughly what they are talking about, I can distinguish the different interpretations, but with physics as a second subject you cannot really get into much further detail.
Again my interest in philosophy really was initially very closely related with the question whether God exists or if there’s a meaning to life. Now, being a metaphysician of science I am not tackling these issues anymore but I would like to go back to them. When you study philosophy and your interests are within philosophy of science you are very remote from these questions. I would love to get back to questions where the metaphysical answers relate to my day-to-day life; where they matter.
Personal identity for example; it matters immediately to the idea we have of ourselves. What we are, who we are, etc. Philosophical questions have to shake us somehow, alter our views.
G: This question begs to be asked: since you are a metaphysician, how does analytic metaphysics, or the metaphysics of science, shake your everyday life?
MS: Well, it doesn’t. Or not enough. I am aware of this gap so I want to turn to these other questions more.
Yesterday we discussed Sokal’s hoax[1]; whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. First of all it is a funny thing! Maybe it reveals a weakness of certain aspects of continental philosophy (I put a “maybe” in front of it). My question after this hoax was: “Is an analogous hoax possible in analytic philosophy?” The answer is: not in this way, of course, because analytic philosophers are usually very precise in the use of their concepts and know their science; there is no way this article was going to be published in an analytic journal. Fair enough.
However, by analogous I mean hitting possible weaknesses of analytic philosophy. I think it actually happens without there even being such a hoax. Here’s what I think happens (I should say this is a very personal opinion): as I said already, I like philosophical discussions of philosophical subjects most when they shake my day-to-day experience or they shake my opinion of myself or of what the world is like. That’s great, if that happens. However, occasionally I have the impression that some analytic philosophy is just puzzle solving, chess playing with concepts, and it doesn’t relate to my life anymore. Let’s say the 25th round of counterfactual analysis of dispositions… there has to be another ceteris paribus clause… in order to avoid finks… and super finks… and super duper finks etc. There is a point when it becomes a mere play with words. I feel that this could and actually does happen. I think that is a Sokal hoax for analytic philosophy; where people just play with concepts and it becomes a matter of “Look how clever I am!”. At one point, at least for me, I lose interest. I know that some puzzles haven’t been solved and puzzle solving is a great, intriguing activity but at some it starts being tedious. Sometimes I have this impression whereas other times I am happy to do it myself! So, a Sokal hoax within analytic philosophy is it’s perfunctory puzzle solving.
EP: If the initial question is one that really matters and then changes according to the replies and counterexample, then it’s a matter of whether the next link of the chain is justified or not. So, if every step is justified in this sense, then even the trivial step is important because it aims at answering the initial question. How would you respond to such a defense?
MS: First answer: I think you’re right of course. Second answer: if such a path leads to refinement after refinement and counterexample after counterexample, maybe this indicates that we should follow some totally different route. Here’s an example: Timothy Williamson says knowledge is the basic term and not justified true belief (in his “Knowledge and its limits” (OUP 2000)). So, he proposed not to analyze knowledge in terms of justified true belief but to have knowledge as the fundamental term and not the other way around. Maybe within some “kuhnian” paradigms some signs of decay appear that indicate that we have to find a new paradigm to move on.
Third answer (again, drawing inspiration from a Timothy Williamson article: “Abductive philosophy”). Here’s an idea: In the special sciences (biology, psychology etc.) we allow laws to have exceptions or rules to have exceptions. We can do really good science even though we know there are these exceptions; we still accept that genes behave in such and such a way except when there is an x-ray pointing at the DNA etc. Maybe philosophical theories can be ceteris paribus. If this is so, then some counterexamples to a theory can be ignored because the overall picture can describe most things and we can tolerate it. That’s a thought. Of course, usually we want 100% accuracy; but maybe that’s the wrong idea. A paradigm shift would be to say: knowledge is true justified belief plus a ceteris paribus clause.
G: Sure but how do you know which ceteris paribus clause you are warranted to use? Depending of the question? If this is so then it seems like an ad hoc solution.
Yes of course. Just as in the natural sciences you have to say when a philosophical theory is definitely falsified. This idea should not be used as an immunization strategy. But hey, this is just the start of an idea!
EP: Do you think we could ever have a theory with no exceptions?
MS: It might be possible. But who ever told us that we humans are clever enough for grand unified theories? Maybe we are just too stupid! Examining the last 2000-3000 years of philosophy I could make the inductive claim that we are probably not up to the task.
G: Thomas Unger has this book called “Empty Ideas” in which he claims, more or less, that modern analytic philosophy has produced merely verbal but not substantial disagreement.
MS: This idea has been around. Logical empiricism says the same about metaphysics. I can see how someone can get into the mood to claim that. I’m not saying that it’s right, but there are moments of frustration where there is a feeling that this is going nowhere.
Yesterday we visited Aristotle’s museum and we asked ourselves what he would think if he were around. First of all, we said that he would freak out because of the traffic! Our second thought was that he would attend philosophy conferences and say that today’s philosophy is all footnotes to Plato.
I think it’s a critique that we must take seriously.
G: Should philosophy engage with public issues?
MS: I can read two questions into your one question. The first one is: should professional philosophers and philosophy graduates somehow interact with the public in order to make philosophical thought available to a wider audience? I think that’s very desirable because people do have philosophical questions and they want answers. Occasionally there are some books on the market which are not that well done and it would be great if some professional philosophers would write them instead. It’s actually fashionable in Germany right now. There is a guy who has not studied philosophy but who started writing these books. One can be opposed to these books, one could write them in a clearer way maybe, but it is a great achievement that the wider public became interested in philosophy through these publications. There are three philosophy magazines right now on the market in Germany and apparently they are doing well. There is a huge conference at Cologne, called Phil Cologne, which is five days long. It is a great conference for the wider audience. And I think this is a good thing.
The second question I can read into your one question is whether philosophers should have and share their opinions on politics. To a certain extent everyone should be involved in political life by voicing their opinion. Now, if you ask specifically a philosopher, what they can do as a philosopher, then my answer would be that we can contribute but maybe it should not be by opinion but by conceptual analysis; clarifying issues. Maybe that’s what philosophers can and should do.
G: As you might know there are Greek philosophers that are part of the Greek government right now. People could say that conceptual analysis is simply not enough. They should also venture at some sort of solution.
MS: Of course, but maybe they do so as citoyen/politicians, not as philosophers.
Stavros Ioannidis: Very often scientists say things like “Philosophy is dead[2]”. What is your attitude towards these allegations? Can metaphysics contribute to science or is it a completely separate domain?
MS: This is a very difficult question. You know of Peter Strawson’s idea to distinguish between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics. Descriptive first: Peter Strawson thinks that from the way we speak in everyday language we can extract the hidden presuppositions about what must be metaphysically true about the world so that this way of speaking is possible or true. For example, a subject-predicate structure of sentences might indicate a properties-individual ontology. That’s doing descriptive metaphysics; you are not prescribing anything, you infer from the way we interact and speak what the metaphysical commitments are.
Revisionary metaphysics would question our ordinary day to day assumptions about the world. Revisionary metaphysics could make us realize that there is no time, there is no self etc. Maybe processes are the fundamental things in ontology and not things and their properties (something Whitehead would say for example). Descriptive metaphysics was meant to be applied to ordinary language. But you could apply descriptive metaphysics to the sciences, and extract their ontological commitments. This would be a task for philosophy.
But I now realize your question was the other way around: can metaphysics inform science? I’m not sure about this. Maybe not in the sense that: “Oh dear, relativity theory must be wrong because of this metaphysical idea”. Not it this sense. Even if the answer is “no” there is a value in metaphysics for at least two reasons.
What’s the use of an artwork? It has intrinsic value; we appreciate it. And that might just be the case with metaphysics as well. It has intrinsic value anyway.
Secondly, if we do descriptive metaphysics of sciences as outlined above and we find out there’s a clash with our everyday metaphysics, with what we thought the world is like, then some overall theory must do some explanatory, unificatory work. If a descriptive metaphysics of physics is a revisionary metaphysics regarding our everyday ontology then I also want a good philosophical theory to explain why we had this wrong opinion; why I have this sense that time is flowing, why I have this sense of self, why there are no individuals and just fields and electrons etc. Metaphysics definitely can correct our opinions it but correction means that it also shows how come I have this wrong opinion. If there’s no explanation for my wrong opinion I’m inclined to be an instrumentalist about the physical theory; I might think it is a good tool to make predictions but I won’t give any truth to it.
G: Why is that a metaphysical question in the first place? One could claim that it’s psychology’s job to explain why we have certain intuitions (you mentioned: time flowing, the self etc.). Maybe we have these intuitions because they are “useful” to our survival (according to some evolutionary story).
MS: In saying this you have granted already that psychology is true. Maybe as a scientific realist. My starting point is earlier. It aims to be more radical.
Of course we totally rely on technology and it would be silly to say that science is all wrong (here’s a mobile phone recording this talk). To be totally skeptical about science’s progress would be utterly silly. But why should it give me more certain truths about the fundaments of the world than my day-to-day phenomenology? That’s what I have been dealing with so far, and I have been dealing with it very successfully. Tables, persons… if they are not certain then I don’t know what is! There are really good reasons to say that this is our basic ontology and the whole rest is derived from that. One first of all has to get good reasons why it’s the other way around. I find myself in my day-to-day in a totally different world that the world described by science (by fundamental science at least). So, it’s quite an effort to get away from that, and that is something that psychology can’t deliver. If you’re saying that psychology can tell you that there is no “self module” in your brain, no homunculus, or some soul, that is already taking for granted that a scientific ontology is the fundamental ontology. It means that you have bought into that already. I say that what is primarily given to me looks different. Now, to give that up, to give up that time flows, to give up that there is a “self”, a lot of argumentation has to go into that. (I’m not saying that we should not get the scientific realists way but we should be aware that this needs philosophical argumentation. Thus, philosophy is not dead at all, pace Hawking.)
G: Any comments on the Analytic-Continental so-called “divide”?
MS: We had this discussion about Sokal’s hoax already and I think it maybe does reveal some weaknesses of the continental tradition. But as I spelled out you can equally reveal weaknesses about analytic philosophy too; if it is just playing with words etc.
More generally speaking I think it’s a very good sign that philosophers from both camps have started to talk to each other again. Most visible in the philosophy of mind where – and that relates nicely to what we discussed beforehand about metaphysics and science – phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have started to talk to each other. Maybe fruitfully so, maybe not (I am not into the debate much although I have read Dan Zahavi’s and Shaun Gallagher’s book “The Phenomenological Mind”).
In analytic philosophy of mind certain phenomena of the mind might have been neglected. In order to do philosophy of mind, to say what the relation between mind and body is, you have to be clear about what the phenomena are, what they are like, what range of mental phenomena there are. Phenomenology does a lot of that. Clarifying what the phenomena are, what kind of phenomena I am confronted with. How time feels like or how shame feels like, or how such and such feels like. And so, what phenomenology can do for analytic philosophy, at least, and I guess many-many more things, is to deliver the data. As far as I know, the idea to look closer at emotions is fairly new; it’s a newer “thing” in analytic philosophy of mind (I might be wrong of course). Our mental phenomena are so rich (It’s not only aboutness, consciousness and qualia. They are so many different ways we feel: moods, attitudes towards life etc.). Phenomenology is a great source to know what we want to analyze if we want to analyze the mind. So, that seems to me to be a great collaboration between analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology.
SI: Are there any internal incompatibilities between the two traditions?
MS: I guess there are. I am not so much an expert on continental philosophy as I am on some bits of analytic philosophy, so answering this question is difficult. Of course there will be clashes on methodology, clashes on what is a good argument etc. But I think that it would be utterly silly if one of the sides says that what the other camp is doing is stupid. So, even if methodology of analytic philosophy is really bad according to some continental view, there should be a discussion about how come this is regarded as bad or as good.
I think a dialogue is necessary and fruitful. To give an example: If I - and this is autobiographical - open a random page in Derrida I won’t understand what’s going on. It’s all too easy for me to say that this is all bullshit, there is no argumentation structure etc. But that’s all too easy. Compare: if you don’t know anything about his philosophy look at a random page of David Lewis’s work; possible world talk… and such like. If you are not informed enough about a philosophy then you can basically laugh about any philosopher. All I want to say is that we should be very careful to prioritize one of the traditions over the other. Again, I was brought up in an analytic tradition so that’s what I favor, but probably because it is the one familiar to me.
G: A point about Schopenhauer.
MS: I used to have a statement on my website saying that I like Schopenhauer! I took this off because he was a terrible misogynist. That was a good enough reason for me to take away that statement. Having said that, I very much like his philosophy. He’s maybe one of the last philosophers where there is a link between his metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics… (this link we discussed earlier). That is extremely visible in his work because his aesthetics, as well as his suggestion on how one should live one’s life is grounded in his metaphysics. He might of course be wrong but he links these areas; this is an aspect of Schopenhauerian philosophy that I really like a lot. I am familiar with some kind of eastern spirituality coming from Buddhism, and that’s also true for Schopenhauer; he was one of the first to discover eastern philosophy and his metaphysics, his ethics and his view of the world is very much influenced by that. I feel at home with Schopenhauerian themes in many respects.
G: Thank you very much for the interview!
MS: I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to think meta-philosophically about philosophy! This has been the first time for me and things I said were spontaneous and not well thought through. I hope readers (if there are any) will forgive the occasional naivety. Again, many thanks to you for the questions about which I will continue thinking.
[1] Referring to a discussion we had the previous day.
[2] "Stephen Hawking tells Google 'philosophy is dead'". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 17 June 2012