curley dialogues with the dead

8/10/2019 Curley Dialogues with the Dead

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Dialogues with the DeadAuthor(s): Edwin CurleySource: Synthese, Vol. 67, No. 1, The Role of History in and for Philosophy (Apr., 1986), pp.33-49Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20116255 .Accessed: 18/12/2014 09:21

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EDWIN CURLEY

DIALOGUES WITH THE DEAD

ABSTRACT. Serious work in history of philosophy requires doing something verydifficult: conducting a hypothetical dialogue with dead philosophers. Is it worth devoting to

it the time and energy required to do itwell? Yes. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of

understanding the past, making progress toward solving philosophical problems requires a

good grasp of the range of possible solutions to those problems and of the arguments whichmotivate alternative positions, a grasp we can only have ifwe understand well philosophy's

past. Philosophers who concentrate too much on the present are apt to assume too simple a

view of alternative theories and of important philosophical arguments. Ryle and Austin

offer instructive examples of how it is possible to go wrong by ignoring or misrepresentinghistorical figures.

My aim here is to reflect on the nature of what I do and to consider

whether it is worth doing. Not everyone will agree that the history of

philosophy is worth bothering with. Philosophers, I find, often have

towards historians of their subject a disdain matched only by that whichcreative writers often have for literary critics. Studying the systems of

dead philosophers may be a fit occupation for apprentices, who have yetto learn their trade, or for others incapable of making any serious

contribution to philosophy proper, but no philosopher worth his salt will

want to spend much time conducting a dialogue with the dead.

Consider the following words of Michael Scriven, contained in a

generally sensible piece of advice to departments on how to increase

their enrollments. In this passage Scriven is recommending the creation

of a 'two-track' major,

one via problems courses... one via history courses .... Of course, the history bears on

the problems, but so do the problems bear on the history... and the fact remains that

many students today won't take on that heavy history trip and you can't act as if all

professional philosophers disagree with them_Some history will come in the back

door of the problems courses- so be it. But don't be a slave to the fact that most of your

faculty know a great deal about the history of philosophy and hence, (a) find it easy to

teach, and (b) tend to rationalize its importance. Like the formal logic requirement, this is

all-too-often a case of those who went through fraternity initiations ... needing to justifythe hardship

- or their own idiosyncratic taste-

by generalizing about its necessity. The

test of a good major is that s/he does good philosophy, not good history of philosophy.Few great philosophers are noted for their work in the history of philosophy and many

Synthese 67 (1986) 33-49

? 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

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34 EDWIN CURLEY

were deficient or disinterested in it. They were into the problems. Let it be at least a

matter for investigation whether the history requirements are necessary; they certainlyare a barrier (1977, p. 233)

Thus Professor Scriven. If he did not exist, it would be necessary to

invent him, for otherwise itwould be hard to find displayed in so short a

space so many indefensible prejudices.Is it really true, for example, that an undergraduate choosing to

major in philosophy is typically embarking on a heavy history trip ?Not in my experience. Typically the undergraduate major is required to

take the standard two-semesteror

three-quarter survey of the history ofphilosophy from Tha?es to Kant, supplemented, perhaps, by similar

surveys of 19th and 20th century philosophy. But at most institutions

that do not have graduate programs, few advanced courses in particular

figures or movements are available; where they are available, they are

rarely required. Typically the undergraduate major takes mainly systematic or problem-oriented courses.

Is it really true that most faculty in philosophy departments know a

great deal about the history of philosophy? Perhaps in some schools

they do, but not inmany- not if knowing a great deal about a subject

implies having an extensive set of accurate and well-founded beliefs.How could they? What kind of training have most faculty had in the

history of philosophy?As undergraduates they will no doubt have had the standard survey

courses, but we cannot assume that they will have learned much fromthat experience. When I went through that kind of course some

twenty-five years ago, we read secondary accounts of Plato, Aristotle,

etc., in a massive textbook. Now more attention is paid to primarysources. No one should be under any illusions about how much can be

achieved in a course of that scope within the time constraints of one

academic year. The undergraduate who knows Plato and Aristotle onlyfrom that kind of course will not know much about Plato and Aristotle.

As graduate students they will no doubt have taken some advanced

seminars in Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and perhaps one or more

of the British empiricists. Here they will actually have read intensivelythe whole of some primary texts and been exposed to some fairlysophisticated secondary literature. But art is long, life is short, and they

will not have read nearly enough to know a great deal about Plato,

say, unless they happen to have chosen him as the subject of their

dissertation. At bestthey

will know onefigure

or movementreally

well.



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36 EDWIN CURLEY

Knowing what a philospher means by what he says requires, at the

very least, having some well-founded beliefs about how he would

respond to questions and objections he may never have explicitlyconsidered. This may in turn require knowing not just how he did in fact

respond to the questions and objections he did explicitly consider, butalso knowing something of the historical context within which he was

working: the possible influences on him by previous and contemporaryphilosophers, the possible effects of developments outside of philosophy, in politics, religion, and science. And I would say that it also

requiresthe

abilityto

analyse the structure ofa

text, to see what thecentral conclusion is and what reasons are offered for it, or suggested byimplication.

If our philosopher were a contemporary, still alive, active, and

cooperative, we might, of course, simply ask him what he means. But Ihave been assuming that an essential feature of the history of philosophy is that it deals with the work of dead philosophers, or at least of

philosophers who for some reason are no longer willing or able to

respond to questions about what they mean. It is this fact that calls forthe historian to exercise the special skills of imaginative reconstruction

which characterize the best work in the field. Knowing a great dealabout the history of philosophy, if I am right, calls for a lot more than

wide reading and a good memory. I cannot believe that such knowledgeis as widely distributed as Scriven suggests.

But if knowing much about the history of philosophy is as difficult as Ithink it is, is itworth the trouble? No doubt some people of antiquariantastes will always be drawn to the study of philosophy's past, but is it

wise to encourage this by requiring such study? Isn't it in fact true, as

Scriven says, that few great philosophers are noted for their work inthe history of philosophy and [that] many were deficient or disinterested

in it.We had better concede straightaway, that there have been a number

of great philosophers who were, to say the least, disinterested in the

history of philosophy. One point on which Descartes, Hobbes, Locke,Kant, and Wittgenstein all seem to have agreed was that in their own

time philosophy needed, in Kant's words, to consider as undone allthat has been done, and to start afresh from new foundations or from anew perspective.1 Still, while this attitude has not been rare, I do notthink it has been typical. Certainly Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas,

Spinoza,Leibniz and

Hegel, Dewey,Russell and

Whitehead,not to



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DIALOGUES WITH THE DEAD 37

mention Jaspers and Heidegger, all found it worth their while to devote

serious and extensive attention to one or more of their predecessors.There is room for disagreement as to whether these philosophers were

good historians of philosophy. By our standards, I suspect that most of

them were not. Sometimes their interests seem more polemical than

historical:2 and sometimes they seem to be motivated by a desire to

demonstrate that the dialectic of history has been leading inevitablytowards the truth represented by their own system.3 But frequently even

great and highly original philosophers demonstrate a desire simply to

work out thelogic

of aposition

alternative to theirown,

and ajoy

in the

insight this can bring.4Are they misusing their time and talents when they do this? I take it

that what underlies attitudes like Scriven's is the conviction that

philosophy is not like other disciplines in the humanities. Great works of

literature retain their validity even though modern writers may prefer to

do something quite different. But philosophy, like the sciences, is a

problem solving discipline, which must make progress, which must getresults, if it is to be worth doing at all. So the history of philosophy must

be either a history of error, or more charitably, a history of successively

less imperfect approximations to the truth we now possess or are aboutto reach. If we are really moved by a concern for truth, and not merely

by antiquarian curiosity, we want the most up-to-date answers, in

corporating all the latest improvements. A friend of mine once askedme: Why waste your time reading Hume on causation, when you can

read Mackie on causation? In part this paper is intended as a responseto that friend.

It is tempting for the historian to reply to this progressivist assumption by taking a pessimistic view of the philosopher's ability to getresults. In the past, philosophers have often held high hopes for some

new methodology: Plato hopes to find philosophical truth dialectically,Descartes by modeling philosophy on mathematics, Hume by introduc

ing experimental reasoning into philosophy, Kant by a Copernicanrevolution, some of our contemporaries by attending to the nuances of

ordinary language or developing a criterion of meaningfulness or

practising phenomenology. Just as often, it seems, these hopes have

been disappointed. The persistence of the classical problems of

philosophy, and their apparent resistance to any solution commandinguniversal assent, is one of the most discouraging lessons the historian

has for thephilosopher.

Because thehistory

ofphilosophy

lends itself to



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38 EDWIN CURLEY

this kind of lesson, it frequently attracts people of a skeptical temperament, who are content to regard the philosopher's ambition to solve

problems as an amusing presumption, and to catalogue the varieties ofhuman folly.5 Determining what Hume thought about causality, and

why he thought it, difficult as this may be, can easily seem a more

tractable problem than determining what the correct account of

causality is.

Nevertheless, Iwould not want to base my defense of the study of the

history of philosophy on skepticism about the possibility of progress, in

philosophy.In

my heart,I

suppose,I

agreewith the view which I

conjecture that Scriven assumes: that philosophy does make progress,that it does sometimes solve problems, that even its more persistentriddles may someday succumb to the right approach. Without claimingthat any of our contemporaries is as good a philosopher as Hume,6 or

that any contemporary solution to the problems of causality is the rightone, it does seem to me that there is a perfectly good sense in which thediscussion of causality inMackie's Cement of the Universe is superior tothat in Hume. I do think that Mackie probably had a clearer grasp of the

many issues that causality raises and that, whatever the truth about

causality is, he was probably closer to it than Hume was.7But it's worth asking ourselves why this should be so. Iwould suggest

that before he set himself to write on causation Mackie clearly spent alot of time reading Hume, along with many other writers on causation,some of them now dead, and that he clearly profited greatly from that

reading, that his familiarity with the dialogue philosophers have been

conducting on this topic since the time of Hume did a great deal to

sharpen his perception of the issues, of the range of possible positions,and of the advantages and disadvantages of each position.

This would seem to me to be good general advice on how to proceedin philosophy: given a problem, acquaint yourself with a wide range of

possible solutions to that problem and try to understand why someone

might be attracted to that solution, and repelled by others. Sometimes itis said that no philosophic doctrine originates in any other way than as a

refutation of or polemic against some previous doctrine.8 As an

unrestricted generalization about the origin of philosophical theories,this must surely be false, if only because it involves a vicious regress.

But it is certainly true that philosophers regularly argue for their views

by first surveying alternative solutions to the problem at hand, enu

merating the many defects of these alternatives, and thenpresenting



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their own view as the only, or best, way of avoiding those difficulties.

The current literature in philosophy presents us with too many exam

ples of this kind of procedure for there to be any point in enumeratingthem. But it does seem to me that philosophers lacking historical

sensitivity frequently go astray in their use of this procedure.

Consider, for example, a work which, 25 years ago, was generating a

great deal of excitement in our field, Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind.

Ryle began his book by describing something which he called,

variously, the official doctrine, or Descartes' myth, or the dogmaof the

ghostin the machine. The doctrine thus

stigmatizedhad both a

metaphysical side and an epistemological side.

Metaphysically, it was the view that a human being is a composite,

consisting of a material, extended substance, the body, and an in>

material, nonextended substance, the mind. These two substances are

each capable of existing without the other. And they regularly interact

with one another, the body acting on the mind in perception, and the

mind acting on the body in its voluntary actions. But apart from these

interferences by the mind, the body's actions are determined solely bythe laws of mechanics, whereas the mind's actions are not determined

by any cause.

On the epistemological side, the dogma of the ghost in the machine is

characterized by the doctrine that the mind has a highly privilegedaccess to its own workings: it knows, directly, infallibly, and automa

tically, all of its own states, whereas it is only partially and tenuouslyknowledgeable about the states of bodies, and totally and invincibly

ignorant of the states of other minds. Our beliefs about the contents, or

even the existence of other minds are no more than shaky inferences

from the behavior of other bodies, inferences whose conclusions we can

never directly verify, and hence can never have any real confidence in.

Ryle attributes the origin of the dogma of the ghost in the machine toDescartes' concern with the apparent implications of the mechanistic

science of his time:

As a man of scientific genius, he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics; yet as a

religious and moral man, he could not accept the discouraging rider to those

claims ... that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.9

So he invented a paramechanical hypothesis, according to which

some of the movements of human bodies have a nonmechanical, mental



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40 EDWIN CURLEY

cause, and all acts of the mind are outside the network of mechanical

causation.

Now Ryle admits, in a historical note (pp. 23-4), that the official

theory does not derive entirely from Descartes and his concern with

the implications of 17th century mechanics, that in part Descartes was

merely reformulating doctrines already existing in the philosophies and

theologies of his predecessors. But this concession to historical fact

does not go nearly far enough. Not only did Descartes not originate the

dogma of the ghost in the machine. in important respects he did not

even subscribe to it.

He did, so far as I can see, subscribe to the whole of what I have

called the metaphysical side of the doctrine, though this is the part of

the doctrine which is least aptly called Descartes' myth, since the

conception of the mind and body as two radically distinct substances

which interact goes back at least to Plato. But he did not, so far as I can

see, subscribe to the most important elements in the epistemologicalside of the doctrine. He did, of course, hold that our knowledge of the

existence and states of bodies is tenuous and imperfect, and that the

mind is better known than the body. But so far as I can see, he did not

think that the mind is omniscient with respect to its own states. Nor sofar as I can see, did he ever commit himself to the claim that we are

completely ignorant of the existence and states of other minds. What

the claim that the mind is better known than the body comes to, I think,is that, whenever we think we have a piece of knowledge aboutsome body, we in fact have a piece of knowledge about our own mind

which is far more certain than what we think we know about the body.To claim that is to fall far short of claiming that we are omniscient with

respect to the contents of our own minds.

Descartes was, in fact, working in a Platonic-Augustinian tradition

which, while firmly committed to metaphysical dualism and to the

priority of self-knowledge, understood as knowledge of an immaterial

substance, was acutely conscious of the difficulties of self-knowledge.So, for example, Descartes writes in the Discourse on Method, that he

has made a resolution to pay more attention to people's actions than to

their words

not only because, in our state of moral corruption, few wish to say all that they believe, but

also because some don't themselves know what they believe. For since the act of thought

by which one believes a thing is different from that by which one knows that he believes in,the one often occurs without the other.10



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There is, of course, a 17th century philosopher who does clearly commit

himself to the position Ryle ascribes to Descartes. But that philosopheris Locke, and it is a matter of some interest that when Locke invokes the

doctrine that there is nothing in the mind of which the mind is unaware,

he typically does so in the course of an attack on Cartesian doctrines,like the doctrine of innate ideas or the doctrine that the soul alwaysthinks, the latter an implication of Descartes' contention that thinking is

the essence of the mind. So if Descartes had been committed to the

mind's privileged access to its own states, it would have caused trouble

for somevery

fundamental doctrines in hisphilosophy.

The situation is similar with regard to the issue of privacy. So far as I

can see, this is an issue which Descartes never thought much about, and

it is hard to find texts in which Descartes even seems to say that no one

knows the contents of other minds. Kenny, generally a good scholar,but very Rylean in his interpretation of Descartes' philosophy of mind,does cite a letter in which Descartes says that

None of our external actions can show anyone who examines them that our body is not

just a self-moving machine but contains a soul with thoughts, with the exception of words,or other signs that are relevant to particular topics without expressing any passion.11

Kenny comments that

No bodily behavior therefore can establish the occurrence of the thought which is pain;even the utterance T am in pain,' would 'have reference to a passion,' and so be

disqualified (1973, p. 122)

No doubt this is true, but Kenny's neo-Wittgensteinian preoccupationwith the example of pain serves him ill here. Descartes' main point in

this passage is to defend his doctrine that it is a mistake to attribute

thought to animals. He wants to contrast the case of animals, whose

exhibition of pseudo-linguistic behavior does not show that they have

thoughts, with the case of human beings, whose exhibition of genuinely

linguistic behavior, does show that they have thoughts.12 A generalized

skepticism about the existence and states of other minds is the furthest

thing from Descartes' intentions. So far as I have been able to discover,the first philosopher to entertain such a skepticism was Malebranche,

though he was followed in this by Locke.13

Ryle bases his refutation of the dogma of the ghost in the machine on

a very misleading account of Descartes' philosophy of mind, and does

not careenough

about the accuracy of that account to try to document



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42 EDWIN CURLEY

it. Some ten years before the publication of The Concept of Mind,

Colling wood had written in his Autobiography.

From the first, I decided that one thing which Oxford philosophy needed was a

background of sound scholarship: such a habit of mind as would make it impossible for an

Oxford-trained student to be deceived by Moore's 'refutation' of Berkeley, or Cook

Wilson's of Bradley. I therefore taught my pupils... that they must never accept anycriticism of anybody's philosophy which they might hear or read, without satisfyingthemselves by first-hand study that this was the philosophy he actually expounded; that

they must always defer any criticism of their own until they were absolutely sure theyunderstood the text they were criticizing; and that if the postponement was sine die, it did

not greatly matter (1978, pp. 26-27)

It is a pity that, in all the years they were together at Oxford,

Collingwood did not teach Ryle that lesson.14At this point I can imagine Scriven protesting that none of this

matters. The philosopher, as such, is interested in general doctrines, not

in the individuals who may or may not have held those doctrines. If

Descartes did not in fact subscribe to 'Descartes' Myth,' then that

doctrine may be ill-named, but it remains a doctrine which others,

perhaps, have held, and which is, in any case, interesting enough to be

discussed in its own right. If Ryle's misreadings of Descartes becomeentrenched in the secondary literature, that may be unfortunate from a

strictly historical point of view, but it is of no importance from a

philosophical point of view.But this answer will not do. Ryle's procedure requires him to discredit

the main alternative to his own view as a preliminary to rescuing us

from the quandaries into which that view leads us. If his prime exampleof a major philosopher who held the alternative view turns out not to

have held it, then we must ask whether we are in fact forced to choose

between the official theory and Ryle's theory. And indeed the

historical Descartes appears to offer a third alternative. He illustratesthe fact that there is no evident necessary connection between the

metaphysical side of the official theory and its epistemological side. A

philosopher may hold that mind and body are two radically distinct

substances and still not hold that the mind has privileged access to itsown states and is invincibly ignorant of the existence and states of other

minds.15 If he does take that road, then insofar as Ryle's polemic is

directed against the epistemological side of the official theory, he willbe untouched by it. And indeed, readers of The Concept of Mind will beaware that

Ryle'smost effective ridicule is directed

againstthe doctrine



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of privileged access, is a reminder that we know far less about our own

minds, and far more about other minds, than we are supposed to

according to the official theory. In the end this has very little to do

with a genuinely Cartesian dualism.

Ryle illustrates one way in which it is possible to go astray by doing

philosophy ahistorically: setting up your own view as the only reason

able solution to a problem after first caricaturing the main alternatives.

My second exhibit is another distinguished Oxford philosopher, whose

work took its final form a decade later than The Concept of Mind, and

whose sin is not so muchmisrepresenting

thepast

asignoring

it. The

work I refer to is J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia.

Austin's concern in this work is to refute the doctrine that we never

see or otherwise perceive, or at any rate, never directly perceive,material objects, but only sense data, or our own ideas, impressions,sense perceptions, or whatever. His book is a sustained argument that

this docrine is

attributable first to an obsession with a few ... words, whose uses are oversimplified, not

really understood or carefully studied or carefully described, and second, to an obsession

with a few ... half-studied 'facts'_(1962, p. 3)

facts about perceptual illusions. Unlike Ryle's, his book is almost

entirely critical. He does not attempt to set up any positive alternative

view. He explicitly disavows the doctrine that we do perceive material

objects, since he feels that that doctrine involves a similar over

simplification. There is no one kind of thing we perceive, but many: the

term material object has meaning only in contrast to the term sense

datum ; ifwe reject the one term we must also reject the other. Austin

is, I think, interested in the doctrine that what we always directly

perceive are sense data, not because he wants to replace it by an

alternative, but because he sees it as leading inevitably to a skepticismwhich he ismost anxious to avoid.16

Austin emphasises that the doctrine he is attacking is a very old one,held by many philosophers, from the Greeks to A. J. Ayer. But he

chooses as the main target of his attack three contemporary philoso

phers, Ayer, Price and Warnock. His justification for doing this is

interesting:

I find in these texts a good deal to criticise, but I choose them for their merits, and not for

their deficiencies; they seem to me to provide the best available exposition of the

approved reasons for holding theories which are at least as old as Heraclitus- more full,



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44 EDWIN CURLEY

coherent and terminologically exact than you find, for example, in Descartes or Berkeley.

(1962, p. I)17

I don't suppose that Austin thinks Ayer, Price and Warnock are better

philosophers than Descartes or Berkeley. Presumably his view is that

because they come at the end of a long tradition, their version of the

doctrine under attack will build on past work, incorporating whatever

there is in Descartes and Berkeley which has so far proven capable of

surviving criticism, as well as the latest improvements.

Nevertheless,if

youreturn to these

openingwords of Austin's after

having finished his book, it is difficult to take this praise quite seriously.

Certainly the last virtues you would be tempted to find in these modern

writers, after reading Austin's critique, would be fullness, coherence

and terminological exactitude. If Ayer is an improvement on Descartes,then Descartes must be shockingly bad. But if you then go back to read

Descartes with Austin's criticisms of Ayer inmind, you may find it hardto apply them.

Austin sees the argument from illusion as the main prop of the theoryof perception he is criticising. One of his principal criticisms of Ayer is

that, in his use of the argument from illusion, Ayer begins by discussingvarious standard cases of perceptual illusion

- the stick which looks

bent when partly immersed in water, mirages, reflections- and that he

gradually slips from characterising these as illusions to characterisingthem as delusions. And Austin argues that this is verbal sleight-of-hand,that illusion and delusion are not the same thing. Illusion, in a

perceptual context, does not suggest that something totally unreal has

been conjured up, whereas delusion does suggest something totallyunreal, something not there at all. And the argument from illusion

trades on not distinguishing between illusions and delusions, on treatingillusions as if they were delusions.

Whatever the merits of this criticism may be when applied to Ayer, it

does not work when you try to apply it to Descartes. In Descartes, for

example, the main use of the argument from illusion is not to support a

theory of perception, but to argue directly to a skeptical conclusion

about our knowledge of the things we take to be around us. Whereas

Austin can, perhaps, charge Ayer with being obsessed with a small

range of examples, Descartes is really not much interested in those

examples at all. In the First Meditation, they are mentioned only to be

dismissedimmediately

as notproviding adequate grounds

fordoubting



14/18


our beliefs about things which are neither very small nor very distantfrom us. Descartes' central case is the dream, a case where it is verynatural to think of something totally unreal being conjured up. Austin,concerned as he is with Ayer, has relatively little to say about dreaming,and the passages in which he discusses dreams are among the least

satisfactory in his book. He writes as if the proponent of the dream

argument had to hold that all (or nearly all) dreams were intrinsicallyindistinguishable from waking experiences. But Descartes' version ofthe dream argument makes no such assumption. I argue this in more

detail inmy 1978,

ch. III.

The moral I draw from this is that it is a mistake to be too

preoccupied with our contemporaries. A 20th century philosopher,expounding an argument or theory which has a long history, mayexpound it with greater sophistication and exactness than his 17th

century counterpart. But he may also, perhaps because he is building ona long tradition and dealing with so familiar a theme, or because he isnot a good enough historian and philosopher to have learned thelessons of that tradition, fail to state it as accurately or fully or

suggestively as an earlier philosopher, who cannot take so much for

granted or who just may have a better grasp of the fundamental issues.Before we dismiss the work of past philosophers as superseded bysubsequent developments, we should recognize that it is not alj thatclear that we know, even at this late date, what a philosopher like

Descartes was saying. We may know well enough what words he wrote.But knowing what he meant by those words, I've been suggesting, is amatter of knowing how he would respond to certain questions about

those words. And as philosophy progresses, as we develop new theoriesand arguments, the questions we want to address to past philosopherskeep changing. So the history of philosophy can never be a permanentacquisition, but must be written afresh in each generation.

I suppose that it may be possible to write timeless history of

philosophy, history of philosophy which is not altered by changingconceptions of philosophic truth. But I suggest that timeless history of

philosophy is unlikely to be very interesting or useful. As soon as thehistorian departs from giving us merely factual information about, say,

Hobbes' dates and writings, and from summarising Hobbes' views inwhat is pretty much Hobbes' own language, as soon as he tries to

express what Hobbes thought in his (i.e., the historian's) own language,or to decide which assumptions Hobbes really needed to reach the



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46 EDWIN CURLEY

conclusions he reached, or construct a possible Hobbesian reply to

objection which Hobbes seems not to have considered, or identify a

contradiction in Hobbes and decide which is the best or most characteristic line for Hobbes to take - as soon as the historian does any of

these necessary things, what he writes will be very much subject to timeand chance. Its value will depend very much on his own philosophicalability, on the philosophical possibilities he is capable of seeing, and on

the level of sophistication and intelligence of the period in which helives.

We need alsoto

recognize thata

label, like the argument fromillusion, or the social contract theory, conveys an entirely mislead

ing impression of definiteness. Such labels refer really to a family of

related arguments and theories advanced by various philosophers in

various forms over the centuries. And in proportion as it is unclear whateach of those philosophers may have held, it will be unclear what the

argument from illusion, or the social contract theory is. Someone doinga really thorough study of an argument like the argument from illusion

would have to look at it in an historical dimension, taking account of itsvarious forms and the interpretive issues each author may raise, and

giving some attention to the question: Why, if this argument isfallacious, has it had such a strong appeal to so many people over such a

long period of time? If he did look seriously at the history of the

argument, he would be unlikely to come to the conclusion that its

appeal rests merely on verbal confusions and a few badly misunderstood

facts.18

When I was a student in my first year of graduate school, JohnPassmore visited a neighboring university to give a paper on the

importance for philosophers of studying the history of their discipline. I

recall being much impressed by his arguments and recommendations.

They were an important factor in my subsequent decision to specialisein the history of philosophy. It would be pleasant if I could now recall

what the arguments were which I then found so convincing, but

unfortunately the intervening years have erased everything except my

memory of being impressed by them. Some years later, when I found

myself a member of his department in Australia, I asked him about that

paper, but he had never published it, did not think he had a copy of it,and could not recall the detail of its argument any better than I can. In

this essay, intended partly as a homage to John Passmore, I have tried to

reconstruct what would have been asatisfactory argument

for his



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conclusion. But I have no idea whether my argument is in fact anythinglike the one he offered on that occasion, or whether he would even

regard it as a satisfactory argument.19

NOTES

1On this theme see Passmore (1965).2

Though Plato, who is particularly open to this charge, is capable of speaking eloquently

on behalf of the need for historical accuracy. Consider the following excerpt from the

speech which his Socrates imagines Protagoras making in response to his attack on the

doctrine that man is the measure of all things:

You take things much too easily, Socrates. The truth of the matter is this: when you ask

someone questions in order to canvass some opinion of mine and he is found tripping,then I am refuted only if his answers are such as I should have given; if they are different,

it is he who is refuted, not I.... Show a more generous spirit by attacking what I actuallymean. (Theaetetus, 166a-d, Cornford tr., slightly modified)

I owe this reference to the article by Passmore cited above, though he emphasises rather

the polemical side of Plato's interest in his predecessors. The polemical historian, in

Passmore's use of the term, is interested more in general points of view than in the

concrete individuals who may have held those positions. In its most extreme form

polemical history of philosophy does not care whether any identifiable individualever

held the position under consideration.3 I have in mind here, not only Hegel, but also Aristotle.4 I think here particularly of the excitement Russell expressed in the preface to his

Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz at his discovery that this seeminglyfantastic system could be deduced from a few simple premisses, which, but for the

conclusions which Leibniz had drawn from them, many, if not most, philosophers would

have been willing to admit (p. xiv).5 As an example we might cite the French historian Martial Gueroult, who writes:

In philosophy ... unlike the positive sciences, truths at present considered as acquired do

not revoke everything in the tradition which contradicts present-day philosophy, as if this

present-day philosophy were a definitely acquired truth subsisting non-temporally. Nor

does philosophy have anything to do with a process of acquisition, which would be

developing in time a growing science whose regular progress we could follow,no matter

what revolutionary crises it were to undergo. Philosophy's past presents itself in effectas a

succession of doctrines which reject each other reciprocally, without their pretensions to

a timeless, universally valid and permanently acquired truth ever triumphing. (1969, p.

572)6 The simile attributed to Bernard of Chartres

We are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants; we see more things than the ancients

andthings

more distant, but this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight, nor to the



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contemporaries, either in our student days or after we became his colleagues... I think, in

retrospect, that my generation was at fault in not ever trying to cultivate our remote

senior.15 Locke would illustrate the same point in a different way. For while he does seem to hold

the epistemological doctrines central to 'Descartes' Myth,' he is careful not to commit

himself to metaphysical dualism. At best it is probable that the sofcl is immaterial, but we

cannot exclude the possibility that God has given matter the power to think. Essay, IV, iii.

6.16 Cf. his remarks on Warnock in the final chapter.17 Notice how both Ryle and Austin create a sense that they are battling an oppressive

orthodoxy, the one by speaking regularly of an official doctrine, the other by speaking

of the approved reasons for holding a doctrine, as if there were some sort ofgovernment bureau whose business it was to certify philosophical theories, and whose

dictates they were rebelling against.18

Having been this hard on Ryle and Austin, I think I should acknowledge that neither

of them entirely neglected the history of philosophy. Ryle has some standing as a Plato

scholar, and Austin not only wrote on Aristotle, but also initiated the Clarendon Aristotle

series. My complaint about them is not that they were as ignorant of history as Scriven

would wish us to be, but that such historical knowledge and interests as they had did not

sufficiently inform their work in contemporary philosophy.19 This paper was originally written for presentation at the meeting of the Australian

Academy of the Humanities in May 1976, and I have read various versions of it at a

number of American universities (Wisconsin, Marquette, and Chicago). I am grateful to

the organizers of the Blackburg Conference for forcing me to finally get it into a form in

which I would be content to see it published.

REFERENCES

Austin, J.: 1962, Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford, Oxford.

Collingwood, R. G.: 1978, An Autobiography, Oxford, Oxford.

Curley, E.: 1978, Descartes Against the Skeptics, Harvard, Cambridge, Mass.

Gueroult, M.: 1969, The History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem', The Monist,

53, 572.

Kenny, A.: 1981, Descartes, Philosophical Letters, University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis.

Kenny, A.: 1973, 'Cartesian Privacy', in The Anatomy of the Soul, Blackwell, London.

Merton, R.: 1965, On the Shoulders of Giants, Free Press, Glencoe.

Passmore, J.: 1965, 'The Idea of a History of Philosophy', History and Theory, vol. 5, pp.1-32.

Ryle, G.: 1949, The Concept of Mind, Barnes and Noble, New York.

Scriven, M.: 1977, 'Increasing Philosophy Enrollments and Appointments ThroughBetter Philosophy Teaching', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical

Association, vol. 50. pp. 232-244, 326-328.

Dept. of Philosophy

Universityof Illinois

ChicagoIL 60680

U.S.A.

curley dialogues with the dead

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