thinking things through historically

Leonardo

Thinking Things through HistoricallyAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Leonardo, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1997), pp. 123-127Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576422 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 06:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.137 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 06:24:34 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576422?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


GENERAL NOTE

Thinking Things Through Historically

David Carrier

T he aim of this article is to evaluate Clark

Glymour's important recent book Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements [1] from a somewhat unexpected vantage point. I want to consider the broad view of philosophy he develops, then take issue with one point of detail: the discussion of what he calls primitivism. I ask questions about a concern Glymour mentions, but does not develop-namely, the relation of his inquiry to politics or, more broadly, to what he calls questions about "how we can best conduct our lives" [2]-and, finally, I say something about the relevance of Glymour's book to visual art.

I think Thinking Things Through an obviously magnificent book, an analysis whose clarity, comprehensiveness and range are worthy of the highest praise. Under the guise of providing a mere textbook, Glymour offers the best account I have read of some very fundamental philosophical issues. Identifying him as a thinker who inspires argument from someone like myself, who has very different interests, is to praise him very highly; an extremely decisive writer, he never loses track of the broad themes when dealing with points of detail.

Glymour's topics fall outside my areas of professional com- petence; I am not competent to argue for or against his broad thesis about the nature of scientific explanation, whose evaluation, in any case, depends upon mastery of the details of Glymour's program. Nor do I have an alternative to his approach, and so my critical questions are mostly genuine questions to which I have no real answers. I always dislike review- ers of my work who pick on points of mere detail. Here, in arguing with one small point, I intend to raise large issues. In order to write this article, I have to pretend to be more confi- dent than I have any right to be. I identify Glymour as a "logical positivist," using that useful term in a loose, descriptive way, not as a term of abuse, as is sometimes done. As he says in the first sentence of his earlier book Theory and Evidence, there are many differences between him and the earlier philosophers associated with that school of thought [3].

Very often the history of philosophy is studied and taught without explaining why that history is worth studying. Read- ing commentaries on Descartes or Spinoza, one can easily feel that often the commentators are pursuing this project for its own sake, as if they were working at a very complex cross- word puzzle without asking what is the interest of setting all these details in place. Since the classical texts are difficult, it is natural to treat them this way; but what proper motivation of discussion demands is some explanation of why such ex- egesis is worthwhile.

In art history, the situation is different. Giotto's successors learned techniques he knew not; yet, this does not diminish the aesthetic value of his work. His paintings have intrinsic

ABSTRACT

Clark Glymour's book Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achieve- ment offers a history of philosophy focused on the achievements of science. Glymour argues in passing that what he calls "primitivism" has pernicious consequences; he thinks that Marxists, phenomenologists and deconstructionists are primitivists. The author of this article claims, rather, that there is no reason to think that primitivism n,rpc,crilv h:ac fk,hc nnlitirn;Fl i;m

value. In literature, similarly, 1

011 I d

VIIIIdI plications, nor to believe that the great texts deserve scrutiny be- philosophical tradition Glymour cause of their artistic value; we champions intrinsically has any par- need not ask if this author's way ticular view of political life. There of thinking or morality is accept- need be no particular relationship between a philosopher's view of able today; we need not accept scientific objectivity and that Jane Austen's view of things, or person's politics-at least, there is Gustave Flaubert's, to think their no argument in Thinking Things novels deserving of attention. But Through to show that there is any

such necessary connection. Pub- in philosophy we seek truth, and sc in philosophy we sieek

truth, and lished in conjunction here is a short so the situation is different. To response by Glymour. the extent that Descartes' or Spinoza's argumentation is bound up with the limits of the science of their day, why should we take an interest in their writings, except insofar as we are interested in doing history of philosophy for its own sake?

Descartes believed that only spiritual substances could think. Observing that the most elaborate known mechanical devices had relatively few parts, he concluded that no such apparatus could think.

It is not conceivable that... a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence.... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

Automatons never answer in word or sign, except by chance, to questions put to them ... [4]

Descartes could not imagine twentieth-century technology and so his claims are merely of historical interest. Aestheticians often treat Kant's writing on aesthetic experience with the greatest respect, although he often discussed things he had never seen, but only knew about from books.

Bold, overhanging, and . .. threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals ... the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force ... make our power of resistance of trifling moment in compari- son [5].

As Alain Corbin has explained, going to the beach had be- came fashionable, so even a non-traveler such as Kant could easily pick up these much discussed ideas about the sublimity of the ocean [6]. Regarding Kant's very strong claims about the universality of aesthetic judgment, it seems fantastical to me, though not to many of my fellow aestheticians, to assume

David Carrier (philosopher, educator), Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

LEONARDO, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 123-127, 1997 123 ? 1997 ISAST



that a provincial eighteenth-century writer who saw few pictures could understand aesthetic judgment as it is prac- ticed in our present-day museum culture.

"Hardly any painters, except the Ve- netian and especially the Flemish," Hegel wrote, "have become perfect mas- ters of colour; both of these groups lived near the sea in low-lying country inter- sected by fens, streams and canals" [7]. In his history of the High Renaissance, Sydney J. Freedberg elaborates on just this point:

The atmosphere of this sea-borne city heightens the existence of seen things. Colour is deepened in the damp-satu- rated air and sharpened by the sea-re- flected light, which also may make complicating interactions among colours [8].

Although he never went to Italy, Hegel's account anticipates modern dis- cussions of Venetian art.

One claim fundamental for Glymour is that philosophy should not be especially or centrally concerned with its his-

tory. In Thinking Things Through, Glymour shows interest in philosophy's history insofar as it leads toward the

present. In that way, philosophy for him is like the sciences; physicists are not pri- marily interested in the history of phys- ics. Looking ahead to the present, the

history of philosophy, as Glymour tells it, is the story of the movement toward

present-day computer science and the

ways in which it has utterly transformed traditional philosophy of mind. The central figures in Thinking Things Through are Aristotle, Ramon Lull and some other medievals, Descartes, Leibnitz, George Boole and Gottlob Frege (in what certainly is, in part, a nonstandard

history of philosophy) because their work anticipates our concerns. Accord-

ing to Glymour, "the human brain is a

biological computer and the cognitive activities of humans are produced by computational procedures within this

biological computer" [9]. These philosophers are important because their work led us toward this. For Glymour, there is not reason to care much about the details of the argumentation of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche or many other figures who are thought by historians of philosophy to be highly important; these philosophers were on the wrong track. By contrast, Lull, who discovered in the thirteenth century that "reasoning can be done by a mechanical process"[10], was headed in the right direction.

The argument for this position as- sembles a great mass of materials in a

way that does justice to the great achievements of cognitive psychology and computer science. What then would be the argument for an alternative position to Glymour's-for the view that the

study of history of philosophy is intrinsi-

cally valuable? This is the natural chal-

lenge he proposes to his critics: write an alternative history as rich, suggestive and plausible as his. The great philosophical texts, it might be argued, em-

body deep wisdom because they have withstood the test of time, demonstrat-

ing their capacity to educate many gen- erations. When present-day American conservatives give this sort of argument, I always am disappointed that they do not have the courage of their convic- tions and demand that Latin and Greek be brought back into school system so that students can study canonical writers in the original languages. The notion that the test of time by itself establishes

anything about the validity of a way of

thinking is puzzling [11]. If a building is old and remains standing, that shows it was well constructed. That a philosophical theory is venerable does not by itself show that theory to be true or even plausible. There is no reason that a false view

might not endure for a very long time. It would be very easy to compile a large collection of all the foolish things Plato, Aristotle and the other canonical figures had to say about science, morals and

many other issues. The marvelous femi- nist Luce Irigaray has devoted a book, Speculum of the Other Woman, to the comi-

cally misguided accounts of philosophers discussing women [12]. They were men of their time, writers whose claims

today have to be read selectively if they are to seem at all plausible.

Doing philosophy, it might be said, is so bound up in its history that this activ-

ity is impossible to perform without an acute historical sensitivity. My hunch is that such a vision can only be defended

by showing how philosophy amounts es-

sentially to something more than the

philosophy of science; by that, I mean

showing how philosophy does some-

thing other and different than science. This anti-scientific view has been defended in our day by such otherwise ex-

tremely diverse figures as Heidegger and Wittgenstein. In a one-page analysis supplemented by a long footnote, Glymour discusses what he calls primitivism, or the rejection of "the scientific description of the world as a place of

things, events, and processes that are in themselves indifferent to human concerns, and in which the emergence of

human consciousness and intentionality constitute phenomena to be explained" [13]. His primitivists include Wilhelm Dilthey, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-

Ponty, Paul de Man, Albert Camus (with qualifications) and his former Princeton

colleague Richard Rorty, a former ana-

lytic philosopher who nowadays identi- fies himself as a pragmatist and whose book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is listed in Glymour's bibliography. What links all these philosophers together is concern with "the sort of anthropomorphic conception of the world that we use in our everyday lives, a conception in which we think of things in terms of their utility to us and others and their

significance as symbols." Primitivism, Glymour correctly observes, is a view of

philosophy held by many non-professional philosophers-by literary critics, for example. I would characterize primitivism in a perhaps different way: it is the residue of a religious worldview, what is left behind of such anthropomorphic ways of thinking when their theological justification has been abandoned.

Glymour does not claim to offer much of a positive argument against primitivism. Nor, it must be said, does he characterize that position in detail, or show any interest in its nuances. The strongest ar-

gument against primitivism made in

Thinking Things Through is the positive demonstration of the efficacy of a scientific worldview. Inevitably, the philosophers who have sought to resist logical positivism seem to be fighting a rear-

guard action, offering ever weaker positions as science advances. Like many of us discussing something we detest, Glymour is brief. He claims not just that

primitivism is wrongheaded, but that because it "emphasizes social authority rather than the autonomy of individuals and . . . denigrates rationality ... " it is

politically pernicious [14]. Allowing that some philosophers he admires had dreadful political views-Frege was, in

unpublished work, an anti-Semite-

Glymour seems to claim that primitivism tends to be associated with bad political positions. Insofar as a philosopher rejects a scientific worldview, Glymour suggests, he or she will tend to have nasty politics.

I do not think that Marxists can be

primitivists, for they are committed to the view that it is possible to provide a very full explanation of historical events. (Whether that Marxist explanation be correct is another story.) For the positivist, Marxists have the right attitude, but a bad theory. Phenemenologists are a

124 Carrier, Thinking Things Through Historically



different matter; they do have an anti- scientific attitude. Glymour's identifica- tion of a "description of the world as a

place of things, events, and processes that are in themselves indifferent to human concerns" obviously raises complex questions about the evaluation of art. In literature or painting, the world is presented in terms of human concerns, and so it is natural that the interpretation of such an account would proceed from the vantage point of such concerns. What Glymour is perhaps criticizing is

taking an aesthetic attitude towards the

world-replacing an objective view of

things with looking at it in terms of its

meaning in our lives. Charles Baudelaire

adopted a determinedly anti-scientific worldview and that led him to write

great poetry and wonderful art criticism [15]. But if Baudelaire's view is treated not as an aesthetic fiction, but an account of how the world really is, then it could have disastrous effects.

No amount of study of the best-known

philosophical work of some philosophers-Frege, for example, or a con-

temporary figure such as the analytic philosopher of language Donald Davidson-would reveal their political positions. Other philosophers such as David Hume wrote about both narrowly philosophical themes (e.g. epistemology and metaphysics) and political history. We philosophers tend not to read Hume's history; complex argumentation would be needed to relate his skepticism to his view of politics. In still other cases, figures with sweeping systems-Kant or

Hegel, for example-offer political analysis. What then is striking about

Glymour's list of primitivists is how var- ied are their political positions. Dewey and Rorty are champions of American

democracy; Heidegger tried to attach himself to the Nazis, who hardly needed his esoteric theorizing; Merleau-Ponty, after the early Marxist phrase to which

Glymour alludes, turned away decisively from that tradition; Sartre, after his

early apolitical phase, turned into an odd kind of Marxist. And Paul de Man, whose nasty early anti-Semitic writings were discovered after his death, was

closely associated with Jacques Derrida, a leftist critical of Marxism whose political views are hard to summarize briefly.

Heidegger's primitivism, Glymour says, "emphasizes the authority of the

community over the individual" [16]. Heidegger gives this authority to tradition, to the great texts. But does not

logical positivism also in one way super- sede the individual, giving authority to

the collective project, the scientific in-

vestigation? What remains difficult is de-

termining whether there be an internal connection between such a philosopher's primitivism and his politics. Theodore Kisiel's very full account The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time suggests that Heidegger's intensive study of classical and scholastic philosophy did not in any way prepare him to grasp Ger- man politics of the 1920s [17]. Not in- volved with racist doctrines, Heidegger was a bookish intellectual whose charac- ter did not equip him to look in an even

minimally sensible way at politics. Far better informed people have made fools of themselves about politics. Many intel- lectuals visited Stalin's Russia and failed to grasp what was happening. Bertrand Russell, no primitivist, did understand Stalin in the 1930s and had real experience of politics. That he suggested in a

public address in the late 1940s that the United States consider declaring war on the Russians before they also obtained the atomic bomb gives reason to be

skeptical of political judgments made even by those philosophers who have some common sense feeling for reality.

As for Merleau-Ponty, the argument of his Humanism and Terror (1947) is worth considering [18]. What morality demands is that we choose the better

position; it is no use arguing in a historical vacuum about revolutionary terror, for the only judgments that count are those made by the actors in the historical process. Different countries have different historical situations; in the United States things are different than

they are in the former Soviet Union. At a certain historical moment, it was not

necessarily absurd to choose Stalinism; the alternatives, it could plausibly be ar-

gued, were even worse. In the 1930s it was not absurd to believe that Stalinism, for all of its crimes, had more to offer than either the Nazis or the bourgeois democracies, whose future seemed pre- carious. Now, of course, we can see that such bets on Stalinism were mistaken; as

always, wisdom after the fact is easy to come by. The philosophical question, still, is whether there is any connection between primitivism and bad politics.

A rational person, Glymour might ar-

gue, need not be a nice person, but that

person will at least form a worldview that can be tested against reality. Some pernicious political programs depended upon racialist views that are demonstra- bly false. But other nasty views are harder to characterize in this way. The Leninists wanted to modernize the

U.S.S.R.; their defenders claimed that if the means used were ghastly, that was because the situation was dreadful and no better alternatives were available. Characterized in the broad way, the Leninists' goal was rational. I do not see how argumentation between logical positivists and primitivists can tell us how to judge that situation. To cite a case closer to home, the American lead- ers who pursued the morally disastrous

policies of the 1960s Vietnam war were not primitivists; they were technocrats, experts at making rational calculations. All of their actions were, as far as I can see, entirely compatible with a rational scientific worldview.

The primitivist, we might say, is like a

navigator who tries to steer with a defec- tive compass; he may lead us in the right direction, but only by accident. Reject- ing primitivism thus yields a minimal constraint; it rules out positions that are based upon views not true to the facts. A

logical positivist will be rational politically; and that, in this century, is not an

insignificant achievement. A case study worth consideration is the

phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, for he, drawing on a great deal of psychology of perception, gave a defense of primitivism. Following Husserl, he writes in the

preface to Phenomenology of Perception (1962), he seeks to re-achieve "a direct and primitive contact with the world" and endow "that contact with a philosophical status" [19]. His book concludes with a quotation from Saint-Exup6ry about the need to acknowledge individual choice, and so to accept our free- dom. What is unclear, still, is whether this

general starting point need yield any particular political conclusion. Wittgenstein, a figure closer to the world of logical positivism, in his later work certainly takes a position closely allied with primitivism. Emphasizing the dividing line between philosophy and science and insist-

ing that it is unbridgeable, he limits the boundaries of scientific inquiry in a different way than the phenomenologists did. But Wittgenstein's way of thinking does not have any obvious, immediate

political implications. None of this argumentation says any-

thing about whether Glymour's rejection of primitivism is mistaken. All I am

questioning is his claim that primitivism yields inherently pernicious political views. Primitivism includes many rather different ways of thinking, and so may suggest a plurality of political perspec- tives. But there is no reason to think that primitivism as such must have bad politi-

Carrier, Thinking Things Through Historically 125



cal consequences, for it is not clear that it necessarily has any political conse-

quences. Suppose the general view of

philosophy's role presented in Thinking Things Through were correct. What political position then follows?

I do not believe that the adoption of a scientific description of the world can

provide any substantial political guid- ance. The reasoning for that claim is twofold. First, I do not see in Glymour's book any claim that adopting a scientific worldview yields any particular political position. Second, when I look at the best-known substantial accounts of these issues, I do not find much reliance upon the details of a particular general philosophical position such as Glymour adopts. Political liberalism, John Rawls

says, "assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of reasonable yet in-

compatible comprehensive doctrines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional democratic regime" [20].

Even if we suppose that such political regimes are associated with a scientific worldview, still the scientist's work does not tell us what kind of politics to adopt. Christians, Jews, Muslims and believers in astrology could, under the conditions Rawls specifies, form ajust community. I see no reason why a community of

phenomenologists or pragmatists could not adopt Rawls's principles. (Marxists would not, but they, I have argued, are not primitivists.) Even if we imagine ev-

ery citizen to be Glymour's ideally rational agent-a person who never makes

logical mistakes-nothing in the history of philosophy as presented in Thinking Things Through suggests that such an

agent would be capable of developing a substantial moral viewpoint [21]. Identi-

fying truthful scientific theories does not tell us how to behave in society, ex-

cept, perhaps, insofar as it demands that we create a society in which the pursuit of scientific truth is possible. And there is no reason to associate that task only with rational democratic politics.

Glymour rejects cultural relativism, which he defines as the assertion "that the beliefs of all human communities are equally well founded and that none are more or less true than others" [22]. For my present purposes, we need only imagine that there exist more than one well-founded system of beliefs, and that the aim of politics is to provide a good way of adjudicating disputes between

people holding in good faith competing beliefs. Maybe the coexistence of such

communities is inconsistent with genuine general adoption of a scientific worldview; perhaps, ultimately, views of truth will converge. Even so, for the

present, one central goal of politics is to resolve conflicts.

And so here, seeking to identify the

political force of anti-primitivism, I fall back on a different line of argument. Taking as given Glymour's view about the falsity of primitivism, what follows for politics? Since it seems impossible to

identify an internal link between

Glymour's philosophy and political theory, let us adapt another strategy: historical analysis. Glymour's view of philosophy is a natural product of the ex-

traordinary recent successes of

computer science. Of course, parts of the modern scientific worldview have been in place since Galileo and Newton; but what is central to Glymour's own

logical positivist position is the achievements relevant to philosophy of mind

provoked by computer science. Were

many of us not living with inexpensive, convenient word processing, then

Glymour's analysis of computability would be a highly academic affair. As it is, what gives great general interest to the discussion is the existence of such

computers. And so it is natural to ask: what is the political effect of these ma- chines? In this indirect fashion, I seek to understand the political implications of

Glymour's philosophy. Since computers are part and parcel of

an anti-primitivist worldview, we might expect them to promote a rational political regime. But because computers are so

spectacularly good at controlling information, it is very easy to imagine how

they could be the basis of an authoritar- ian society. The philosopher who has said the most suggestive and perhaps wrongheaded things about this issue is Michel Foucault, and so it is unfortunate that

Glymour is allergic to his ways of think-

ing. Insofar as computers are associated-so recent American experience teaches-with radical economic inequali- ties, it is hard to see how they could have

any inherent connection with democ-

racy. Many diverse scenarios about the effects of computers can readily be writ- ten. Twenty years ago, no one could have

imagined our present situation, and so it seems hopelessly optimistic to trust in

any projection about the future. This is why I am skeptical about any attempt to derive a view of politics from Glymour's logical positivism. I do not see how any discussion of the conditions of theory testing in science-the seeking of ratio-

nal grounds for our beliefs-generates any particular view of what narrowly we call politics, or what more broadly we can call with Glymour "how we can best conduct our lives." Since the further devel-

opment of computer technology is about as inevitable as any social process that can be imagined, what is the point of ask-

ing whether this is a good thing? It will

happen, whether we like it or not; since

philosophical reflection is very unlikely to change the world, what is demanded of the social philosopher is an under-

standing of the process. In Thinking Things Through, art has

little place. This, of course, could be a mere accident of Glymour's personal history. When, in the last chapter, he de- scribes some influential philosophical work, he adds, with winning modesty, that these examples are "chosen simply because I know of them" [23]. What

might be the implications of his account for the philosophy of art history? When

Glymour points to a number of new sci-

ences-computer science, Bayesian sta- tistics, cognitive science-as "all informed by developments in philosophy within the last 100 years" [24], it is natural for me to add art history to that list. Michael Podro has traced the process in which German philosophy was the start-

ing point for modern art history [25]. Since Vasari, there had of course been extensive commentary on painting. But

only when philosophical ways of think-

ing were developed further was it possible for art history to become an academic discipline. It is possible to

imagine art history developing accord-

ing to models provided by the philosophy of science. Like the scientist, the historian of art could form a hypothesis that may be testable; like the scientist, he or she could consider alternative ex-

planations of relevant features of art, seeking the most economical, plausible and far-ranging account. Just as, finally, a scientist might test a theory by general- izing, so too an art historian could test an interpretative approach by working with new examples. Insofar as historians of art are concerned to explain representation-making, it seems natural to ex-

pect them to enlist the aid of scientific

psychologies of perception. But what is possible does not always

happen, and I would find it very difficult to cite much recent influential work in art history that develops according to this model-with one exception, and that is the work of arguably the most fa- mous living art historian, a man who, for

complicated political reasons, is much

126 Carrier, Thinking Things Through Historically



out of fashion: Sir Ernst Gombrich. He is, in interesting ways, a potential ally for

Glymour [26]. AnyoneJewish and interested in psychoanalysis in 1920s Vienna

certainly was aware of the political power of primitivist thinking. When, then, later, as an emigre in London, Gombrich developed both a broad view of art's history and an account of modernism, he laid great stress on the im-

portance of controlling the irrational by reliable means. Gombrich has a reso-

lutely rationalist theory of art history. A novel form of representation is tested, he argues, in much the way in which a scientific theory is tested. Gombrich was much influenced by his great friend Karl

Popper, both in rejecting Hegelianism in any form-including Marxism-and in thinking of testability as a key condi- tion for a good art-historical analysis. Glymour has an un-Popperian view of

theory testing, but that difference with Gombrich is not as important here as their shared concerns; Gombrich's ap- plication of Popper's claims does not

depend upon such points of detail. The history of representational art, ac-

cording to Gombrich, is like the history of science as it might be told by a logical positivist. When a theory is developed, it is then critically tested; the history of art-

making is the history of ever better ways of representing the visual world. These

systems of representation can be tested

by observation. The specific affinity of Gombrich's account with Glymour's views comes in Gombrich's worries about the political implications of artistic

primitivism. Art that revels in the irrational, Gombrich fears, is the art of a society that may readily become irrational. Recent art history, in its concern with feminism and gender issues, multi- culturalism, many forms of leftist politics, poststructuralism, modernism and

postmodernism has, not entirely fairly, identified Gombrich as the enemy [27]. Nothing would attract more hostile com-

mentary from many sides than to speak of art history as a proto-science. The logical positivist worldview presented in

Thinking Things Through would also, I fear, seem alien, repugnant and reaction-

ary to many of my colleagues in art his-

tory. Since Glymour has contempt for his

opponents, he hardly is prepared to lis- ten to their arguments; they, in turn, are

unlikely to respond sympathetically to his

analysis. Seeing how large is the gap between his view of philosophy and the concerns of art historians-as well as most professors in literature and cultural studies-it is hard to know how genuine

discussion is possible; recognition of this

impasse is not necessarily a bad thing, for fruitless discussion is a waste of time.

Here we come to my only real criticism of Glymour. What is odd is his concern with the possible political influence of a few academic primitivists. In recent literature, conservatives worry a great deal about the social effect of esoteric literary debates concerning deconstruction and about the support from the (U.S.) Na- tional Endowment for the Arts for a few

politically controversial artists. Reading such accounts, one would think that the

way literary criticism is studied at Yale or Irvine or the way a small sector of the

public looks at postmodern art has a

large effect on the entire culture. Surely the dominant ideology of our culture is

logical positivism. There are, however, some primitivists who have real political effect-I mean the religious fundamen- talists who, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, do reject "the scientific description of the world as a place of things, events, and processes that are in themselves indifferent to human concerns." In

my view, the natural enemy of the logical positivist is religion and so, if Glymour is concerned with politics, it should be his real target.

CLARK GLYMOUR RESPONDS Some philosopher-Robert Nozick, maybe-once observed that an ideal

philosophical argument should have such force that it either convinces or kills the reader. Perhaps there is a third state. I still live after reading the main argument of David Carrier's generous and fair-minded review of Thinking Things Through, and I have not been convinced that the argument is correct, although I

acknowledge its force. Carrier's critical

argument chiefly concerns a single footnote in the book, which claims that the

idealist/phenomenologist tradition tends to promote political evil. He argues against the proposition. But he has convinced me that my impressions do not constitute a serious case about a complex causal issue. Accordingly, I have removed the footnote in question from the forth-

coming second edition of the book. -Clark Glymour

Reference and Notes

1. Clark Glymour, Thinking Things Through: An Intro- duction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

2. Glymour [1] p. 371.

3. Clark Glymour, Theory and Evidence (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980) p. ix.

4. Rene Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, John Cottingham, Robert Stoofhoff and Dugald Murdoch, trans. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988) pp. 4-5; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III: The Correspondence, John Cottingham and Anthony Kenny, trans. (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991) p. 99.

5. Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, James C. Meredith, trans. (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952) p. 110.

6. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside 1750-1840, Joselyn Phelps, trans. (Lon- don: Penguin Books, 1994).

7. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T.M. Knox, trans. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975) Vol. 2, p. 839.

8. S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy: 1500 to 1600 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971) pp. 76-77.

9. Glymour [1] p. 216.

10. Glymour [1] p. 71.

11. See my review of A. Savile, The Test of Time, in TheJournal of Philosophy 131, No. 4, 226-230 (1984).

12. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Gillian C. Gill, trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).

13. Glymour [1] p. 242.

14. Glymour [1] p. 375, footnote 2.

15. See my High Art: Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1996).

16. Glymour [1] p. 242.

17. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1993).

18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, John O'Neill, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969; originally published 1947).

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Percep- tion, Colin Smith, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) p. vii.

20. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Co- lumbia Univ. Press, 1993) p. xvi.

21. Glymour [1] p. 215.

22. Glymour [1] p. 237.

23. Glymour [1] p. 370.

24. Glymour [1] p. 5.

25. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1984).

26. See my "Gombrich on Art Historical Explana- tions," Leonardo 16, No. 2, 91-96 (1983) and "The Big Picture: David Carrier Talks with Sir Ernst Gombrich," Artforum (February 1996) pp. 66-69, 106, 109.

27. Eric Fernie, Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995) pp. 223-226. "[W]hile many in Britain consider him a traditional figure, in France he is ranked as a radical thinker alongside figures such as the deconstructionists" (p. 224). The one well-known figure whose general attitude toward scientific accounts in art history is simi- lar to Gombrich's is his former student Michael Baxandall. See my review, "M. Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment and E.H. Gombrich, Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art," TheJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54, No. 2, 200-201 (1996).

Manuscript received 13 February 1996.

Carrier, Thinking Things Through Historically 127



thinking things through historically

Documents