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On Why Philosophers Redefine their Subject

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Stuart Brown
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Extract

My title is intended to recall a well-known aphorism about philosophy, which runs something like this:

When a clergyman loses his faith he abandons his calling. When a philosopher loses his he redefines his subject.

There is probably a correct version of this aphorism somewhere and an author to whose intentions what follows will do less than justice. I want to pick it up much as a composer might pick up a dimly remembered melody and I am going to develop it and produce my own variation on it. My topic is not centrally about loss of faith as generally understood, though it is centrally about the changing definitions of philosophy. My concern is with at least some of the reasons people have for doing philosophy and, in particular, about how their motives for doing philosophy connect with what philosophers think their subject is. My hope is that some light is thrown on this question by considering cases where people have changed their conception of philosophy–where, in other words, they have redefined their subject.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 33 , September 1992 , pp. 41 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1992

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References

1 See Apel, (1979, 1980) and Habermas, (1971).Google Scholar

2 Quite contrary to a common stereotype of Scottish University Philosophy of that time—see, e.g., Passmore, , (1968) p. 572,Google Scholar n.19—we learnt nothing of Hegel or that tradition of Idealism, apart from the coherence theory of truth as propounded by Joachim, which was introduced to us as one of several theories of truth.

3 As Anthony Palmer suggests elsewhere in this volume, the relation between the earlier and later Wittgenstein is a complex one. Sometimes the later views are already anticipated in the earlier writings. My suggestion in this paper is that the converse is also true, that views more consonant with the earlier period are to be found residually in the later.

4 G. E. Moore took notes on Wittgenstein's lectures in the early 1930s when Wittgenstein explicitly discussed the question of how far he was doing a ‘new subject’ and how far it was the successor to traditional philosophy. See ‘Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930–33’, Mind, Vol. LXIV, 1955,Google Scholar Section (H).

5 See, for instance, Wittgenstein, (1953), i, 121–133.Google Scholar

6 See, for instance, Wittgenstein, (1953), i, 122.Google Scholar