Milinda’s Questions

Since it’s Groundhog Day, I thought about giving this post some sort of pseudo-intellectual title. In French, say: Le jour de cochon de terre, or whatever it is. Trouble was, I didn’t know the word for “groundhog” in French. Or in any language other than my native tongue, for that matter. I did a quick bit of internet research: none of the major WWW translation sites can tell you what the word for “groundhog” is in French, Spanish, German, or Japanese. Just shows how far machine translation still has to go.

Photographer Steve Pike has an online collection of portraits of contemporary academic philosophers. The portraits are well-shot, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see photos of a group of predominantly jowly white males. (With a few exceptions: Anthony Appiah is in there, and, while I don’t know if Pike picked some of the younger female philosophers to include based on aesthetic criteria, one could definitely get that impression.) What makes the site worth going to is the quotations. Here are a few of my faves:

Often the worst thing to do with what looks like a real philosophical question is to answer it. It can get in the way of fuller understanding of what the problem really is and where it comes from.

Barry Stroud

What killed the cat is for The Philosopher a defining desire of the rational animal.

Ernest Sosa

To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; l and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.

Jerry Fodor

You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, ‘If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.’

Ned Block

My parents once cautioned me, recalling St. Paul’s warning to ‘beware of vain philosophy’. (Was he warning against philosophy, or only vain philosophy? You’re condemned to do some philosophy just to grasp the warning.) Alas, I fell for philosophy anyway, and perhaps for vain philosophy. I’ve argued that Kant’s claim about our ignorance of things in themselves is a claim about ignorance of the intrinsic nature of things. In vain-I’ve persuaded no-one. In political philosophy I’ve argued (along with others) that pornography subordinates women. Again in vain-we’ve persuaded no-one. Philosophy needn’t be vain: it helps us understand the world, and sometimes change it for the better. But its pull is not in its utility. As Adam Smith said: ‘wonder…and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts [us] to the study of philosophy’.

Rae Langton

And here’s one I’ve heard before, but it’s worth repeating:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

Wilfrid Sellars