Specter of Reason

Jason Stanley has posted part of his and Carlin Romano's recent "Philosophical Progress and Intellectual Culture" panel discussion. There's a lot of humor and good spirit here, until Carlin Romano starts talking. Jason Stanley is a bit all over the place, but his points tie together nicely enough and are delivered with panache. I am entirely sympathetic with his presentation and point of view (except about the propositional nature of practical ability, but that's pretty irrelevant here, and I think Stanley is even a little tongue-in-cheek about it at the end). Then Romano gets up and immediately goes on the assault. His criticism of academic and analytic philosophy is incredibly arrogant and ignorant. His most humorous error results from his lack of familiarity with Grice's notion of implicature . He quotes Stanley, who says that "asserting that p implicates knowledge that p." Romero interprets this as a ridiculous error. He thinks Stanley b...

Brian Leiter mentions an upcoming Symposium on Philosophical Progress to be held at Harvard next weekend. The question is, will the consumption of alcohol lead to violence? Jason Stanley and Carlin Romano will be pitted against each other in a panel discussion entitled "Philosophical Progress and Intellectual Culture" immediately after a wine and cheese break. Stanley, it is safe to say, will come down hard on the side of progress. He stands behind decades of advanced work in linguistics and epistemology. He doesn't just stand behind it. He banks on it. Carlin Romano, on the other hand, represents the literary critic's vitriolic rejection of so-called "positivist epistemology," a phrase which presumably is meant to cover any sort of philosophy which is not literary criticism--in other words, any sort of philosophy which calls itself "philosophy" without irony. I'm not sure you could find panelists more invested in such incommensurable a...