“Analytic philosophy is not so much a school of thought as a style or method. It is a style of philosophizing which seeks to be rigorous and careful…” A C Grayling
A C (Anthony) Grayling (1949 – ) is the very model of the modern professional and public intellectual. He has published many scholarly books, he has worked at the frontier of knowledge in his field (scepticism and justification), he has edited books for comprehensive undergraduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy, he has been active as an officer and editor in the associations and journals of the profession, he has engaged with some of the big moral and political questions of modern times and he has tirelessly written popular pieces, for many years on a weekly basis.
He is so embedded in the profession, so wide-ranging and so prolific that he is likely to embody whatever is good and not so good about modern academic philosophy in the rationalist and analytical tradition. Playing the role of the helpful critic I will have to focus on what is not so good.But first of all to step through his magnificent and far from completed career.
“Anthony Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are “Ideas That Matter”, “Liberty in the Age of Terror” and “To Set Prometheus Free”. For several years he wrote the “Last Word” column for the Guardian newspaper and now writes a column for the Times. He is a frequent contributor to the Literary Review, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Index on Censorship and New Statesman, and is an equally frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He writes the Thinking Read column for the Barnes and Noble Review in New York, is the Editor of Online Review London, and a Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine.”
“In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and is a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union.”
“Anthony Grayling was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum for several years, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world.”
“He is a Trustee of the London Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2003 he was a Booker Prize judge, and in 2010 is a judge of the Art Fund prize.”
Of course his website is a mine of information, with lists of his books and major publications, many of which are on line. See also Wikopedia.
I will focus on one topic and two books. The topic is his special interest in scepticism and the justification of our claims to knowledge. The two books are the collections of papers which he edited to provide the basis of undergraduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy at the University of London.
Writing some time later, after some time spent reading his paper Scepticism and Justification, I think I will proceed to the two books without spending more time on the paper. We seem to have a regress, where his first rejoinder to the sceptic is to fall back on the framework of discussion, than to say that this brings us to another form of scepticism, that is relativism, and we will move on to that another day.
“The nub of the claim here is that we can redescribe the problem of justification as the problem of epistemic finitude, and, by seeing how such finitude is overcome–viz. by our possession and employment of a realistic conceptual scheme which serves as a geographical-historical explanatory framework designed to make experience coherent, serving as a framework of inference, specifically deductive in form, in which the general assumptions of the scheme play an undischargeable role–we thereby see how we come by justification for our workaday epistemic judgements. And we thereby also identify where the major philosophical task in this region lies: namely, in justifying the scheme itself, which is the same thing as refuting scepticism in its most interesting and substantial guise, namely, as relativism. This is a different problem of justification, but it only comes to the fore when epistemology’s traditional problem of justification has been dealt with in the way suggested here.”
I get the feeling we are being conned!
Moving on to Philosophy 1 and Philosophy 2. They received some (but not all) positive reviews on Amazon.
These were compiled for the University of London in commissioning material to accompany undergraduate studies in philosophy. They support “London University’s celebrated single-subject honours degree in philosophy”. The essays in the second volume introduce the advanced study of particular topics. “They do so robustly, and head-on, but with the needs of progressing students clearly in view. Along with its precursor, this book therefore constitutes, as it is designed to constitute, a major resource for continued philosophical study.”
This is the Introduction to Philosophy 1. Some extracts:
“It is the aim of what follows to introduce philosophy’s central fields of inquiry. There are so many connections and overlaps between them that to separate them under different labels in the way just indicated is somewhat artificial. But not entirely so; for there are problems distinctive to each, and a preliminary grasp of what they concern offers a first step towards understanding them.”
“Each of the chapters that follow is devoted to a major area of philosophical endeavour. They are their own introductions to the questions they discuss, and therefore need little supplementary introduction here. But a preliminary note about what each chapter contains will help with orientation, as follows.”
“Chapter 1: Epistemology. Epistemology – sometimes called ‘theory of knowledge’ – concerns the nature and sources of knowledge. The questions asked by epistemologists are, What is knowledge? How do we get it? Are all our means of seeking it equally good?
Chapter 2: Philosophical Logic.
“Chapter 3: Methodology. Epistemological discussions of the kind pursued in Chapter 1 concern the concept of knowledge in general. A more particular application of it concerns science, one of the major fields of knowledge acquiring endeavour. Philosophical investigation into the assumptions, claims, concepts, and methods of science raises questions of great philosophical importance. The elementary part of this inquiry, here called Methodology, focuses largely on questions about the concepts and methods used in and its problems; the concept of laws of nature; realism, instrumentalism, and under- determination of theory by evidence; confirmation and probability; and the concept of explanation.”
Chapter 4: Metaphysics.
Chapter 5: The Philosophy of Mind.
Chapter 6-9: The History of Philosophy.
Chapter 10: Ethics.
Chapter 11: Aesthetics.
“The kind of philosophy introduced in these chapters is often called ‘Analytic Philosophy’. Analytic philosophy is not so much a school of thought as a style or method. It is a style of philosophizing which seeks to be rigorous and careful, which at times makes use of ideas and techniques from logic, and which is aware of what is happening in science. It is, in particular, alert to linguistic considerations, not because of an interest in language for its own sake, but because it is through language that we grasp the concepts we use, and it is by means of language that we express our beliefs and assumptions. One of the principal methods of analytic philosophy is analysis of the concepts we employ in thinking about ourselves and the world: not surprisingly, this is called ‘conceptual analysis’.”
This is his editor’s introduction to the second volume, for elective subjects at a more advanced level.
TO BE CONTINUED
