[lit-ideas] Re: To R. Paul: Public Apology
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:11:11 +0000 (GMT)
--- Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>I also liked Ryle, who was kind, surprisingly funny, and
> very supportive. It's said that he was similarly supportive of many
> people from the Colonies.
Bryan Magee, who taught at Oxford and describes it withering in his
'Confessions Of A Philosopher', has a story about Ryle - although given what
Ryle did to Ayer [as JLS reports] perhaps this is an unreliable story, as an
important source is Ayer.
The gist is Ryle was the king-maker in most British universities' philosophy
departments [or equivalent - for as Magee explains the linguistic turn in
philosophy may be partly explained by the fact philosophy was taught at
Oxford only via Classics or Greats - so only people who already had a
linguistic turn in dead languages (Ancient Greek being dead now, I think)were
allowed to touch the subject, with arguably consequences as damaging as the
consequences for the subject if only the scientifically or mathematically
trained were allowed to study it]. And Ryle sought to keep Popper out of
Oxford. Successfully.
Magee conjectures the reason behind this blackballing was simple - much as
they valued their own work, this 'ill-sorted they' knew Popper was a severe
critic of the linguistic turn, and they knew he was better than them [some
privately admitted it], and they did not want him on their turf to challenge
them. They nearly all, according to Magee, were scientifically illiterate and
looked down on science as a source of philosophical insight while exalting
'the examination of language' as a source of such insight. Surprise.
Cut off from any challenge from a figure like Popper how was any likely
undergraduate there to resist the 'school mentality' - would we expect a
student in a Leninist conservatoire to come away believing that actually free
market economics or Christianity were right, or a student in a Bible Belt
college to think Marx or Darwin were right? And if they did, how high a mark
would they get - a precondition of having a professional career in
philosophy?
What they might get is an intense dislike of philosophy, based on the way
'professionals' practice it.
Perhaps Ryle's supportiveness only extended to the sufficiently like-minded?
-Anyone honest with a passing knowledge of intellectual history will hardly
faint at the thought, and only an ingenue would say Oxford must be somehow
above any of the sins we find in that history, or deny that those party to a
flawed 'school of thought' may be last to admit it is even a school.
I conjecture Popper knew he was 'blackballed' and resented it, but kept
relatively quiet about it in his 'famous seclusion'.
As a footnote to these Oxonian themes, and sometime after Ryle had gone:-
I did two philosophy options at Oxford - philosophy of mind being one. Though
the tutor I believe knew my Popperian bent of thought, nothing from Popper
was on any of the reading-lists (perhaps he thought I knew it all and would
just treat it as on the reading-list anyway - an awful assumption). Popper
has a book that is effectively his main work in the philosophy of mind - 'The
Self And Its Brain' - and this addresses the mind-body problem but not in the
way of Oxford. I had not known what I had let myself in for.
The questions in finals were very revealing, things like:-
1. Can a frog turn into a prince? Can a prince turn into a frog?
2. Can I imagine '2+2=5'? Can I imagine '2+2=4'?
The first (I guess) is about 'personal identity' so-called; and the second is
about a number of things - but the questions are so framed that it is nigh-on
impossible to say anything about them from a Popperian or non-linguistic turn
POV. The Popperian POV is (I guess) that these are very bad way of framing
the underlying issues, indeed they are 'clever-clever' or smart-arse ways -
but an answer to this effect would be punished _as not answering the
question_, if not seen as just insulting polemic.
Consider another question used:-'Which theory of sense data is better - X or
Y's?'
A Popperian answer that there are no such things as sense data, and therefore
there is very little to be gained by quibbling over X and Y's differences,
would gain very little marks; because, even if well-argued, _it did not
answer the question_.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg, for at least all of the above raise
important underlying issues - no matter that they frame those issues in a way
that amounts [I think] to agenda-setting of a high order.
The worst topics were the 'causal theory of perception', which is examined by
asking 'Is seeing a seeming lamp seeing a lamp?', and the so-called
'philosophy of action', which is examined by asking something like 'What is
the difference between my moving my arm and my arm moving?'.
On this last, I turned up at a tutorial without having written an essay as I
had been unable to bring myself to - using (I hope) something polite to
convey my feeling that the topic was intellectually trivial and unworthy, and
that really any answer could not be given directly but must come via
consideration of the mind-body problem in all its complexity. The tutor was
not angry but said, I recall, that he tended to agree. We talked amiably
about God-knows-what instead.
Btw, my tutor was clearly a very bright man: but bright does not mean right
[(C) D.McEvoy].
Those who feel what I say here is simply the product of self-aggrandisement,
bitterness, arrogance and immaturity may take as supporting evidence that I
did get an absolutely stinking mark in this paper.
But then, as Magee explains and my friends at college also found, at Oxford
they don't appear to really care about that that much.
Diddums Donal
Still playing in the intellectual sandpit of the nincompoop nursery
Definitely not an 'Oxford Man', having been there
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