10.11 — The Twentieth Century, and Where Philosophy Is Now

Two things happened, and they went in different directions and mostly stopped talking to each other.

The analytic tradition, in Britain and then America, turned to logic, language and precision.

The continental tradition, in France and Germany, turned to experience, history, power and interpretation.

The split is real, institutional, and only now beginning to heal.

The linguistic turn

The idea that reorganised analytic philosophy: many philosophical problems are produced by language, and dissolve when the language is clarified.

Frege and Russell developed a formal logic far more powerful than Aristotle's (10.4), able to handle relations and quantification. Volume I's chapters on logic and computation descend from it directly, and so does the entire foundation of computer science.

And Russell's example of the method: the present King of France is bald. There is no King of France. Is the sentence false? Then its negation — the present King of France is not bald — should be true, and that is also wrong.

Russell's analysis: the sentence is not a simple subject-predicate claim. It asserts that there exists exactly one thing that is currently King of France, and that it is bald. The first part is false, so the sentence is false, and the puzzle dissolves.

The technique — the surface grammar of a sentence misleads you about its logical structure — became the tradition's central method.

Wittgenstein, twice

And the most interesting figure, because he produced two philosophies and the second one refutes the first.

The early view

The Tractatus, 1921. Short, numbered, and written with total confidence.

Language pictures the world. A meaningful proposition has the same logical structure as the state of affairs it describes. Whatever cannot be said in that form cannot be said at all.

And that excludes ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life — all of which he regarded as the most important things, and all of which he concluded cannot be spoken about.

The last line: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

He thought he had solved philosophy, and left it to become a schoolteacher.

The later view

He came back, and the Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, takes his own earlier work apart.

Language does not picture anything. Meaning is use. Words mean what they do in the practices they are part of — and he calls those practices language games.

Try to define "game." Board games, ball games, card games, the Olympic games, a child playing alone. No feature is common to all — not competition, not winning, not rules, not amusement.

What you find is family resemblance: overlapping similarities, like the resemblances among a family, with no single feature everybody has.

Which is the answer to Socrates and to Plato (10.2, 10.3). The definitions could not be found because there are none, and that is not a failure — it is how the words actually work.

And his diagnosis of philosophy itself: philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. A word taken out of the practice where it works, and then puzzled over.

His stated aim: to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Not to answer the question but to dissolve the confusion that produced it.

The continental side

Meanwhile, and in a completely different register.

Husserl's phenomenology: describe experience as it is actually given, carefully, before theorising about it. Bracket the question of whether the world is really out there, and describe what appears.

Heidegger, his student, turned it to the question of being. His central term is Dasein — being-there — his word for the kind of being a human has, which is characterised by caring about its own existence and by knowing it will end.

His useful contribution: authenticity against falling-into-the-they. Most of the time you do what "one" does — one dresses like this, one wants this, one is shocked by that — and the "one" is nobody in particular. Authenticity is owning your existence as yours, and what makes it possible is confronting your own death.

And Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, served as a university rector under it, and never adequately renounced it. The relationship between the philosophy and the politics is genuinely argued about, and the honest position is that the work is important and the man's conduct was disgraceful, and that pretending either fact away is dishonest.

Foucault, later, turned the attention to power. His claim: knowledge and power are not separable — what counts as knowledge is shaped by institutions, and institutions maintain themselves through it. His histories of madness, medicine and punishment trace how categories that look natural were constructed.

Useful, and it has an obvious failure mode: if all knowledge is power, that claim is also power, and the position undermines itself. The productive version keeps the question — who benefits from this being classified this way — without the totalising claim.

What is actually open now

And this is what the Part has been building to.

The hard problem of consciousness

The one that is completely open. 15.2 covers it.

We know a great deal about which brain processes correlate with which experiences. We have no account whatsoever of why any of it is accompanied by experience at all.

Free will

Also open, and it interacts with everything in Part 8 and Part 13.

The positions: hard determinism (everything is caused, so no free will), libertarianism (some choices are genuinely undetermined), and compatibilism (freedom means acting according to your own reasons without external compulsion, which is compatible with determinism).

Compatibilism is the majority position among philosophers and it feels like a dodge to most people on first encounter. Spinoza's version (10.8) — freedom is understanding why you want what you want — is the most attractive one.

The is-ought gap

Hume's problem (10.8), and Part 13's problem. No purely factual account entails a value, and every ethical system has to bring a value premise from somewhere.

And the personal identity question

What makes you the same person as the child in your photographs, when no atom and few memories are shared?

The candidates — bodily continuity, psychological continuity, a soul — all fail on some case, and thought experiments involving teleporters and split brains break every one of them.

Derek Parfit's conclusion, in the twentieth century's most striking piece of ethics: identity is not what matters. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, and these come in degrees. And he reported that finding this out made him less afraid of dying — which is 6.7's anatta, reached by an Oxford philosopher through thought experiments about teleportation.

What philosophy is for

A fair question after eleven chapters, and here is the answer this book gives.

Not to produce final answers. Two and a half thousand years and the four questions above are open.

What it produces is the ability to see the structure of a question — what is being assumed, where the value premise entered, whether the terms are doing consistent work, and what would count as an answer.

And that transfers completely. Every argument you will have about politics, work, a relationship or a decision has a structure, and almost nobody looks at it.

Plus a small number of genuinely portable instruments, and they are the Part's actual yield:

Define it without an example, then break the definition (10.2).

You become brave by doing brave things (10.4).

Sort it into what is up to you and what is not (10.5).

Which desires are natural and necessary, and which have no limit (10.6).

Do not add components that do no work (10.7).

Where did the "therefore you should" come from (10.8).

Could you tell them exactly what you are doing and why (10.9).

Would you take this week again, forever (10.10).

And: is this a real question, or is a word on holiday (10.11).

What to carry from this page

Meaning is use, and many words have no definition — only family resemblance. Which retires a great deal of pointless argument about what things "really are."

Most of the time you do what "one" does, and "one" is nobody.

Ask who benefits from this being classified this way — without concluding that everything is only power.

And identity may not be what matters. Psychological continuity, in degrees — and the person who worked that out reported it made him less afraid.

Next: Part 11 leaves philosophy and goes to the stories every other people told — and asks why, across cultures that never met, they keep rhyming.