July 24, 2005

John Roberts: Wrong Line of Work?

A New York Times piece on Judge John Roberts makes this interesting statement:

"The English teacher used to talk about his papers after he had written them because they were outrageous but very well crafted," remembered John Langley, an emergency room doctor in New Orleans who was a class below Judge Roberts at La Lumiere. "He could take an argument that was borderline absurd and argue for it so well that you were almost at the point of having to accept his stance even though it was intuitively obvious that it was absurd."
Perhaps he should have been an analytic metaphysician.

Posted by Jeremy at 5:07 PM | Comments (7)

March 22, 2005

Hispanic Metaphysics, African Epistemology

Matthew posts at Prosblogion about his experiences at a religious studies conference, and one comment struck me as interesting:

The worst part of the workshop was having someone insist to me that there is such a thing as Hispanic and African metaphysics and epistemology. I'm cannot imagin what being Hispanic or African adds to ones analysis of material constitution or Gettier cases. However, if anyone has a suggestion I am willing to listen.
Since the comments there are acting up (the blog software thinks I just submitted a comment and tells me to wait, but I haven't submitted one in days), I decided to turn my comment into a post here and just trackback.

The one thing that might make some sense is if the African philosophical tradition or the Chinese philosophical tradition had approaches to these questions that we don't have in the western tradition. When Ted Sider was finishing up his Four Dimensionalism book (I believe I have the chronology right), he read a whole bunch of Asian philosophy to see what they thought about time and persistence, and he says many of the contemporary metaphysical views are in there. Maybe the ancient Chinese philosophers developed views that are distinctively in the Chinese tradition and haven't yet entered western philosophy. Of course, the average Asian wouldn't have much access to any of that, and I'm not sure how this would even begin to make sense of Asian metaphysics as opposed to any other kind. I don't see how anything analogous to that could even make sense for Hispanic metaphysics. In the end, I'd say the same about ethics or any other philosophical issue. These issues all transcend cultural background and race. Sometimes people's cultural assumptions will make certain views easier or harder to understand and more or less palatable to invididual people. Sometimes people might have more access to certain information, e.g. what it's like to be a woman or to be black in America, but it's a misnomer to call that feminist epistemology or black epistemology if you mean that this is an epistemological approach exclusive to women and common to all women. It's an epistemological thesis about women and men's relative access to certain truths, not a view for and by women as opposed to views for and by men. Men can hold such a view as well (e.g. Michael Stocker), and many women disagree with it (e.g. Susan Haack, to name one prominent philosopher). So I don't see how there could even in principle be a Hispanic ethics, an African political philosophy, or an Inuit aesthetics any more than there is a South Bronx metaphysics or Russian epistemology. Groups of people might all agree on a certain view, and that might mean there's a predominant view on Native American land claims among the Onondaga people of New York (though I imagine there isn't even that). It might turn out that, contingently, circumstances work so that all of a certain group end up with a view that no one else holds. That doesn't mean there could even be an Onondaga political philosophy, though, or a Martian metaphysics for that matter. There may end up being a political view that most Onondagas happen to believe, but it's a view that anyone could hold or even have come up with. Calling it Hispanic metaphysics sounds incredibly innatist and essentialist to my ears, as if Hispanics, merely by being Hispanic, are forced into certain views and/or approaches that others wouldn't ever begin to think of considering.

Posted by Jeremy at 5:39 PM | Comments (65)