Cutting to no good purpose

The current edition of Private Eye —No. 1256. 19 February–4 March 2010 — carries (on its EDUCASHUN SPECIAL page), a report headed Against all logic. The following are the first three paragraphs of the Eye’s report:

Students and philosophers all over the world are questioning the logic of King’s College London in axing three top academics in the field of … logic. 

King’s is planning to cut more than 200 jobs across thirteen departments and has warned the entire School of Arts and Humanities that jobs are at risk. In the philosophy department, Professor Shalom Lapin, Dr Wilfried Meyer–Vial and Professor Charles Travis all face losing their posts — the first two to redundancy, and 67 year–old Professor Travis to compulsory retirement.  

The university blames the cuts on the loss of funds resulting from its poor performance in the 2008 research assessment exercise (RAE). But the philosophy department was ranked third nationwide in the RAE, behind only UCL and St Andrew’s — and that ranking owed much to the three academics in question   

               

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this report. However, I imagine that many people reading it would wonder, ‘Why all this fuss about logic: surely this is an arcane subject of no practical use to the world, and one which could be excised from the curriculum without the remotest loss to anyone?’ People tend to have the same sentiments about philosophy too. And not entirely without reason: Pierre Hadot, Professor Emeritus of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France, has written:

Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists. (Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Blackwell. 1995. p272)

However, anyone reading this and thinking that all modern philosophers are part of a cosy coterie keeping their departments together in perpetuity for their own ‘higher’ enjoyment would be wrong. This does of course happen in certain departments at certain universities. Nevertheless — looking at the last three decades or more — it is true to say that, not since the flourishing of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, have there been so many philosophers who have striven to their utmost to write accessible and extremely clear and stimulating introductions to a subject that has always been described as one in which there is no ‘shallow end’. Well, there are certainly no ‘shallow’ ends in the derogatory sense, but there are now ‘entry level’ texts of the highest quality. One such is Stephen Law’s The Philosophy Files. Dolphin. 2000 (wonderfully illustrated by Daniel Postgate). Anyone reading this book will understand both the value and pleasure of reading — and doing — philosophy.

However, to return to the question of philosophical logic and its use, we cannot perhaps do better than quote from A C Grayling’s An Introduction to Philosophical Logic. (Harvester. 1982. p17.), in which he paraphrases a metaphor of Gilbert Ryle’s:

…Ryle said that formal is to informal logic as geometry is to cartography. In the latter, the irregular features of landscape or continent have to be plotted to scale, and the success of the enterprise depends upon the cartographer’s being able to employ or be guided by the idealised regularities of Euclidean plane geometry.

And we may I think also legitimately compare the discipline of logic to that of the experimental scientist. She too has to expend a great deal of time, energy, and thought in order to produce results that can then be used by scientists engaged in practical work. Research has a bad name, but little would happen without it. 

So what exactly is informal logic, and why might it be useful to anyone? Well, primarily of course it is not symbolic logic — involving Venn diagrams, and the rest — and it is expressed with a minimum of philosophical terms; and one of its primary functions lies in exposing common fallacies in argument and reasoning. Here is an example, taken from a piece which originally appeared in Kol Shalom (Mamzer is Yiddish for a detestable man.)

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Postlude Some examples of philosophical thinking, usage, and — example 1/ — abusage.

1/ From Susan Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose (as illustration at head of this blog). Professor Stebbing held many posts in a distinguished academic career, including that of Lecturer in Symblic Logic at Columbia University in New York 1931–2. The passage she quotes is from The Times, May 25, 1937; the italics are Professor Stebbings; and the speaker was Stanley Baldwin. The sub–text would seem to be that the best approach is simply to bumble along!

2/ Quoted in Antony Flew’s An Introduction to Western Philosophy. Thames and Hudson. 1989. p30

…speaking of the key step required for the development of his Special Theory of Relativity, he [Einstein] wrote: ‘The type of critical reasoning which was required for the discovery of this central point was in my case advanced above all by reading the philosophical works of David Hume and Ernst Mach.’

3/ From Cicero on the Emotions ~ Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Margaret Graver. Chicago. 2004.

Envying, they [the Stoics] say, is ‘distress experienced because of the good fortune of another person,’ which does no harm to the one who envies. Pity is ‘distress over the misery of another who is suffering unjustly… [and so] …just as pity is distress over another’s misfortune, so envy is distress over another’s good fortune. Hence anyone who is subject to pity will also be subject to envy. [And Cicero’s answer to this? ‘Why pity rather than give assistance if one can? Or are we able to be open–handed without pity? We are able, for we ought not to share distresses for the sake of others, but we ought to relieve others of their distress if we can.’]

4/  From Metaphysical Horror. Leszek Kołakowski. Penguin. 2001. p129.

…is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe were void of meaning, we would never have achieved the ability to entertain this very thought — to wit that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?