Pseudophilosophy

The orthodox understanding of pseudophilosophy is any idea or system that masquerades itself as philosophy while significantly failing to meet some suitable intellectual standards. The term is frequently used pejoratively, and most applications of it are quite contentious. (The term non-philosophy is often taken to refer to similar areas, but with less legative connotations. As such, non-philosophy is a term used to refer to philosophy situated at the margins of the discipline in terms of subject-matter and its critical reception.) The term bears the same relationship to philosophy that pseudoscience bears to science.

The term is often used more casually to express contempt, irritation, or just dislike toward some idea or system of ideas. It is not, for the most part, used technically within academic philosophy, though it is likely to occur in philosophers' judgments on larger aspects of culture, their advice to new students, their assessments of other disciplines, and so forth.

Nicholas Rescher, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, defines pseudo-philosophy as "deliberations that masquerade as philosophical but are inept, incompetent, deficient in intellectual seriousness, and reflective of an insufficient commitment to the pursuit of truth." Rescher adds that the term is particularly appropriate when applied to "those who use the resources of reason to substantiate the claim that rationality is unachievable in matters of inquiry."

Some accusations of pseudophilosophy

Accusations of pseudophilosophy in academia

Academia has sometimes denied the title of "philosopher" to certain people. One must recall that philosophy has taken various institutional forms over the centuries, starting from the Epicurian' gardens and other Schools. It was only in Hegel's time that it started taking its modern, university form. Since Hegel, philosophy has thus been linked to the University, and mainly takes place into this institution. Therefore, it has sometimes denied the title of philosophy to popular books written outside its credentials, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. The foundation of the International College of Philosophy in 1983 by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet and others, specifically had the aim of creating a non-institutional place for philosophy, where new paths could be explored. The College was created "from a non-governmental origin, with an international span, an institution which is not destined to oppose itself, but to balance, question, open, occupy margins ; where where we would privilege unfrequent approaches or yet unlegitimized by the university approaches, new objects, new themes, new fields; where we would treat more of intersections than of academic disciplines" Derrida: "d’origine non gouvernementale, à portée internationale, une institution qui n’est pas destinée à s’opposer, mais à équilibrer, à questionner, à ouvrir, à occuper les marges ; où l’on privilégie des approches peu fréquentes ou point encore légitimées dans l’université, de nouveaux objets, de nouveaux thèmes, de nouveaux champs ; où l’on traite des intersections plus que des disciplines académiques" Interview with Derrida

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote the following about Hegel. Hegel is considered, along with Kant, Fichte and Schelling, as one of the greatest German philosopher of the Enlightenment:

Schopenhauer's critiques of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte are informed by his perception that their works use deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous jargon and neologisms, and that they contained castles of abstraction that sounded impressive but ultimately contained no verifiable content. Søren Kierkegaard attacked Hegel in a similar manner, writing that it was pretentious for Hegel to title one of his books "Reality." To Kierkegaard, this indicated an attempt to quash critics even before criticism was voiced.

Despite these attacks, Hegel is widely considered one of the most influential writers in world history: the rigor of his philosophy notwithstanding, Hegel had a significant impact on the writings of subsequent philosophers, for example Marx. Hegel scholar Walter Kaufmann contends that Schopenhauer's attacks actually illuminate more about Schopenhauer than about Hegel. Accusations that are similar in substance, if not in style, to Schopenhauer's have been made more recently against Martin Heidegger, postmodernists, and the adherents of French critical theory like Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard. W.V.O. Quine, along with Barry Smith, Hugh Mellor (then Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge), and various other academic philosophers, once wrote to protest Cambridge University's award of an honorary degree to Jacques Derrida, famous for his deconstruction theory inspired by Heidegger's destruktion of metaphysics, claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and that it is made of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists". Such attacks are usually considered as a sign of the breach between analytical philosophy and continental philosophy. Furthermore, interestingly enough, "French theory" is an US construction, which gathered philosophers considered widely different in France (Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.). The label of "structuralism" was already denied by almost all of the so-called structuralists thinkers (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, early Foucault), and the label of post-modernism would be rejected by all (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida...). Derrida would warns several times that the "deconstruction" of metaphysics didn't means that "we didn't need metaphysics"; but we need to do something else, beside it: the deconstruction of metaphysics is not an abandonment of metaphysics.

Popular philosophy

Alfred Korzybski's theory of General Semantics has been given this appellation (also by Quine), and post-structuralism has been widely accused of this kind of accusation (see Sokal Hoax). The works of Albert Camus, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, have also been mistreated, in particular by Jean-Paul Sartre who claimed it was "philosophy for classe de terminale" (last class in high school before the Baccalauréat). Camus' works are thus generally considered as literature and not as philosophy, although they definitely posed some philosophical questions.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism is often cited as a pseudophilosophy, for several reasons. Firstly, many of her philosophical views are presented in her "romantic realist" novels, rather than in refereed journal articles. Secondly, Rand was self-taught, and consequently the philosophical issues that she discussed were out of sync with the research program of mainstream academic philosophy during the years she was active. Her grasp of the historical problems of philosophy is considered idiosyncratic in many ways – her proposed resolution of the problem of universals, for example, treated it as a question of epistemology although it has usually been taken as a question of metaphysics.

Finally, she and some of her followers are often perceived as being dogmatic, frequently ignoring published criticism of the system instead of responding to it. This is in part because many of them were young people excited by her novels and unlearned in philosophy; such people are not often aware of the complexities of their subject and prone to construe disagreement as ignorance. Furthermore, many of her supporters would not permit modifications or additions to her philosophical system, leading some to label Rand as a cult leader.

There have been few published reactions to Objectivism in academic journals. The most comprehensive academic criticism to date is "With Charity Towards None" by William F. O'Neill, published in 1971. However, academic work on Objectivism has grown in recent years: see Response to Objectivism for some examples.

Furthermore, the New Philosophers (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut...) have been also accused to be a form of pseudo-philosophy, although some of their early work was academic. Gilles Deleuze particularly criticized the movement. Some have criticized them for reversing the classical model of the intellectual: while the intellectual uses his influence gained in his field for moral, politic purposes, and thus goes from his scientifical field to the public space, New Philosophers capitalize their legitimity on their appearance on TV talk shows and derived from there their scientific legitimity. They are not studied by philosophy students.

Pseudophilosophy in popular culture

Other works that have been labelled as "pseudophilosophy" include the material in Richard Bach's fable Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Satanic Bible, James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy and the novella The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Other New Age works are generally considered speculative or unanalytical by philosophers. Here, the label of pseudophilosophy is used to criticise these works as being conventional, sentimental, or platitudinous; and of lacking rigor, system, or analytical content.

Another cultural phenomenon that has been labelled pseudophilosophy is the form of philosophical skepticism that is the central premise of the motion picture The Matrix.

References

External links

Letter protesting the Cambridge award of an honorary degree to Derrida, with critical commentary.

Pejoratives | Philosophical terminology | Pseudoscience

Pseudo-philosophie