Interview with Professor Stephen Mulhall
NB: What follows grows from my personal views about philosophy, and its place in wider culture. Whilst these views inevitably inform the way I think about my present responsibilities as Director of Undergraduate Studies, they aren’t an official expression of the Oxford philosophy faculty’s view of these matters.
Whenever I try to explain what philosophy is to people who aren’t already immersed in it, I tend to focus on the ways in which philosophical questions emerge naturally within the work of other academic disciplines, and yet take us beyond the reach of those disciplines’ ways of answering their own questions. Historians try to understand what happened in the past: but what justifies their assumption that the past is real, or that certain kinds of (eg documentary) evidence can disclose it to us? Physicists try to comprehend the nature of material reality; but what validates their assumption that observations can reveal a reality independent of their deliverances, or that inductive reasoning can reach from the observed to the unobserved? Since those assumptions inform the proprietary methods of the discipline, applying those methods cannot validate them; but if they can’t be validated, then everything delivered by those methods lacks a proper grounding.
As a result, for every non-philosophical discipline (or family of them), there’s a branch of philosophy whose concern is its grounding assumptions: if each such discipline provides a way of making sense of some aspect of reality, the corresponding branch of philosophy aims to make sense of each such way of making sense of things. So although philosophy is in this sense parasitic upon other disciplines, and so on our basic ability to comprehend reality in all of its various aspects, it also critically evaluates, and so transcends, their methodological constraints: just as each discipline systematizes and criticizes our pre-theoretical understanding of specific kinds of thing, so the philosopher reflects critically upon the systematic body of knowledge that results, as well as the means by which it was achieved and may be extended.
This already gives philosophy a very distinctive (and arguably unique) location in the ecology of human ways of achieving knowledge of reality. Unlike the other disciplines with which it critically engages, it has no specific subject-matter – no proprietary body of knowledge on which its claims to expertize or enhanced insight draw and depend. On the other hand, it is capable of critically engaging with every such discipline, in ways that none can ignore, on pain of putting in question the validity of their entire enterprise. So philosophy is the quintessentially inter-disciplinary discipline: its intellectual enterprise concerns the validity of any and all other intellectual enterprises. Put negatively, this means that philosophy lacks any secure location in the ecology of human inquiry; put positively, it means that philosophy arises wherever any form of human inquiry arises, and belongs nowhere in particular because it belongs everywhere.
Little wonder that philosophy’s location in the university – that institutional microcosm of the diverse unity of human powers of understanding - is so peculiar: at once utterly central, and inherently elusive. I’ve lost count of how many government and university policies fail to engage appropriately with philosophy’s mode of academic being, simply because they’re developed with the nature of other academic disciplines in mind.
But the reflexive move that generates philosophical inquiry should, in all consistency, apply to philosophy itself. If we make space for ourselves in the intellectual world by critically evaluating the basic assumptions of other disciplines, then we have an obligation to critically evaluate the means we employ in doing so. That means, in the first instance, reflecting on the commonalities and differences between the orienting assumptions disclosed by each branch of philosophical reflection. As students increasingly appreciate as they proceed through their philosophical education, clarifying the basic assumptions of – say – art turns out to involve clarifying assumptions about the language in which we talk about it, the psychology of our responses to it, our capacity to acquire knowledge of it, and what exactly it is about which we do acquire knowledge; so work in this branch of philosophy, as in any other single branch, turns out to involve work in many branches of philosophy. But how we go about exploiting the connections between those branches will reveal a range of presuppositions about how they differ from one another, and about how they can nevertheless constitute branches of a single intellectual enterprise. It will, in other words, reveal assumptions about philosophy’s integrity and its diversity that stand in need of critical evaluation, on pain of putting in question the validity of any philosophical work that is informed by them. Perhaps they will survive that examination; but they might equally well turn out to need revision or refinement. And unless that examination is undertaken - unless we constantly ask ourselves what our own fundamental assumptions about what it is to do philosophy might be, and whether we should stick with them – then we are failing to take philosophical responsibility for ourselves in the way we happily require of other disciplines.
In this context, I want to emphasize three ways in which asking that question might illuminate our understanding of what we’re doing, and of how we might go about doing it more successfully. The first involves questioning our sense of which branches of philosophy are central, and which marginal, and the basis on which those assignments of priority are (often unreflectively) made. Why, for example, assume that we should start with a model of thought, language and mind developed with fact-stating discourse in view, and regard art or religion as deviant cases to which the standard model must be adapted, rather than viewing the role of thought, language and mind in the domains of art and religion as requiring a radical revision in the light of their role in these contexts? It might be fruitful to consider how far such assignments of philosophical significance reflect broader cultural assignments of centrality and marginality that are driven by political forces in the widest sense, and ones which merit more systematic philosophical interrogation. This is the kind of critique mounted by Marxist and feminist critics of contemporary philosophy, amongst others.
Second, we might reflect more questioningly on the division that still exists between broadly Anglo-American and broadly Franco-German traditions of philosophizing after Kant. For a very long time, for a complex and mutually-supporting array of reasons, the latter traditions were regarded not so much as an alternative set of ways of conceiving of the purpose and the appropriate methods of doing philosophy, but as a sustained expression of something antithetical to philosophy’s governing goals and aspirations – as a kind of anti-philosophy: what Socrates understood by sophistry. If, however, we exercise sufficient charity to make an effort to understand how and why Kant’s German Idealist successors (and their successors in genealogical and phenomenological traditions of thought) could see what they were doing as inheriting the most philosophically fruitful aspects of Kant’s Critical enterprise, then we might come to appreciate that some of our deepest Anglo-American assumptions about philosophy’s relation to its past, and its relations to other disciplines, stand in need of refinement or even radical revision. There have, after all, been many internal critics of those assumptions, especially in the previous century – including Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Collingwood, Murdoch, Anscombe and Foot.
Third, we might reflect more systematically on the extent to which our conception of philosophy – including the conception that I’m sketching here – is rooted in a specifically Western European heritage, in which philosophers picture themselves as continuing a story that originates in Ancient Greece, is modified by Judaeo-Christian forms of thinking, and is integral to Europe’s understanding of its role in world history. An obvious way of facilitating such self-questioning is by considering the relationship between philosophy in its Western European formations and those movements of thought and practice that seem at least roughly analogous to it in non-Western cultures. The most obvious points of reference in this respect would be Islamic philosophy, and the philosophical traditions of India and China; although one could also look further afield. And if it were to turn out that nothing in those cultural traditions immediately leapt out to us as clearly analogous to what Western Europe calls ‘philosophy’ (as opposed, say, to what it calls ‘wisdom literature’, or ‘spiritual practices’, or ‘religion’), then we don’t necessarily have to conclude that philosophy is an intellectual practice exclusive to the West. We might equally well conclude that the specific role played by philosophy in contemporary Western European cultures has left unexamined its internal relation to spiritual practices, or failed to see that non-Western wisdom traditions can be seen as taking up responsibilities in relation to their cultures that Socrates could recognize and respect as continuations of his own practices.
Against this background, some of the ways in which philosophy is practiced in Oxford might seem rather more intelligible. I’m thinking in particular of the fact that all of our undergraduate degree schemes are joint enterprises with other disciplines, and that we don’t have a single honours philosophy programme; the fact that the university tries so hard not just to accommodate but to defend its distinctively collegiate structure (with colleges amounting to smaller reflections of the microcosm of the wider university, providing a space within which students of different disciplines converse regularly with one another); and the fact that we defer our Finals examinations to a concentrated period at the end of every student’s career (thereby giving them the greatest possible opportunity to appreciate the interconnectedness of the work they did on each of their philosophy papers). It is only an apparent paradox that this same conception of philosophy not only accounts for some very parochial features of the study of philosophy in Oxford, but also explains the faculty’s willingness to explore new ways in which we might diversify our courses and syllabi. For the impulse to open ourselves to what appears ‘other’ is actually deeply rooted in the distinctively Western European understanding of philosophy that finds its point of origin in Socrates.