Companionship in Guilt

Abstract

Philosophers hunt in packs. The obvious advantage of this is that the spread of collective attention promotes in-depth illumination of different areas of inquiry. The obvious downside is a tendency to one-sidedness and partiality. Different packs fail to communicate at the cost of missing out on illuminating insight, whether of general philosophical interest or of particular relevance to their own area of expertise. The latter tendency is clearly diagnosed by Hilary Putnam, when he writes:

I believe that the unfortunate division of contemporary philosophy into separate ‘fields’ … often conceals the way in which the very same arguments and issues arise in field after field. For example, arguments for ‘antirealism’ in ethics are virtually identical with arguments for antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics; yet philosophers who resist those arguments in the latter case often capitulate to them in the former. We can only regain the integrated vision which philosophy has always aspired to if at least some of the time we allow ourselves to ignore the idea that a philosophical position or argument must deal with one and only one of these specific ‘fields’. (Putnam 2004, 1)