The Meta-History of Philosophy

If we examine the history of Peloponnesian War, or of the Spanish Civil War - if we examine the history of jury trials, or of metalworking - then whichever methods we use for those types of history will also be applied to the history of Schopenhauer, or of Kierkegaard - i.e., to the history of philosophy.

To speak of the history of philosophy is to speak of history; the history of philosophy is history, and so is subject to any generalizations which can be made about history.

Whichever descriptive or prescriptive rules apply to history in general apply also to the history of philosophy.

There is even the risk of an infinite regression: if we apply the philosophy of history to the history of philosophy, then we would have the philosophy of the history of philosophy - and we do in fact have this.

(And then: the history of the philosophy of history, the history of the philosophy of the history of philosophy, the philosophy of the history of the philosophy of history, etc.)

The term ‘meta-history’ can be used in several senses: it can refer to the archetypical patterns which either govern or describe historical events and processes; it can refer to the manner in which historical narratives are created; it can refer to the study of the philosophy of history (cf. the Oxford English Dictionary).

There is also the question of defining ‘history’ - the word can refer to the actual events and processes which have occurred in the past, or it can refer to our writings and narratives which attempt to record those events and processes, as Frederick Copleston writes:

Taken by itself, in abstraction from context, the term ‘history of philosophy’ is ambiguous. On the one hand it may refer to the actual historical development of philosophical thought, in the Greco-Roman world, for example, or in India. On the other hand it can be used, and, I suppose, generally is used, to refer to written accounts of such developments. Thus one might say of a book, ‘this is an account of the history of Greek philosophy.’ This possible ambiguity might be avoided by reserving the term ‘history of philosophy’ for the actual historical development of philosophical thought and by employing some such phrase as ‘historiography of philosophy’ to refer to written accounts of this development. But this cumbersome procedure is unnecessary. These sense in which ‘history of philosophy’ is being used is generally clear enough from context.

Copleston’s view includes some amount of Platonism or realism - he calls it ‘a common-sense point of view.’ This leads us to Kantian considerations about history.

Kantianly, there’s a Ding-an-sich (a ‘thing in itself’) behind or under our perception of the thing: a noumenon behind the phenomenon. Analogously, we might ask about an event in itself apart from the event as we perceive it.

On the other hand, an opposing view might argue that there is no history apart from the perceptions we have and the narratives we create: that history is the telling of history, and nothing more. Philosophers use the word ‘idealism’ to refer to such a view, and the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) expressed such views.

If Copleston draws our attention the questions about realism or idealism in history in general, and in the history of philosophy in particular, then John Yolton draws our attention to the linguistic considerations:

Taking its root in the theory of types, the theory of meta-disciplines insists that any given discipline, such as sociology, psychology, language, etc., must be distinguished from the talk about that discipline. The psychologist in his laboratory, performing experiments, deriving conclusions, devising theories, is engaged in the accepted activities of his profession. When that same psychologist begins to reflect critically upon his methodologies, upon the meanings of the familiar terms, upon the general significance of his science, he has taken on the activities traditionally associated with the philosopher, he has, that is, become a meta-psychologist. Philosophies of science are, in this way, meta-scientific activities, since the men who construct them do not perform the scientific experiments but instead examine the presuppositions, the methodologies, the concepts of the sciences. Since the two-fold distinction of discipline and meta-discipline arose out of the theory of types, and since this theory has had its most wide-spread application within semantic systems, much of the activity of meta-disciplines has taken the form of a linguistic analysis of the speech and writing of any given discipline.

There is, perhaps, a general pattern in which questions which were viewed as metaphysical questions in the 18th and 19th centuries came to be viewed as linguistic questions in the 20th century.

If the 20th century was the heyday of the philosophy of language, then it should be no surprise that meta-historical thought was treated as a question about the language used to talk about history. Meta-history was seen as the examination of the language which historians used to talk about evidence and data - the language which was used to construct narratives.

Yolton continues:

Thus, Hare has recently given us an analysis of The Language of Morals, Woodger presents Biology and Language, and Ryle offers an account of mental conduct words. Such analyses of the language of disciplines cannot avoid making assertions or drawing conclusions about the activity of the discipline itself: that is precisely the function of a critical examination of science, ethics, or history, i.e., to formulate conclusions not only of a descriptive but also of a prescriptive nature. Ryle urges us, for example, to dispense with the fallacy of the ghost in the machine in thinking about the nature of mind and mental activity, while the historical relativist insists that claims to objectivity in historiography are fallacious. If taken seriously, the analysis of the meta-discipline reflects back upon the discipline itself, recommendations made upon the meta-level are absorbed 'into the original activity. The meta-discipline lays bare latent presuppositions, exposes them to criticism, challenges their accepted meanings, indicates contractions required for precision.

We might pose a question about whether, in the history of philosophy, it is correct to speak of Bossuet ‘reacting’ or ‘responding’ to Hobbes. One the one hand, to thus speak creates a more intelligible and continuous narrative. On the other hand, it might be more accurate to simply say that Bossuet wrote at a point in time after Hobbes had published his major texts. To attribute ‘reacting’ or ‘responding’ to Bossuet might exceed the evidence at hand.

Likewise, to ask whether George Berkeley is properly grouped among the British empiricists, as Louis Loeb does, is simultaneously to challenge a construct created by some historians of philosophy and to create a new competing construct. Both the asking of the question and the answering of it are worth investigating, inasmuch as the examination of schools of philosophy is the examination of a later historiographical construct, a construct which is then retrojected onto the earlier evidence, rather than a direct examination of the data itself.

In any case, while it is first necessary for us to naively ask a historian of philosophy for a narrative about “what happened,” it is secondly also necessary for us to ask the historian of philosophy about how he constructs narratives and how he chooses from among competing narratives.

Competing Views of Descartes: How Platonic Are His ‘Immutable Natures’ and ‘Eternal Truths’?

Almost single-handedly, Rene Descartes began modern philosophy. What scholars call ‘modern’ philosophy started around 1620. It is indicative of the character of this movement that Descartes was, among other things, a mathematician.

In addition to founding modern philosophy, Descartes initiated one of the competing schools within it. The cartesian school is known as ‘rationalist’ and has a preference for a priori knowledge over a posteriori knowledge, i.e., it privileges knowledge which is not empirical over knowledge gained from sense-data, and privileges theoretical deduction over knowledge gained through the use of the five sense.

Descartes hoped to build a reliable foundation for knowledge on those three things which he thought to be most certain: the truths of geometry and algebra, the confidence that any rational agent has about her or his own existence, and existence of a non-contingent being on whom other contingencies rest.

Given the centrality of arithmetic and mathematical truths in cartesian thought, it became obvious for students to ask about the nature of such truths. In this question, modern philosophy inherited some questions which had been discussed in both medieval and ancient philosophy. This topic is often labelled as the “problem of universals.”

This debate, according to Tad Schmaltz, “concerns the ontological status of universal features of reality.” For example, the system of Euclidean geometry yields certain results - and those results hold equally in Europe and North America, equally last year and next year. They are universal.

An interpretive question asks how, exactly, Descartes regarded what he viewed as, in Schmaltz’s words, “eternal truths.”

The ancient antecedents of this debate see one side in Plato, who considered such eternal truths to be not physical but rather metaphysical objects and considered them to exist both outside the physical natural world and outside the human mind. They see the other side in Aristotle, who located these truths in the natural physical world.

The medievals were bequeathed this dispute, and refined the argumentation on both sides with increased nuance.

Plato should not, however, be seen as an early version of Descartes; nor should Aristotle be seen as an early version of John Locke.

While Plato and Descartes may have shared a fondness for a realism about abstractions, they were quite different in other ways.

The interpretive questions for those who study Descartes include these: what did he consider to be in the category of metaphysical objects? What, according to him, are those things which we can consider to be outside the realm of physical objects? Which realities are not detectable by the five senses?

Two competing views of him emerge: one view sees him as minimally metaphysical and as assigning relatively few objects to the category of metaphysical object; the other view sees him as richly metaphysical, populating the metaphysical realm with many objects and with many different types of object.

Tad Schmaltz describes the interpretive schism:

The division in the recent literature on Descartes is between those who see him as adopting the broadly Platonic view that immutable natures are independent both of the human mind and of the particular objects in the created world that exemplify those natures, on the one hand, and those who see him as endorsing a conceptualist reduction of such natures to features of the human mind, on the other.

A closely related question is this: is our idea of a truth identical with the truth itself?

As Schmaltz writes, there is textual evidence on both sides of these questions. Descartes’s writings are ambiguous.

There is a related controversy regarding the ontological implications of Descartes’s famous (some would say infamous) doctrine of God’s free creation of eternal truths. Though there is some support in Descartes’s texts for the identification of these truths with the ideas concerning them that God has imprinted in our mind, there also is reason to worry that such an identification cannot fully accommodate everything that Descartes has to say concerning eternal truths and immutable natures.

So, on the one hand, there is a debate about whether or not eternal truths are identified with our ideas concerning them. On the other hand there is a debate about whether immutable natures are features of the human mind or whether immutable natures are independent both of the mind and of the physical world.

These two debates are intricately linked, to the point that the question could be posed as to whether they perhaps constitute only one debate, cast in two different sets of vocabulary.

Are the words ‘eternal truths are identified with our ideas concerning them’ equivalent to the words ‘immutable natures are features of the human mind’? Again, are the words ‘immutable natures are independent both of the human mind and of particular objects in the created world’ equivalent to the words ‘eternal truths are not to be identified with our ideas concerning them’?

Competing Definitions of ‘Religion’

The debates and discussions of religion are many, and the discipline of the philosophy of religion, as it is known at universities, is a prolific one, spilling gallons of ink. One reason that the analysis of this topic is so voluminous is that the words used are slippery, having ambiguous definitions.

The word ‘religion’ is one of the words at the center of this clutter.

There are many competing definitions of ‘religion’ and each carries with it a set of implications and entailments.

Two of these many will serve as examples.

Among individuals and societies, two phases can be discerned - and possibly many more, in addition - which are not necessary temporal phases, although they probably are, but certainly one phase has a logical priority over the other:

Phase 1: Some individuals and societies structure their thought around myths and magic.

Phase 2: Others shift the primary emphasis onto a relationship with the deity.

The word ‘myth’ may be used to refer to a narrative which has explanatory powers - it is usually a narrative designed to explain or to answer some question. Contra some modern usages, a ‘myth’ is not a priori false: there are true myths.

The word ‘magic’ here refers to attempts to control the forces of nature. Traditionally, there is an effort to manipulate the weather, the fertility of crops, the outcome of military efforts, the romantic response of a potential spouse, or one’s physical health. Magic is an attempt to manipulate via supernatural means. In this context, societies offer sacrifices of animals or humans, prayers, songs, and artworks.

Myth and magic are transcended by an outlook which is in some sense Kantian. Historically speaking, some individuals and societies have moved beyond myth and magic centuries and millennia before Kant (1724 to 1804), but the principles involved are Kantian in nature.

At the risk of great oversimplification, Immanuel Kant argued that there are some things which are simply unknowable to human reason. Sifted down to ordinary folk, this means accepting the concept of mystery.

Rather than using human reason to find explanations, or create myths, rationality simply accepts that there is a categories of unknowables.

An allusion to Werner Heisenberg’s work may be in order here: Heisenberg (1901 to 1976) showed that human reason cannot predict, e.g., the direction in which a photon will leave a neon atom when it’s electrically charged.

This Kantian shift nudges the individual, or the society, to de-emphasize myth - the attempt to explain, and to de-emphasize magic - the attempt to control. Instead, emphasis is placed on relating to the deity.

In a post-myth and post-magic framework, the individual seeks knowledge about, and understanding of, God. Questions arise about God’s nature, characteristics, actions, and intentions. These questions are not instruments, i.e., their answers are not sought as tools by which the individual or the society may achieve some end.

Rather, the goal - if a goal it is - is relating to, or with, the deity. But perhaps it is something other than a goal: perhaps it is a way of being. Some scholars use words like ‘contemplation’ and ‘reflection’ for such way.

Relating to the deity includes not only a partial knowledge about, and understanding of, God. It include not only a ‘knowing about’ but rather also a ‘knowing’ - and here one may investigate the difference between ‘knowing about God’ - which could also be the task of an academic philosopher - and ‘knowing God’ - which is a relational concept.

Further, there is a reciprocation: being known by God, and being understood by God. Generally considered to be omniscient, God is seen as knowing and the understanding the individual - and doing so better than anyone else.

Having moved beyond myth and magic, this second phase focuses on a connection or communication between God and the individual human being. In this phase, variety of concepts appear to describe this relationship: grace, mercy, forgiveness, inspiration, vocation.

But the question which lay at the beginning of this investigation was about the definition of ‘religion’ - what does this word mean? Note that it has been studiously avoided for several paragraphs!

Here the competition between definitions becomes clear.

Some scholars use ‘religion’ to designate the phase of myth and magic. Other scholars use the word to refer to the post-myth, post-magic phase of relation.

With two such variant definitions on the table, it is no wonder why discussions of the matter seem endless.

For the one group of thinkers, ‘religion’ is a phase to be left behind. For the other group, it is a goal.

For one group, it is an irrational and pre-Kantian viewpoint. For the other group, it is the achievement of human reason having reckoned with its own limits.

To muddy the waters still further, these are only two of many possible ways of using the word ‘religion.’

Hypothetical Architecture (Part 3)

Trying to formulate even a rough estimate of the Earth’s carrying capacity is difficult. How many people can sustainably and renewably be housed and fed and given a first-world lifestyle on our planet?

In simple terms of physical space, there is room for hundreds of billions of people to have generous housing - 400 square feet of indoor living space (e.g., 1600 square feet for a family of four), with running water, electricity, HVAC, telephone, radio, internet, and television. There is no shortage of space.

But living space is merely one variable. What about clean water, clean air, food, and energy?

Warren Weaver earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, and taught at Caltech (The California Institute of Technology) before working at the Sloan-Kettering institute. He analyzed food production in terms of energy: sunlight is energy which plants store by means of photosynthesis.

The effectiveness of agriculture can be measured by the efficiency with which sunlight’s energy is converted into, and stored as, chemical energy in plants.

Calculating what the carrying capacity of America might be, Weaver, in the words of author Charles Mann, suggested

that in terms of energy, the theoretical carrying capacity of the United States was about 80 billion people.

Weaver was one of the first to apply advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry to the question of Earth’s carrying capacity. Charles Mann continues:

Think in these terms was clarifying, Weaver thought. It showed that viewing the human dilemma in terms of an ecological carrying capacity was a mistake. The planet’s actual, physical carrying capacity was so large - scores of billions of people - as to be irrelevant. The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.

Weaver calculated that even modest progress in agricultural productivity would yield enormous advancements. Baseline farming practices convert energy at a microscopic efficiency of 0.00025%, but

if we had a more efficient way of turning solar energy into food - and let us now say to be more reasonable, a way that had efficiency of only 1 percent - then an area the size of 1/100 the state of Texas would produce food enough to give 3,000 calories per day to a world population 50 or 60 times the present one.

As generous as Weaver’s estimates are, the planet’s carrying capacity is, in fact, many times greater than he suspected. To his numbers can be added, e.g., the farming of the seas (kelp), which would feed billions more.

Turning from food to water, it is clear that the planet Earth contains immeasurably more water than any conceivable human population might need. The trick is, however, to provide water which is both clean and desalinated.

The majority of the planet’s water is saltwater, and the majority of the needed freshwater is not for drinking, but rather for agriculture.

Water use can be analyzed from a variety of perspectives: sea farming doesn’t require desalinated water; industrial large-scale desalination processes have been refined to point at which they can provide huge amounts of water.

It is quite reasonable to estimate that we can provide sufficient energy while retaining or even improving air quality. In the United States, for example, air quality was at its worst in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it has been getting better ever since. During this same time, the U.S. has increased its energy production and energy consumption.

Clean air and plentiful energy are not mutually exclusive.

Reports generated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations confirm that, relative to the planet’s population, the world has a food surplus.

Starvation and malnutrition, wherever they occur, are the results of mismanagement, corruption, and bad distribution practices.

So what is the Earth’s carrying capacity? A definitive answer eludes researchers, but a generally acceptable number would be significantly greater than 100 billion.

Hypothetical Architecture (Part 2)

Using hypothetical architecture as a proof of concept, it can be shown that 30 billion people could be housed in an area the size of the state of Kansas: and not merely housed, but provided with first-world dwellings.

This is part of a larger project to investigate the carrying capacity of planet Earth. How many people can live on our planet in a sustainable manner, using renewable resources?

‘Carrying capacity’ is the upper limit of a population in given habitat. It is the ability of the habitat to provide the necessities of life for the population.

This is, of course, a difficult and ambiguous calculation, but it seems that the upper population limit would be several hundred billion. But even that number might be surpassed with technological innovation.

With any population level in the foreseeable future, food is not a limiting factor. Agriculture as currently practiced could provide good nutrition for many times the current population of 7 or 8 billion.

Hunger and famine, which tragically claim many human lives each year, are the results of distribution problems, not production problems. Instances of starvation or malnutrition are not due to a lack of food, but rather to a lack of delivery.

To the contrary, over the last century, production of food has exceeded the need for it. Deaths are the result of a failure to transport food to locations in which it is needed.

Slowing or stopping population growth would not reduce starvation. Even reducing the human population of the planet would not reduce starvation. Famine is the result of human nature; it is not the result of the planet’s carrying capacity.

If there were only 100 humans living on the planet, there could, and probably would, be starvation.

On the other hand, large-scale farming of seaweed would expand food supply beyond anything currently envisioned. Likewise, there is much underutilized fertile land which would expand food supply with traditional, land-based agriculture.

The earth’s mineral resources have barely been used in terms of iron and copper. The same is true of limestone for cement and concrete, and of clay for bricks.

The wise use of various energy sources will leave humans with clean air and clean water.

The works of Thomas Malthus, who wrote during the late 1700s and early 1800s, were misunderstood and misinterpreted to create a wave of concern in the 1960s and 1970s about potential ‘overpopulation.’

This misreading of Malthus led to alarmism in the popular imagination, seen in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. Various governments formed ‘population control’ agencies and policies. Ironically, decreasing birth rates in many first-world nations led to economic misery as fewer workers had to provide for more retirees.

Declining birth rates also inhibited ‘green’ environmentally-friendly practices, as a shortage of young workers caused employers to find the most efficient practices instead of the most ‘green’ practices.

The question of our planet’s carrying capacity was not explored by the doomsayers of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, it was simply assumed that this capacity had been reached. Paul Ehrlich’s book is filled with horrifying predictions of what would happen in the next decade or two.

Because the timeline for Ehrlich’s predictions has passed, and the disasters he predicted did not happen, researchers are carefully analyzing the question of Earth’s carrying capacity. No precise answer has been calculated, but it will be well above current population levels, and will be in the hundreds of billions.

Hypothetical Architecture (Part 1)

The phrase ‘hypothetical architecture’ is here used to refer to designs for a building which nobody intends to build. The architect who designs it does not intend for anyone to build it, and there are no people who want to build it.

What is the purpose of designing something which nobody will ever build, and which nobody even wants to build?

Hypothetical architecture can serve as a proof of concept. It can show that a concept is feasible.

In the present case, it can help to answer questions about the carrying capacity of the earth. How many people can live on planet earth?

More precisely, how many people can live in first-world fashion, with sustainable and renewable sources of clean water, clean air, and nutritious food? This exploration provides 200 square feet of living space per individual (a family of 4 would have 800 square feet, a family of 5 would have 1000 square feet, etc.).

While this amount of living space is a bit low for a truly first-world standard, it represents a convenient metric for calculation. Once established, it would be easy to return to the question and recalculate to provide 250 or 300 square feet of living space per person.

Also part of the standard would be first-world HVAC, running hot and cold water, telephone, cable TV or broadcast TV, high-speed internet access, radio, electricity, etc., in each living unit.

This hypothetical architectural experiment will proceed by envisioning a 20-story apartment building which can be reproduced in a standardized fashion to fill an arbitrary number of square miles.

The building would be 54 feet wide and 421 feet long. Exterior and interior walls are calculated as being 1 foot thick. The interior space is conceptualized as square rooms measuring 20 feet by 20 feet. A 10-foot-wide hallway would run down the middle of the building with rooms to the right and left. There would be 20 rooms on each side, totalling 40 rooms on each floor of the building. Space is allotted for stairwells or elevators.

Outside of the building would be a 10-foot margin of green grass and a 10-foot sidewalk. A 1-foot curb would separate the sidewalk from a 10-foot automotive lane. (These units are imagined as replicating, so the next unit would also include a 10-foot automotive lane, forming a two-way street.)

This structure represents housing for 40 people per floor; a 20-story structure would render a building housing 800 people.

The unit, including the building, sidewalk, curb, and one lane of automotive traffic would measure 116 feet by 483 feet. These dimensions would constitute a repeatable footprint.

Replicated, 450 of these structures would be placed within a square mile, arrange in 10 rows of 45 buildings. Within that square mile would also be extra space for parks and gardens.

This would yield a housing density of 360,000 residents per square mile.

Thus housed, 9.7 billion people could be housed in an area which is equal to one-third of the square miles in Kansas.

The reader is again reminded that, in reality, nobody would ever build in this fashion, nor would anybody want to live in this fashion: it would be as unbearably dreary as the Stalinist socialist prefabricated housing (called Plattenbau in the former East Germany) which filled Warsaw Pact cities during the Cold War.

While nobody would build these structures or want to build them, and nobody would live in them or want to live in them, their function as ‘hypothetical architecture’ is fulfilled inasmuch as they serve as ‘proof of concept,’ showing that the earth’s population could not only be housed, but housed in first-world fashion.

Such a small percentage of the surface area of the earth would be occupied by residential structures that huge amounts of land would be left for agriculture, for parks, for undeveloped natural preserves, and for industry.

In any non-hypothetical scenario, obviously, the population would be spread across the various continents of the earth. The housing is here imagined as concentrated merely for the purpose of calculating population density and surface area.

The surface area and natural resources of the planet are sufficient to provide education, recreation, and meaningful work in addition to housing and other basic needs.

A population, of not only 10 billion, but rather even of hundreds of billions, could be housed. There would be ample sustainable and renewable resources to provide clean air, clean water, and nutritious food.