From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Science vs Philosophy of
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 06:12:58 GMT

In article <1992Aug30.042348.19289@math.ucla.edu> barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>In article <1992Aug28.162115.22963@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu  
>(Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
>
>>  How do you divorce the
>> concept of "Being-in-the-world" from Heidegger, or "Absolute Spirit" from
>> Hegel?  Such divorcing is not as easy as you seem to make it out to be.
>
>We quite succesfully divorced calculus from Newton and 
>Electrodynamics from Maxwell. If the notions you cite cannot be divorced
>from their authors, that says to me that the phrases don't really
>mean anything, and that philosophers are more interested in
>the individuals than in the ideas.

No, you're missing the point.  In your original article you asked why
one should not just think about the "concepts" themselves "divorced"
from their authors instead of wasting time reading the original texts.
My question is, what are you "divorcing" from what?  What it seems that
you're saying is that we should "divorce" the concept of "Absolute
Spirit" from WHAT HEGEL SAYS *ABOUT* ABSOLUTE SPIRIT.  But this is not
so easy:  the point is that to even DEFINE the concept of "Absolute
Spirit" adequately requires the entire machinery of Hegel's Logic.  It
does not make sense to "divorce" this concept from the rest of Hegel's
system.  I think you are too accustomed to concepts like "justice" or
"belief" that we all have some intuitive knowledge of and which do not
require elaborate machinery to make sense of.  Similarly with
"Being-in-the-world"---to even grasp this concept requires a
substantial amount of Heideggerian ontology.

So in order to think about these concepts one must first learn WHAT
THEY ARE; and this requires learning some background machinery.  Where
is the best place to learn about this background machinery?  In many
cases the best place is the text of the person who first introduced the
concept.

>> Secondly, if the originals are inferior, where can we find these superior
>> presentations that you seem to imply exist?  
>
>I'm suggesting that the fact they cannot be found points to a weakness
>in philosophy and/or philosophical discourse.

In other words, what you're saying is that if nobody can present a concept
in a way superior to the way the first person presented it, then there is
something wrong with the field.  Well, if this is true, then mathematics is
in deep trouble.  Grothendieck's EGA still contains the best and most
thorough exposition of much algebraic geometry, even though we have
progressed a long way since EGA was written.  Same with Serre's work on
sheaves.  It would be easy to multiply examples.

If the person who first introduced the concept did the best job of
explaining it, and if grasping the concept requires reading a substantial
amount, what is wrong with reading old works of philosophy?  Or to put it
another way, if reading old works of philosophy is wrong, then so is reading
Grothendieck's EGA.

What I DO see as a difference between science and philosophy is that until
recently there has been much greater consensus in science about which
concepts are worth retaining and which ought to be discarded.  The reason we
don't read Newton's work on the calculus is that we've decided to discard a
lot of the concepts that he used as being unsatisfactory.  So I think you'd
be better off arguing as follows: philosophers keep reading old works of
philosophy; this means that they keep harping on old concepts and are too
afraid of dismissing concepts; for a field to make progress we have to weed
out the chaff as well as grow more wheat.  If you were to argue like this I
think you would find more supporters, particularly among analytic
philosophers.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949