​Here it is. I've finally reached the end of my list in this series on the survival of the fittest philosophers. I'll save any grand pronouncements for a summary post next week, so let's just get through these last three philosophers all at once since they represent an offshoot from the rest of the philosophers I've profiled and they're on a branch that I'm quite sure is going to be a dead end.

A few weeks ago, after Nietzsche ushered us out of the era of modern philosophy and we moved into the era of contemporary philosophy, we saw Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein narrow the field down to its analytical school, which focuses heavily on logic and the analysis of language. This school has come to dominate the US and British philosophy systems, but it is not the only one that has continued on. In sharp contrast to the narrow and rigorous analytic school is the wide and wandering school of continental philosophy. In my Philosophy 101 guide, I pulled together this definition of that school:

Continental Philosophy – This refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. Continental philosophy includes the following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and some other branches of Western Marxism. Continental philosophers generally reject scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience, and that scientific methods are inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility." Continental philosophy usually considers the conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Continental philosophy typically holds that conscious human agency can change the conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways." Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and tend to see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism. Continental philosophy has an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases, such as German idealism or phenomenology, this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases, such as hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism, it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And some continental philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Derrida, doubt whether any conception of philosophy can be truly coherent.

This is clearly a mixed bag, with many ideas that have little in common with one another, but the underlying anti-scientism that runs through many of the philosophers who fall in this school make them common enough to run quickly afoul of an evolutionary philosophy built entirely upon investigating the consequences of findings in that scientific field. In fact, I was tempted to drop the last philosophers from this school off my list, but they are widely cited in academia and have even made appearances on popular tv shows like the Colbert Report. Read some quotes about them, and read my analysis of their thoughts though and see if you can tell me why.

I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist. —Michel Foucault

Anyone who has heard [Jacques Derrida] lecture in French knows that he is more performance artist than logician. His flamboyant style—using free association, rhymes and near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions—is not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative strategy" for combating logocentrism. —Mark Lilla in a review in The New York Review of Books

Bernard-Henri Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions. —Garrison Keillor in a review in The New York Times

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984 CE) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian. Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse has been widely discussed. In 2007, Foucault was listed as the most cited intellectual in the humanities.

Survives
One of Foucault’s central theses: all periods of history have possessed specific underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another. Foucault refused to examine statements outside of their historical context. The meaning of a statement depends on the general rules that characterize the discursive formation to which it belongs. Fair enough. This is a good reason to give history’s philosophers some credit for working with the knowledge and tools they had at their disposal. It is also a good reason to re-examine their beliefs in light of our progress.

Needs to Adapt
In Foucault's "Technologies of Punishment," he considers two contrasting types of punishment. The first type, "Monarchical Punishment," involves the repression of the populace through brutal public displays of executions and torture. The second, "Disciplinary Punishment," is what Foucault says is practiced in the modern era. Disciplinary punishment gives professionals (psychologists, program facilitators, parole officers, etc.) power over the prisoner, most notably in that the prisoner's length of stay depends on the professionals' judgment. Foucault goes on to argue that Disciplinary punishment leads to self-policing by the populace as opposed to brutal displays of authority from the Monarchical period. Disciplinary punishment is clearly better than monarchical punishment, but there are other options. In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now though, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.

Gone Extinct
The Order of Things made Foucault a prominent intellectual figure. In this book, Foucault made the claim that "man is only a recent invention" and that the "end of man is at hand.” As far as we know, man is at the end of an evolutionary process that began with the Big Bang. Evolution is the term we use to describe the way life attempts to survive. The end of man will only come when the species goes extinct or finds the means to immortal life. Either way, those ends could be near at hand or a long way off. Our actions will decide which and when.


Jacques Derrida (1930-2004 CE) was a French philosopher born in Algeria who developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy. His academic influence in Continental Europe, South America, and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant, is enormous; becoming crucial in debates around ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language.

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Derrida considered that when encountering a classical philosophical opposition (body-soul, existing-being, passivity-activity, sensible-intelligible, receptivity-spontaneity, heteronomy-autonomy, empirical-transcendental, immanent-transcendent, local-global, femininity-masculinity, animal-Man, beast-sovereign, etc.), one never encounters peaceful coexistence of the two opposing concepts, but rather a violent hierarchy, where one of the two dominates over the other. In order to begin the deconstruction, one must break the link between the two opposing concepts. But, as a second step, Derrida added that one must do what is needed so that the two concepts stay separate and non-hierarchical. Not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. To mark the undecidable of all oppositions working across all texts in western culture, he created marks like: the pharmakon, that is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement, that is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the hymen that is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.; the gram, that is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.; and spacing, that is neither space nor time. Though Derrida was highly regarded by contemporary philosophers his work has been regarded by other Analytic philosophers, as pseudo-philosophy or sophistry. Searle, a frequent critic of Derrida, exemplified this view in his comments on deconstruction by saying: “...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.” According to Foucault, Derrida practices the method of obscurantisme terroriste. He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.” That's the terrorism part. Derrida is no lover of wisdom; he is no philosopher. As defined above, he is deserving of spacing - neither space nor time.
 
Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948- CE) is French public intellectual, philosopher, journalist, and best-selling author.

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Lévy became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers school. This was a group of young intellectuals who were disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near-revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, and who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas. His books have been criticized for being neither journalism nor philosophy, but attempting to be both. More recently, in the essay De la guerre en philosophie (2010), Lévy was embarrassed when he used, as a central point of his refutation of Kant, the writings of French "philosopher" Jean-Baptiste Botul. Botul's writings are actually well known spoofs, and Botul himself is a fictional creation as is easily guessed from his thought system being called “botulism.” This is the state that famous philosophers have fallen to. It is a consequence of the atomization of knowledge in academia and the retreat of philosophy from the realm of the natural sciences. There may be fitter philosophers out there, and if so, I hope they come here to help me with my endeavor.
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So Foucault clearly has a healthier relationship with thinking than his other two French continental compatriots, but I couldn't bear doing a post on Derrida and Levy alone so I've lumped them all together. In one sense, this is unfair to Foucault, but at least he looks much better by comparison, and he looks better with just a short, shallow entry on my part. (Digging deeper into Foucault's writings exposes plenty of criticisms.) The less said about Derrida and Levy the better.

Over the course of writing these deeper blog post profiles of the 60 philosophers on my original list, I've become much better acquainted with the current scholarship and personalities in the field and I don't despair nearly as much as I did when I finished my first draft. There are plenty of non-famous academics publishing interesting things, and I've even managed to join their ranks with my own published paper. I have hope now that fitter philosophers can and will carry human thoughts forward in a productive way, and I'll do my best to be part of that now that I've finished laying out my beliefs and comparing them to those from the best minds in history. Thanks for listening and pushing me along the way!

We're coming down to the last two posts in this long series on the survival of the fittest philosophers. I'm nearing the end of my list of contemporary philosophers, and so naturally we're finally discussing people who are alive or in the memories of other still-living philosophers. Just before Christmas, the Philosophy Bites podcast released a special episode compilation of all the times they had asked their guests, "Who is the most impressive philosopher you've met?" As you might expect, not everyone has met all the great philosophers in their field. And with a subject so divided into numerous camps of opposing beliefs with strong disagreement, there ended up being quite a large list of philosophers who got named. From interactions with little-known thesis advisers to long-remembered encounters by octogenarians with some of the giants of the early 20th century, the list of impressive philosophers was broad and varied, with 39 different names being mentioned. 27 of those were nominated by only one of the interviewees. Five philosophers managed two votes. But seven received three or more votes, so even in a highly subjective and flawed list like this, these certainly represent outliers of impressiveness. Among these seven* were John Rawls and Noam Chomsky—two of the last five philosophers that I've analysed for my evolutionary philosophy. For Noam Chomsky, this is particularly impressive as he doesn't even hold a degree in this often insular field, but having seen him last summer at a speech at the University of Durham, I can see why he was recognised and I'm glad I included him in my own list.

So far in discussing other philosophers' works, I've ended up spending a lot of time dealing with my universal definition of good, which allows an objective critique of the beliefs espoused by those philosophers. Once the long-term survival of life is established as the ultimate goal that all moral actions must work towards, all the ends of other philosophical systems are easy to evaluate as to whether or not they are likely to meet that goal. Whenever means to those ends are uncertain, I've advocated humility about our ignorance because our predictive knowledge is only ever probable, and so an emphasis on virtues is needed then while conducting limited trials to determine the best paths to follow. In reality, that's just a simple principle for a field which still requires much careful examination—i.e. determining how to act in specific situations when only a large, vague, and general goal is known. When individual instances are looked at, whose rights need to be upheld? Whose can ever be trampled? Or just temporarily set aside? These are the beginnings of deep questions about justice in society—a field much explored by Rawls as a theoretician and Chomsky as a public agitator.

John Rawls developed definitions for terms that have come to dominate philosophers' discussion of justice. Terms such as: justice as fairness; original position; reflective equilibrium; overlapping consensus; public reason; and the veil of ignorance. I'll get to the details behind some of these terms below, but Rawls' overriding beliefs are best captured by these quotes from him:

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.

It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper. To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice. Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society.

Chomsky—a man with one biography aptly titled A Life of Dissent--has been advocating for this kind of Rawlsian justice for decades. He rose to prominence as a linguistics pioneer, but he became a public intellectual when he published an essay in the New York Review of Books that strongly criticised America's involvement in the Vietnam war. Since then, he has been an outspoken critic of violence of the state in general, capitalism, the United States, nuclear weapons, France, the media, Israel, intelligence agencies, both Iraq wars, the education system, propaganda, and corporations. It has become common to talk about economic inequality and corporate oligarchy in America today, but in 1973 Chomsky was already out in front of this issue.

Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.

Reading Chomsky's lengthy wikiquote page is like reading a canary in the coal mines singing out a heartfelt warning for many of our modern illnesses. He's not been a dispassionate theorist developing definitions of principles about why political philosophy is the way it is, or should be the way it should be, but his passionate diatribes have over time clearly outlined the theories that guide him. I can't go through them all, and he may not be fair on every issue, but his bias, like Rawls', is always on the side of justice for the least fortunate. And that's a good place to be in a species that needs a cooperative society to survive and thrive. Let's get straight to my analysis of these two philosophers, before a quick wrap-up.

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John Rawls (1921-2002 CE) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II, and is now regarded as one of the primary texts in political philosophy.

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The “original position” is Rawls’ thought experiment to replace the imagery of a savage state of nature from prior political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes. In it, parties select principles that will determine the basic structure of the society they will live in. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which would deprive participants of information about their particular characteristics: his or her ethnicity, social status, gender, and conception of the good (an individual's idea of how to lead a good life). This forces participants to select principles impartially and rationally. The original position is designed to reflect what principles of justice would be manifest in a society premised on free and fair cooperation between citizens, including respect for liberty, and an interest in reciprocity. The veil of ignorance may lead to mutual respect for others, but why resort to ignorance when knowledge gets you to the right answer? The survival of life as the principle conception of the good is universal and leads to the right outcomes for how to design a cooperative society focused on the long-term.

Rawls’ theory of justice is described: Justice as Fairness. It comprises two main principles of Liberty and Equality; the second is subdivided into Fair Equality of Opportunity and the Difference Principle. The first and most important principle, Liberty, states that every individual has an equal right to basic liberties. Basic liberties are inalienable: no government can amend, infringe, or remove them from individuals. Rawls claimed, however, that certain rights and freedoms are more important or basic than others. For example, Rawls believed that personal property - personal belongings, a home - constitutes a basic liberty, but an absolute right to unlimited private property is not. The Equality Principle is the component of Justice as Fairness establishing distributive justice. Rawls presents it as follows: "Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. The Difference Principle regulates inequalities: it only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the worst-off. By guaranteeing the worst-off in society a fair deal, Rawls compensates for naturally occurring inequalities (talents that one is born with, such as a capacity for sport). Rights and liberties do not arise from nature. Ask the zebra, hyena, or omega member of a pack. Only the state grants liberties, but it must grant them equally to maintain a cooperative society, and it must optimize those liberties to maximize the ability of the species to survive. To maintain the ethic of cooperation, every member of society must contribute to it, and every member must be taken care of. Every member of society must recognize the support that society and the history of mankind has given them. Then, distributive justice will divide the benefits of society form each according to their talents to each according to their effort. Inequalities will arise due to the distribution of talent and effort, but must be confined to orders of magnitude that are sustainable to members of a cooperative and just society. The worst-off will therefore receive the bulk of largesse from the rest of society, but the best-off will have the freedom to pursue their passions, the just rewards for their contributions, the satisfaction of pulling society forward towards continued survival, and the comfort that they have not separated themselves from the pack.

The term “reflective equilibrium” was coined by Rawls as a method for arriving at the content of the principles of justice. Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgments. Rawls argues that human beings have a "sense of justice" that is both a source of moral judgment and moral motivation. In Rawls's theory, we begin with "considered judgments" that arise from the sense of justice. These may be judgments about general moral principles (of any level of generality) or specific moral cases. If our judgments conflict in some way, we proceed by adjusting our various beliefs until they are in equilibrium, which is to say that they are stable, not in conflict, and provide consistent practical guidance. Rawls argues that a set of moral beliefs in ideal reflective equilibrium describes or characterizes the underlying principles of the human sense of justice. Rawls is merely describing a scientific method of hypothesis testing that will arrive at the truth about justice. This is the way all truths are arrived at. Thus, the ideal reflective equilibrium is achieved when the basis for justice is understood - the need for life to survive in the long-term. Humans have a “sense of justice” but it is in conflict when it must decide between short-term emotions or long-term reason. Reason must prevail over sense.

Gone Extinct
Overlapping consensus is a term coined by Rawls to refer to how supporters of different comprehensive doctrines can agree on a specific form of political organization. These doctrines can include religion, political ideology, or morals. However, Rawls is clear that such political agreement is narrow and focused on justice. This consensus is reached, in part, by avoiding the deepest arguments in religion and philosophy. The deepest arguments in religion and philosophy have left us with the deepest divides between factions of humanity. In order to cooperate fully and promote the long-term survival of the species, these divides must be bridged by knowledge uncovered through science and reason. The universal need for the survival of life is the universal basis for arriving at consensus. Because our knowledge is imperfect, people will still disagree about the correct course of action even if they come at the problem with the same underlying view of reality. It is these realms where caution is needed, diversity is valued, and limited trial and error should govern the competition of ideas until broader consensus is reached.

Noam Chomsky (1928- CE) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. Chomsky is often viewed as a notable figure in contemporary philosophy.

Survives
Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur, are pointed to as motivation for innateness. Proponents of this view also argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. Experiments that raise animals in human environments also show that compared to them, humans certainly have an innate ability to grasp and produce language. It is another refutation of the blank slate theory of humans, and another confirmation of the “nature x nurture” explanation of human behavior. (While we are on the subject, I would make a small addition to linguistics: a two-by-two matrix analysis of the four elements of language. Language is either input or output and it can be done fast or slow. Fast input is listening; slow input is reading. Fast output is speaking; slow output is writing. Learn the fast to go fast. Practice the slow to go fast well. As infants or beginners, we must learn fast to join the conversation at all, but we remain prone to errors for life until we concentrate on the slow.)

Needs to Adapt
Chomsky constructed a model that attempts to explain a perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. He argues the bias derives from five filters that all published news must pass through, which combine to systematically distort news coverage. The first filter, ownership, notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent. While these biases do exist, this analysis misses the roles that competition and evolution play in the media industry. News outlets must compete with each other for consumers. When consumers are educated and seek the truth, unbiased news outlets will win and survive. When consumers don’t care, are simply looking for entertainment, or seek to confirm their biases, then surviving news outlets will reflect these interests. In our pluralistic world, we see all of these forms of news. But we need knowledge to survive! Citizens must seek it and demand it.

Gone Extinct

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These are great topics that deserve much more attention. As I said above, these kinds of explorations of justice are concerned with finding the best ways to act in specific situations when only a large, vague, and general goal is known. With that in mind, the next big series I intend to blog about are the "100 thought experiments for the armchair philosopher" in Julian Baggini's book The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, which promises to get into lots of specific details for consideration from the evolutionary philosophy perspective that I've been diligently laying out. But first, I have one more set of French continental philosophers to dismiss. Stay tuned for that...



* The other five of the top-seven vote getters for most impressive philosophers were Bernard Williams, David Lewis, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin.