Conservative Philosophy, Part I; 'tain't one, 'tain't the other

Brad DeLong found something really hi-fucking-larious.  Apparently, they really did this.  They really put together a panel of conservative "scholars" and made this list:

HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:

• The Communist Manifesto
• Mein Kampf
• Quotations from Chairman Mao
• The Kinsey Report
• Democracy and Education
• Das Kapital
• The Feminine Mystique
• The Course of Positive Philosophy
• Beyond Good and Evil
• General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

If you follow the link, they'll give you some of their reasoning. 

Let's examine some of the list.  Unfortunately, it's a little more revealing of the state of right-wing intellectuals than they'd like it to be.  Bear with me, this will take a little while.

The Course of Positive Philosophy is a book by Auguste Comte (1797-1857).  I've never read it, but I know the basic stuff about Comte: he's considered the father of sociology, and began what we think of as "positivism."  A slightly more detailed but still quite cursory examination of his philosophical lineage reveals this:

• Positivism developed a fierce critical, and skeptical, edge. After its late modern development in Comte, Neo-positivism emerged as one of the most powerful and significant movements in modern Western philosophy. The logical positivists, springing out of the so-called Vienna Circle, were the most strident exponents of positivistic revisionism with regard to human intellectual activity.
• The Vienna Circle included at various times Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Hand Hahn, Béla von Juhos, Felix Kaufmann, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Friedrich Waismann, and Edgar Zilsel. Their fundamental ideas derived principally from Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), George E. Moore (1873-1958), and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Karl Popper were not member of the Circle but had frequent conversations with them. The Vienna Circle disintegrated in the 1930s under Nazism.
• In 1931, the name "logical positivism" was given to the principal doctrines of the Vienna Circle. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy furnishes some synonyms: consistent empiricism, logical empiricism, scientific empiricism, and logical neo-positivism.
• J. Ayer is the most popularly well-known of the logical positivists, though he was never associated with the Vienna Circle. His book, Language, Truth and Logic systematically and colorfully attacks all "non-admissible" forms of intellectual activity, including ethics, metaphysics, and theology.

All of which may not mean much to you if you don't have a background in philosophy.  But suffice it to say that 20th century positivism is thought of as fitting under the umbrella of "analytic philosophy," which is the kind of philosophy that is generally practiced in the United States and Britain (it generally involves the use of clear, precise argumentation and relies heavily on logic and evidence).  Auguste Comte's emphasis on eschewing what he thought of as the first two phases of humanity, the

theological, in which events were largely attributed to supernatural forces; [and the] metaphysical, in which natural phenomena are thought to result from fundamental energies or ideas

and his hope for a "scientific" or "positive" phase, makes him in a very real sense the one of the intellectual forebearers of contemporary "analytic philosophy."

Another book on the list, Beyond Good and Evil of Friedrich Nietzsche (which, unlike Comte, I have read) is situated rather differently in the history of philosophy.  Nietzsche's ideas about the "Will to Power" influenced a diametrically different set of philosophers, those who practice what we call "continental philosophy."  Nietzsche was critical of positivist philosophers like Comte, and certainly would have been equally critical of Comte's intellectual descendents, the "analytic" philosophers.  As Wikipedia explains:

In Beyond Good and Evil, he [Nietzsche] claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their Will to Power[.]

A similar tension between analytic and continental philosophers exists right down to this day. The Philosophical Gourmet helpfully summarizes:

"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities.[...]

Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).

So, basically, analytic and continental philosophers are completely different, and are thought of as the two opposing straining in contemporary Western philosophy.

Why this philosophy lesson? 

Because the Human Events "panel" of "scholars" rejects the intellectual grandfather of not just one of the two major strains of contemporary philosophy.  It rejects both. 

Not only do they reject the philosophy of these two intellectual forebearers of modern philosopher.  They consider their books to be 2 of 10 most harmful of the last 200 years.  They might as well have said that philosophy itself is harmful. 

But that's the thing -- I'm sure that's precisely what they would do if they could rub the requisite two brain cells together. 

-- Michael

Comments

[Michael]

Snaps to you, Michael, for a great rant!

[Ed Drone]

"But that's the thing -- I'm sure that's precisely what they would do if they could rub the requisite two brain cells together. "

But they can't, 'cause one of the cells is lost, and the other is the search party.

Ed

[jeremy]

REICHPUBLIKKKANS are just a bunch of gun toting biblethumping freaks who talk in their stupid southern accent and haven't reach the level of maturity or spirituality to fully endorse socialism.