Pseudophilosophy

fr:Impostures en philosophie

Pseudophilosophy is any idea or system that masquerades itself as philosophy while significantly failing to meet some suitable intellectual standards. The term is pejorative, and most applications of it are quite contentious. The term bears the same relationship to philosophy that pseudoscience bears to science.

The term is not infrequently used more casually to express contempt, irritation, or just dislike toward some idea or system of ideas. It is not, for the most part, used technically within academic philosophy, though it is likely to occur in philosophers' judgments on larger aspects of culture, their advice to new students, their assessments of other disciplines, and so forth.

Nicholas Rescher, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, gives the following definition of the term:

Pseudo-philosophy consists in deliberations that masquerade as philosophical but are inept, incompetent, deficient in intellectual seriousness, and reflective of an insufficient commitment to the pursuit of truth." Rescher adds that the term is particularly appropriate when applied to "those who use the resources of reason to substantiate the claim that rationality is unachievable in matters of inquiry.

Contents

1 Some accusations of pseudophilosophy

1.1 Academic pseudophilosophy
1.2 Ayn Rand's Objectivism
1.3 Pseudophilosophy in popular culture

2 See also

3 External link

Some accusations of pseudophilosophy

Academic pseudophilosophy

An example of academic judgement of pseudophilosophy was the episode when W.V.O. Quine, along with Barry Smith, Hugh Mellor (then Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge), and various other academic philosophers, wrote to protest Cambridge University's award of an honorary degree to Jacques Derrida, claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and that it is made of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists".

Alfred Korzybski's theory of General Semantics has been given this appellation (also by Quine), and post-structuralism has been widely accused of this kind of accusation (see Sokal Hoax).

Similarly, Schopenhauer wrote the following about Hegel:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudophilosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J.Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp.15-16.

Schopenhauer's critique of Hegel is directed at his perception that Hegel's works use deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous jargon and neologisms, and that they contained castles of abstraction that sounded impressive but ultimately contained no verifiable content. As the Derrida incident shows, similar accusations have been made more recently against postmodernists and the adherents of French critical theory like Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism

Ayn Rand's Objectivism is also frequently cited as a pseudophilosophy. Several considerations are usually cited in support of this claim. First, Rand was a self-taught philosopher. Consequently, the philosophical issues that she discussed were out of sync with the research program of mainstream academic philosophy during the years she was active. In addition, her grasp of the historical problems of philosophy was not at what many academic philosophers would regard to be scholarly level. (Her proposed resolution of the problem of universals, for example, treated it as a question of epistemology even though the existence and nature of universals has usually been taken as a question of metaphysics.) Second, many of her philosophical views are presented in her "romantic realist" novels, rather than in refereed journal articles. Third, she and some of her followers were at least perceived as being dogmatic. In part, that is because many of them were young people excited by her novels and unlearned in philosophy; such people are not often aware of the complexities of their subject and prone to construe disagreement as ignorance. In part it is because they would not permit modifications or additions to her philosophical system, and in part because they frequently ignored published criticism of the system instead of responding to it. This led some to label Rand as a cult leader. As with almost any philosophical system, some commentators have claimed that Rand's philosophy contains significant omissions and/or contradictions. However, there has been very little published (at least in mainstream scholarly arenas) that has undertaken to prove that Objectivism is incoherent - or, equally, aimed to vindicate it from such charges ("With Charity Towards None" by William F. O'Neill, published in 1971, is the most comprehensive effort yet published by a major press aiming to refute Rand; however, it did not even take into account her entire corpus). Consequently, the charge that Objectivism is a "pseudophilosophy" usually just indicates disagreement with some particular view of Rand's. At least, it cannot be regarded as something that has been publicly demonstrated by and to professionals in philosophy.

Academic work on Objectivism has grown in recent years. There are currently fellowships for the study of Objectivism at several major philosophy departments, including the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Texas, as well as in the business schools of such universities as Duke University and the University of Southern California. A book has been published to comprehensively present the philosophy, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Dr. Leonard Peikoff (another, "The Logical Structure of Objectivism," by David Kelley and William Thomas, has long been in the works). Other works have been directed at academic audiences, such as Viable Values by Dr. Tara Smith and The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts by Dr. Harry Binswanger. An academic journal, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been publishing interdiscipilinary scholarly essays on Ayn Rand’s philosophy since 1999. It is not clear, however, that established professionals in philosophy or related disciplines are paying much attention.