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System and Theory in Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Paul Gilbert
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Abstract

What is systematic in philosophy is its description of the world we inhabit. ‘Philosophers boast’, said Whitehead, ‘that they uphold no system. They are then a prey to the delusive clarities of detached expressions whichit is the very purpose of their science to surmount’. We need not accept Whitehead's comparison of ‘speculative philosophy’ with the systemof naturalsciences to take his point. The philosophical description of the world issystematic since ‘detached expressions’ may delude us; ‘detached’, that is, in lying outside ‘a coherent, logical, necessary system of generalideas’; we lack a conviction that they have an application to any element of our experience, which the members of a system possess, according to Whitehead, in characterizing every element. What is the nature of this system of description?

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 229 , July 1984, pp. 331 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 A. N., Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1933), 287.Google Scholar

2 E.g. M., Dummett, ‘Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to Be?’, in Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), 437-458.Google Scholar

3 W., Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, R. M., Zaner and K. L., Heiges (trans.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 27.Google Scholar

4 Cf. P., Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 106.Google Scholar

5 Consequently an ‘interactionist’ account is ruled out, pace Pettit, op. cit. 108.Google Scholar

6 Cf. D., Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Critical Inquiry 5, No. 1 (Autumn 1978), 31-47.Google Scholar

7 L., Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M., Anscombe (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 193-229.Google Scholar

8 PaceN. R., Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: University Press, 1958), Ch. 1.Google Scholar

9 One might elaborate this point by observing that philosophy, unlike literature, does not necessarily lose anything in translation or paraphrase; for, unlike literature, its insights do not depend on finding just the right form of words for a thing.Google Scholar

10 Or, rather, it offers analytical truths only in passing, as science might.Google Scholar

11 As reported by J., Wisdom, ‘The Metamorphosis of Metaphysics’,in Studies in Philosophy J. N., Findlay (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 214.Google Scholar

12 So does Dummett, op. cit. 455-6.

13 Due to T. S., Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar

14 Pace Dummett, loc. cit.

15 Cf. K., Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Ch. 3.Google Scholar

16 G. H., Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge University Press, 1946), 21.Google Scholar

17 I do not, of course, wish to deny that there can be imaginative solutions to intellectual problems. The force of the claim can be brought out by noticing that whereas imagination may be drawn on to reach the solution it is not required for understanding it.Google Scholar

18 Hegel's Logic, 3rd edn, W., Wallace (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 126. While Hegel rejects this description Dummett, perhaps, accepts it: ‘it is … amazing that, in all its long history [philosophy] should not yet have established a generally accepted methodology, generally accepted criteria of success and, therefore, a body of definitively achieved results’ (loc. cit.).Google Scholar

19 As Dummett assumes unquestioningly (loc. tit.).Google Scholar