Charles Taylor on Science and Psychology: notes

In the "Human Agency and Language" collection of Charles Taylor's essays there is another inadequate index.  But there is one thing that is immediately noticeable: a few entries for Frege, many for Heidegger, for Wittgenstein - but not a single reference to Brentano, Husserl or Twardowski.

Kazimierz Twardowski, seven years younger than Edmund Husserl, also died in 1938. 

What is most striking - more so than the lack of any entries for Putnam or Searle - is the lack of any entry for Adolph Reinach.

During his years at McGill, Taylor was to be found in the department housing political science.  During my years attending lectures in both  that and the philosophy department, there was no shortage of hours spent on Frege, Cantor, Gödel - but not on the Munich School of phenomenology or the Göttingen school of phenomenology.  With Taylor, it all starts at Freiburg with Heidegger replacing Husserl in '28 and then the trusted Gadamer (reputed to be the true philosphical confidante of the master in his exclusive visits to the thinker's hillside cabin.)

There has been some effort to provide a corrective in the works of Claire Ortiz Hill  and in 1995 in  "The Cambridge Companion to Husserl".  Most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in 2006 in his short book on Edith Stein's years in academic philosophy has provided both an introduction  to Husserl and to Reinach.  MacIntyre also laments that Heidegger never troubled himself to learn Polish (remarkable given what Arendt was expecting from Heidegger on Logik.)  One can only imagine Heidegger raked over the coals in Polish by a living poet, Czesław Miłosz.

Also missing: Anton Marty and Stanisław Leśniewski (notable as a corrective to the influence of John Duns Scotus on Heidegger.)

What is important though is try to assess to what extent Husserl also turned against science.  Dorian Cairns makes a report of one clue that Husserl's attacks on physicalist and naturalist positions had evolved to a delight in anticipating failures in natural science.

At the time of Heidegger's absurd pronouncements on science, the NASA Gravity Probe B project was underway.  While plagued by unanticipated problems in sources of error, and perhaps damned by the anti-science philosophers as a mere "technical" achievement, it ranks with the most important experiments since Galileo's inclined planes.

At Heidegger's hut the concessions to technology are the hand water pump, the ax, skiis, door hinges, boots and even forks on the table.  There is no astrolabe, no sundial and not even a pre-telescope concession to astronomy.  Husserl, on the other hand, had begun in astronomy - and by the time he was being driven out of teaching in Freiburg, the centuries old Vatican astronomical observatory was moving to its new home at Castel Gandolfo.  It have have been there during summer meeting at the papal residence that Taylor first met Miłosz .

Whether Husserl eventually turned against natural science in bitterness or old age - or not at all - may be contested.  What is more evident is that Taylor has been more clearly in the anti-science camp with his large "wisdom" tomes on the self and the scular age.  This was not so obvious in his earlier essays and in his 1964 book on psychology, The Explanation of Behaviour, nor in his 1971 essay in Social Research.  Taylor's earlier work is on the inabilities of certain theoretical commitments to deliver adequate explanations and true understanding due to the naive views of the nature of knowledge and science in the training of psychologists and social scientists: they failed to understand that the objects of study were agents with a mental life and the actions of those agents given their values.  This could be corrected - and one such corrective can be found in a recent work by Colin McGinn, Mindsight.

But Taylor, in my view, stands closer to the Sartre of "the psychology of the imagination".  Sartre was never trained in phenomenology, instead he found what he was looking for in Heidegger (Raymond Aron referred Sartre to phenomenology - Merleauu-Ponty, on the other hand, would advice the Viet Kong philosopher  ___ to go to Leuven even during the war.)  Sartre's rhetorical ploy was that conceptual analysis would have to suffice because his readers were not familiar with phenomenology.  Taylor, on the other hand, entered the scene at a time when ...  de Beauvoir ntoed that Sartre seemed happiest writing what he did not yet understand - often clear in his obscure condescension to his "French" reader denied access to the Husserl archive - when it is clear that Sartre in "néantisation" was providing not phenomenology verifiable by another, but "a way of talking" about the visual field in perception, for example, which is not distrubed by whether it is adequate - it is enough that it "fits".  But phenomenology is not mere description of human experience in novel forms or cleverness about "néant" and hypostatization.  The latter is a serious problem facing certain views of intentionality in their account of mental life, mental contents and common referents which are not physical individuals validated as existing in space and time (for recent non-phenomemologist philosophers on intentionality see Roderick Chisholm "Perceiving: A Philosphical Study" and John Searle, Intentionality - An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, and for an interesting parallel to MacIntyre, Peter Geach and Eliz. Anscombe; s/a Anscombe's Intention  paper of 1957)

Taylor's targets have too often been the easy targets: his reader could easily draw the conclusion that there was no stronger challenge (behaviorism was dominant in academic life and in practice - but not successful in the one and with very limited success in the other - and today finds more success in practice as a nuddled language-cognition variant of behaviorism.)

Both Taylor and MacIntyre embrace a kind of limited relativism - a view that a philosphical standpoint always involves presuppositions and arises within a tradition, whether that tradition is recognized, avowed or affirmed.  Comparing Taylor to Putnam or Searle is comparing him to philosophers who see nothing to fear in science and trends attributed by historians to "the enlightenment" and the "secular".  Comparing Taylor to MacIntyre in his "Whose Justice? Which Rationality? " - say in MacIntyre's treatment of Hume and Thomas Reid, there is the feeling of a philospher at work and not a lecturer (for that we have his realted Gifford Lectures.)

When Hegel was working on his logic, he was teaching the equivalent of high school students.  When Taylor was working on his philosphy of social science, he was very active in Canadian politics.  It is possible that Taylor sacrficed scholarship for his political commitments: it cannot be expected that many of his students would know that Heidegger/Gadamer/Habermas are only one train out of Freiburg -and that the train departed first from Göttingen where it had come up from Munich - or that Roman Ingarden had departed in quite another direction, as had Koyré.  MacIntyre, if he chooses, could provide that corrective in a book on realism and nominalism in the past century.

note: Thomas S. Kuhn nennt Koyrés Schriften als bedeutsam bei der Entstehung seines Hauptwerkes Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen.

A persisting curiosity: the absence of Murdoch in Taylor.

Academic lives to compare when Americans mock the British sense of "fair-play": Iris Murdoch at Oxford, Edith Stein at Göttingen (and Philippa Foot & Anscombe some 30+ years later; women and the "chairs" of Collège de France)

Note: John Haldane places Germain Grisez in this group along with John Finnis and Henry Veatch
Compare: three writers on Simone Weil: Iris Murdoch, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor.

My assessment of the influence of Taylor: comparable to that of Northrop Frye on Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing".  My correctives to that: Martha Ostenso's "Wild Geese", my great-grandmother's stories of life along the North Saskatchewan River in the 1880's, my cousin in the 1980's urging native women out on the wind-swept tundra to use the porta-potty and her collecting stones to hold down the tent; Samuel Hearne making tea; my cousin's body being prepared by her brother for an arctic burial; that Glen Gould thought The Great North was somewhere just outside Fort William and Port Arthur; my great-great uncle returnign via Hudson's Bay.  Correctives to Taylor: taking seriously Oliver Sachs on the man who lost colour vision as might have Merleau-Ponty; abandoning the notion that what we need is another, older, tradition in order to escape scientism, physicalism, mechanism or naive materialism in a philosophical appreciation and assessment of current discoveries, achievements, theories and trends biology, neurology and linguistics.  Ditto for assessing, constraining and advocating for technologies in relation to societies, economies and environments.
The less than subtle, incessant and continual pleading for theism in recent western philosophy: only satire may do, as without their appeal to "tradition" they cannot choose between Jeshua, Mahomet or Bahá'u'lláh.
Corrective to Heidegger on science: Hermann Weyl

term: subjectity as used in relation to Heidegger's Hegel by Robert Sinnerbrink.