The Archimedean urge

Journal article

In Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Socrates orders his hapless student Strepsiades to lie down on a couch to make him more receptive to philosophical inspiration. Instead he catches Strepsiades masturbating under the bedclothes. Aristophanes’ suggestion is that it amounts to much the same thing. Like philosophy, scepticism about philosophy has its modes and fashions. Sometimes the accusation, as with Aristophanes, is that a seemingly lofty activity is in fact chicanery, nonsense in the service of all too human desire. According to the sort of diagnostic scepticism associated with the later Wittgenstein, philosophy is a symptom of pathology or confusion. Scientistic scepticism impugns philosophy for falling short of some putative standard met by all respectable — that is, empirical — modes of enquiry. What we might call ‘genealogical’ scepticism complains that the building blocks of philosophy — the judgments and concepts on which it all hangs — are contingent features of whoever it is who is doing the philosophising: her or his particular history, culture, language, education, gender, character.

Authors: Srinivasan, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Philosophical Perspectives
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 325-362
• Publication date: 2016-04-22
• DOI: 10.1111/phpe.12068
• ISSN: 1520-8583
• Keywords: SBTMR