RICHARD MARSHALL interviews PHILIP KITCHER
3:AM: You’ve written books on science in a democratic society, living with Darwin, the ethical project and an invitation to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. This is a broad field of interests and captures the flavour of your philosophical position where you argue for the importance of both science and humanities. How did your philosophical career begin? Were you always asking questions, reading and thinking?
Philip Kitcher: I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics (pure and applied, with a dash of theoretical physics). Under the British system, I’d had to specialize at age 15, and I found it very hard to decide between mathematics and literature (English, French, and German). After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year. I’d originally intended to concentrate in history of science, but reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions prompted me to switch to philosophy of science. Despite the fact that I hadn’t done any serious philosophy as Princeton understood it, I was accepted as a graduate student in the philosophy side of Princeton’s HPS program (now defunct). I struggled at first, but eventually managed to correct some of my initial ignorance.
But I think that, all along, I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It’s taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is, as your question suggests, wide. Some people would probably describe it as quite weird. Maybe this interview will dissolve some of that sense of weirdness.
3:AM: You wrote a review in The New Republic ‘The Lure of the Peak’, of Derek Parfit’s ‘On What Matters’, his massive two volume book that ambitiously tries to reconcile three approaches to ethics that are usually seen as irreconcilable: consequentialists, Kantians and contractualists. You ultimately judge this to be a grand and brave failure. The problem in the final analysis seems to boil down to views about naturalism. Can you say something about how the rejection of Parfit’s vision of ethics sheds light on your own contrasting view?
PK: I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition – rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages. Parfit believes that philosophers have a priori sources of knowledge that enable them to arrive at eternal truths. I don’t think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore passed on to us by our ancestors in light of our experiences, and the best a philosopher can do is to learn as much about what has been discovered in various empirical fields, and use it to try to craft an improved synthesis. That seems to me what the great philosophers of the past did, even when (like Kant) they were declaring that their proposed principles were known independently of experience. That’s part of my naturalism, which is more extreme than that of most philosophers (even Quine’s): Dewey and Mill are the only two figures I know who have been uncompromising in their naturalism. Moreover, in the case of ethics, my naturalism follows Dewey in thinking of ethics as an unfinished human project. So Parfit’s idea of a set of final principles from which all ethical truth flows strikes me as an illusion.
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