Those of us who like to bask in the sunlight of the liberal arts – students, educators, writers, researchers, journalists, other knowledge-workers – seldom do it for the money. But whatever our motives for thinking, writing, teaching, and communicating, once in a while we get sucked into a quixotic or risky, but not hopeless, project: one that is a pure labor of love.
Actually, I’ve occasionally wandered into the realm of the hopeless. wouldn’t characterize my own writings as purely public-spirited; but the boiling ego that bubbles beneath my prose isn’t entirely self-serving. (Of course it’s mostly self-serving; that’s the ego’s job). What else should I call it, Dr. Freud? An urge to achieve and disseminate clear thinking doesn’t sound too grandiose; a drive to lend a little incremental intelligence to the universe, or as my mother might prefer to say: to offer what little intelligence I have to some common purpose.
Whatever the case, my labor of love is an idea I’ve nursed for several decades, and for which I’ve recently found an ally. Together with a friend, John McKinnon, who is a Canadian philosopher, I’m hoping to find a publisher for a group of essays by the British philosopher J.R. Bambrough (1926-1999). It’s not exactly my dying wish – but it’s a major living one.
I never met Bambrough, and if I had, I’m not even sure we would have gotten along. He was a Briton from a coal-mining family, who with the help of scholarships rose to become a classical scholar and then (a not uncommon evolution) a Cambridge philosopher. Our political views were probably not aligned. Neither were our philosophical credentials or capabilities. We were of different generations.
But here’s what matters: Bambrough’s modest legacy, consisting of several short books and several dozen essays, constitutes a magnificent body of philosophical work: a model of clarity, humanity, and accessibility. Most, but not all, of his essays are easy reads for non-philosophers, and open invitations to discover that we are all philosophers, because we all use language and think.
As a philosophy student, I quickly learned that British philosophers are, on the whole, better writers (if not necessarily more original thinkers) than their American or other anglophone counterparts. Stuart Hampshire, H.L.A. Hart, Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit – these are a few of the brightest stars in that great galaxy of modern British philosophy. My labor of love is (along with my friend, who is doing the heavy lifting) to publish Bambrough’s collected essays, and thus to show why he belongs in that pantheon.
Underlying that challenge is an idea about philosophy and its role in society, beyond its role (see: Inside the Liberal Arts) as the heart and soul of liberal learning. There are many ways to approach that question and to find value in metacognitive thinking. And there are respectable arguments both for and against he idea that philosophy “makes progress,” depending on what one means by progress. But that’s beside the point, which is that there are (at least) two ways that philosophy works.
One is that it generates models or systems to describe human thought and how it works. Another is that philosophy models methodologies for achieving clarity, breadth, and depth of meaning, not just for philosophers or their students. Quite simply, it is the seat of all intellectual rigor – beginning with formal logic, but not ending there. Both approaches are important, and they often co-exist in one thinker. But Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Hegel, all came up with distinctive architectural models of thought. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, developed a style of thinking, a form of inquiry, rather than an architectural system.
Bambrough is mostly in the Wittgensteinian tradition. It has sometimes been deprecated as a “therapeutic” model, because of its emphasis on clarity and analytic rigor rather than on system-building. But such deprecation is radically misplaced. Philosophical systems are invaluable points of reference and tools of understanding; but in the view that I share with Bambrough, philosophy’s most important “progress” is its continuing ability to make people – philosophers and others – think, and think better than before. Philosophy is all about clarity and rigor.
Bambrough’s essays are in that spirit: models of clarity and common sense. They implicitly recognize that philosophy isn’t just for philosophers. It’s for everyone. Since my student days, I’ve returned to those essays time and again as a kind of philosophical gymnasium, to buff my brain.
Some of those essays have been influential in the field of philosophy. (One, on Wittgenstein and the problem of universals, has been anthologized at least eight times.) My favorite, however, is a piece titled “Aristotle on Justice: A Paradigm of Philosophy,” which appeared in 1965 in a book Bambrough edited, New Essays on Plato and Aristotle. That essay constitutes one of the best examples – and definitions – of philosophy that I know. But over time I’ve read virtually all of his relatively modest corpus. To encounter these philosophical equivalents of Rembrandt miniatures is to rediscover the thrill of thinking. Hence the labor of love in which Dr. McKinnon and I are now engaged.