ARTIFACTS, REPRESENTATONS AND SOCIAL PRACTICE

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editor

ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University

Editorial Advisory Board

THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University

ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh

SAHOTRA SARKAR, Dibner Institute, M.I.T.

SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University

JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University

MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of

the City University of New York

VOLUME 154

MARX W. WARTOFSKY

ARTIFACTS, REPRESENTATIONS AND

SOCIAL PRACTICE Essays for Marx Wartofsky

Edited by

CAROL C. GOULD Stevens Institute of Technology

and

ROBERT S. COHEN Boston University

k 4

i f SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A r t i f a c t s , r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s , and s o c i a l p r a c t i c e : essays f o r Marx Wartofsky / e d i t e d by Carol C. Gould and Robert S. Cohen.

p. cm. — (Boston s t u d i e s In the philosophy of science ; v. 154)

Includes b i b l i o g r a p h i c a l references and index. ISBN 978-94-010-4390-8 ISBN 978-94-011-0902-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-0902-4 1. Philosophy. 2. A e s t h e t i c s . 3. S c i e n c e — P h i l o s o p h y . 4. S o c i a l

s c i e n c e s — P h i l o s o p h y . I . Wartofsky, Marx W. I I . Gould, Carol C. I I I . Cohen, R. S. (Robert Sonne) IV. S e r i e s . B73.A69 1994

100—dc20 93-38216

ISBN 978-94-010-4390-8

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE / Carol C. Gould

MARXOLOGY / Robert S. Cohen

Art

HILDE HEIN / Institutional Blessing: The Museum as Canon-

ix

xi

Maker 1

GREGG M. HOROWITZ / "Suddenly One Has The Right Eyes": Illusion and Iconoclasm in the Early Gombrich 21

MICHAEL KELLY / Danto, Dutton, and our Preunderstanding of Tribal Art and Artifacts 39

PETER KIVY / In Defense of Musical Representation: Music, Representation and the Hybrid Arts 53

DOUGLAS P. LACKEY / Two Vignettes in the History of the Mensuration of Value 69

BEREL LANG / Irony, Ltd., and the Future of Art 87

GARY SMITH / A Genealogy of 'Aura': Walter Benjamin's Idea of Beauty 105

Science

ROSHDI RASHED / Analysis and Synthesis According to Ibn al-Haytham 121

JOHN STACHEL / Changes in the Concepts of Space and Time Brought about by Relativity 141

Philosophy and Its History

ANDREW BUCHWALTER / Hegel and the Doctrine of Expressivism 163

PETER CAWS / Translating Feuerbach 185

WILLIAM JAMES EARLE / Is the Enlightenment Over? 195

vii

viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS

PAUL FEYERABEND I Realism 205

JAAKKO HINTIKKA I An Anatomy of Wittgenstein's Picture Theory 223

ISAAC LEVI I Rationality and Commitment 257

ALASDAIR MaciNTYRE I The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken 277

JOSEPH MARGOLIS I Donald Davidson's Philosophical Strategies 291

JOELLE PROUST I Time and Conscious Experience 323

ABNER SHIMONY I Ten Philosophical Poems 343

Politics and Praxis

JOSEPH AGASSI I The Philosophy of Optimism and Pessimism 349

BERNARD ELEVITCH I Life is not a Poem? 361

ROGER S. GOTTLIEB I Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide 365

CAROL C. GOULD I Marx After Marxism 377

ERAZIM KOHAK I The Good and the Rational 397

GYORGY MARKUS I The End of a Metaphor: The Base and the Superstructure 419

WILLIAM McBRIDE I The Marxian Vision of a (Better) Possible Future: End of a Grand Illusion? 441

THOMAS McCARTHY I On the Communicative Dimension of Social Practice 463

CHEYNEY RYAN I The Bread of Faithful Speech 483

KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE I Unsafe at Any Depth: Geological Methods, Subjective Judgments, and Nuclear Waste Disposal 501

LORENZO C. SIMPSON I Community and Difference: Reflections in the Wake of Rodney King 525

WILLIS H. TRUITT I Partisanship, Universalism, and the Dialectics of Moral Consciousness 543

NAME INDEX 551

CAROL C. GOULD

PREFACE

The essays collected here in honor of Marx Wartofsky's sixty-fifth birthday are a celebration of his rich contribution to philosophy over the past four decades and a testimony to the wide influence he has had on thinkers with quite various approaches of their own. His diverse philosophical interests and main themes have ranged from constructivism and realism in the philosophy of science to practices of representation and the creation of artifacts in aesthetics; and from the development of human cognition and the historicity of modes of knowing to the construction of norms in the context of concrete social critique. Or again, in the history of philosophy, his work spans historical approaches to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as contemporary implications of their work; and in applied philosophy, problems of education, medicine, and new technologies. Marx's philosophical theorizing moves from the highest levels of abstraction to the most concrete concern with the everyday and with contemporary social and political reality. And perhaps most notably, it is acutely sensitive to the importance of historical development and social practice.

As a student of John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel at Columbia, Marx developed an exemplary background in both the history of philosophy and systematic philosophy and subsequently combined this with a wide acquaintance with analytic philosophy. He is at once aware of the requirements of system and of the need for rigorous and careful detailed argument. Interestingly, too, as a practicing artist and violinist from early on, he became attuned to the role of the aesthetic in experience and in science as well. And as a politically engaged person, he has always been keenly aware of the situatedness of philosophical thought and of the impact of both theories and actions on those who are exploited or oppressed.

What has perhaps not been sufficiently noted about Marx's thought is the degree to which he anticipated so many of the recent trends in philosophy years before it became fashionable to do so. For example, his early innovative concern with historical epistemology and with historical approaches to the philosophy of science has been widely echoed

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x CAROL C. GOULD

recently and his analysis of representation and artifacts in aesthetics has also been reiterated in present discussions. It is our expectation that this book will elicit further attention to Marx's creative and important contributions to a wide range of key philosophical problems and will stimulate further thought in the directions he has emphasized.

The essays collected here touch on a number of the themes that have been central in Marx's theorizing, though always from the unique standpoint of each of the distinguished contributors. The authors of these essays are friends or colleagues of Marx from the various "eras" of his work - from Boston University and from Baruch College, from colleagues in the U.S. philosophical community to friends from Western and Eastern Europe, and include some of his older and more recent students as well. Inevitably, many philosophical friends, colleagues, and students of Marx are missing here, either because of the editors' over­sight or because the authors were asked to produce their contributions in some haste. We are sorry for these omissions but look forward to editing another Festschrift on Marx's seventy-fifth birthday, by which time he will undoubtedly have produced a range of new ideas and themes on which we may comment and which will inspire us to new sorts of thinking of our own.

ROBERT S. COHEN

MARXOLOGY

Observation is praxis-laden ...

First the facts. Marx Wartofsky, the philosopher and violinist, was first a musician and an artist. He graduated from that wonderful High School of Music and Art in New York City in January 1945. After a semester at Brooklyn College, he went to Columbia University, all the way to his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1952. He came to Boston University in 1957, and after 26 years returned to New York as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he flourishes today. I met him in the fall of 1958 when we shared a graduate seminar on Hume. I thought then, and now too, that he is the ideal colleague, teacher, friend, comedian, and critic. For six years he was the chairman of the philosophy department at Boston University, a time of turmoil without and within the University, and yet we experienced a Renaissance of philosophical quality due to him as first among equals. He seems to be a natural mediator while also a firm leader, qualities which were so very valuable in his years as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, as a local, state, and national official of the American Association of University Professors, and as one of the main figures in the development of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science in 1960. He was the creative and innovative figure even as a depart­ment chairman when he decided to cut through university bureaucratic budget-making by inventing a new unit of exchange value for full-time, part-time, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, teaching fellows, visiting pro­fessors, adjunct faculty ... he called it 'philosophon'. No dean would recognize it. This was his only failure known to me.

What has he published thus far? Three books: Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968, with translations published in Madrid, 1973, Budapest, 1977, and Beijing, 1984); Feuerbach (1977); Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (1979, with transla­tion published in Moscow, 1988). He has published more than three score and ten philosophical papers, beginning with his fine essay on 'Diderot

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xii ROBERT S. COHEN

and the Development of Materialist Monism' in Diderot Studies II (1953). Some of his titles will show his interests and tempt the reader: "Marx on the Jewish Question - A Critical Review" (1961); "Metaphysics as Heuristic for Science" (1967); "Aesthetic Deprivation and the Drugged Scene" (1970); "From Praxis to Logos: Genetic Epistemology and Physics" (1971); "Is Science Rational? Repressive Reason and Liberating Reason" (1972); "Actions and Passions: Spinoza's Construction of a Scientific Psychology" (1973); "Technology and Art as Conflicting Models of Education" (1975); "Art as Humanizing Praxis" (1975); "Organs, Organisms and Disease: Human Ontology and Medical Practice" (1975); "The Mind's Eye and the Hand's Brain: Toward an Historical Epistemology of Medicine" (1976); "On Doing it for Money" (1976); "Politics, Political Philosophy and the Politics of Philosophy" (1979); "Picturing and Representing" (1979); "Art, Artworlds and Ideology" (1980); "Cameras Can't See: Representation, Photography and Human Vision" (1980); "The Critique of Impure Reason II: Sin, Science and Society" (1980); Homo Homini Deus Est: Feuerbach's Religious Materialism" (1982); "The Child's Construction of the World and the World's Construction of the Child: From Historical Epistemology to Historical Psychology" (1983); "Karl Marx and the Outcome of Classical Marxism, or: Is Marx's Labor Theory of Value Excess Metaphysical Baggage?" (1983); "Virtue Lost, or Understanding MacIntyre" (1984); "The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial Representation and the Dimensionality of Visual Space" (1984); "Virtues and Vices: The Social and Historical Construction of Medical Norms" (1984); "Good Science, Bad Science, or: Dr. Frankenstein's Dilemma" (1985).

Wartofsky is the consummate editor - encouraging, connecting, flexible, a pioneer in recognizing how very far philosophical inquiry and analytical rigor should go into human affairs. He has edited The Philosophical Forum since 1970, and we were responsible together for the first hundred volumes of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1960-1987). With Carol Gould he edited Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation (1976). In 1981 he was elected chairperson of the Society of Philosophy Journal Editors.

I once wrote that Wartofsky is a philosopher's philosopher, but also philosopher for Everyman. He has thought through the problems, indeed the philosophical anatomy, of the natural sciences, the social sciences, medicine, psychology, the fine arts, politics and political economy, the conceptual development of philosophy, especially in the last three

PREFACE xiii

centuries. He is Jack-of-all-philosophical-trades, and master of them too.

It is fashionable these days to identify 'key words'. Wartofsky's key words I suppose are praxis, model, and representation. I have selected some revealing phrases and passages from his writings.

(FroDl Feuerbach) "[He] articulates hiDlseif in the very process of his critique. And we CODle to know hiDl through it as well. This is why this study is devoted to the struggling, eDlerging, Feuerbach - not to the Dlature, cODlplete one". (p. 11)

" ... an 'adequate DlaterialisDl' is a touchstone for criticisDl rather than a theory as such . .. a goal, not an achieveDlent". (p. 26)

" ... a heuristic will be bald and bare; it is not an algorithDl, nor a security blanket, nor a dogDla". (p. 26)

(FroDl Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought) "The job of science ... is to render subject to law what has been unpredictable in the past, thereby Dlaking it predictable .... Science, in this interpretation, sDlacks of that Dlissionary urge to bring the heathen under the law, to civilize theDl". (p. 295)

(FroDl Models) " ... praxis and logos are indissoluble, and in the genetic sequence of hUDlan devel­opDlent, the separation of logos froDl praxis is iDlpossible". (p. 173)

" ... Dlany scientists are full of Dletaphysical hunches, but not Dlany scientists, in Dly experience, can follow a Dletaphysicai hunch across the street". (p. 71)

" ... I aDl talking about Dletaphysics as that heuristic whicb serves the end of helping, guiding, suggesting how the scientist comes to understand what he is doing, and not siDlply how he CODles to do what he is doing". (p. 73)

science and art: "Dlodes of cognitive praxis" (p. xiii)

" ... the crucial feature of hUDlan cognitive practice, naDlely the ability to Dlake representations . . . this I traced to the priDlary production of artifacts - in the first place, tools and weapons, but Dlore broadly, in good Aristotelian fashion, anything which hUDlan beings create by the transforDlation of nature and of theDlselves". (p. 13)

"The cognitive artifacts we create are Dlodels: representations to ourselves of what we do, of what we want, and of what we hope for". (p. 15)

"[Karl] Marx's striking aphorisDl, 'Language is practical consciousness', requires the elaboration that it is also social consciousness .... " (p. 18)

"Anything (in the strongest and Dlost unqualified sense of 'anything') can be a representation of anything else .... It is we who constitute sODlething as a represen­tation of sODlething else. It is essential to sODlething's being a representation, therefore, that it be taken to be one". (p. xx)

xiv ROBERT S. COHEN

"The one-sided manifestos of classic philosophical materialism and idealism - 'being determines consciousness' or 'consciousness determines being' - leave out of account the crucial question: How? ... Between an inert epiphenomenalism, and a hyperac­tive creationism, we are left with two unacceptable theories of mind; and in consequence, two distorted theories of science". (xxii)

" ... every model proposes a certain relation to the world, or to its object, and impli­cates the maker or user of the model in this relationship. We can therefore always read back or reconstruct the modeller from the model itself. . . . In this sense, all modes of representation can become themselves modes of self-knowledge as well". (xxiv)

" ... the ubiquitousness of handprints in paleolithic art: How shall we interpret this perhaps most ancient of all the visual artifacts of the human race? The simplest answer ... that such prints are deliberate marks of presence: "I was here' ... the handprint records a gesture, an action, an intention". (p. xxv)

" ... acknowledge the importance, in our quest for objective knowledge, of the human imperative to make one's presence known, to be recognized by the fruit of one's labor: theory is the graffiti of the intellect". (p. xxvi)

This selection is mine. Another reader will have another selection. Marx Wartofsky is my genial, lucid and relaxed philosophical companion. Happy Birthday, Marx.