Will Philosophy Bury Its Undertakers?

Extract

In what is undoubtedly his most famous essay, the late F.C.S. Schiller posed the deceptively simple query: “Must philosophers disagree?” To Schiller and, seemingly, the bulk of philosophers before and after him, the question should be answered in the negative. Yet, the dialogues among contemporaneous philosophers, past and present, as among the vast number of protagonists in the long, “unscripted” dialogue which constitutes the history of thought, reveal that the disagreements among philosophers justly may be said to define a central problem of philosophy, if not the root problem. Perhaps fearful lest the diversity of philosophical alternatives evidence the defeat of reason, many have striven to piece together a unified whole, to gloss over deep rifts in convictions among individuals, and even to institutionalize some contemporaneously acceptable explanation. But none of these moves has been successful to the present and none seem destined to gain the field in the future. Indeed, contrary to the end which the “heart” may desire, the “mind” drives us towards the conclusion that the ineluctable characteristic of reason is disagreement. Yet this in no way disparages reason or its usages, for no principle of logic has been violated when one chooses from among diverse basic convictions which form the foundation of alternative philosophic systems.