 Okay, hi and welcome to Philosophy 3324, 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm your instructor, Matthew J. Brown, Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas here at UT Dallas. What I wanna talk to you today, in this talk to you about today in this first of many video lectures for the course is kind of what the focus of the course will be, the structure of topics and also provides some background for thinking about the sort of overall movements and also background that's important to understand some of the concepts and themes in the readings. So the focus of the class, I mean, it's a little obvious, right? 19th and 20th century philosophy. We'll be looking at philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. And we're going to have kind of two levels of focus or two lenses, if you like, by which we look at this time period. The first is we will look at this at kind of a micro level. We're reading a wide variety of a fairly short readings, essays, chapters, excerpts from books by a number of very different philosophers from the period. Here, we're looking for a variety as well as significance and interesting sort of aspects of their work. And then the other level or the other lens through which we'll look at this is more of a macro level, macro lens, where we think about philosophy itself as an academic discipline or specialty. We try to understand the movement of thinkers and ideas and how it affects the different traditions under which philosophy is practiced today. Okay, so that's sort of the big picture of what we're doing in the class. Okay, so let's start by thinking a little bit about philosophy as a discipline and the professionalization of philosophy. Now, it's safe to say that philosophy has been a thing since ancient times. Of course, we are most, many of us are most keyed into thinking about ancient Greek philosophy, but there's ancient philosophies from around the world, East and South Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East as well as Africa all have their own ancient philosophical traditions that go back many, many centuries. In many cases, these philosophical traditions have their own schools. Sometimes they're defined in relation or they're a part of what we would think of today as organized religion. Other times they're somewhat in opposition to organized religion as you might think is the case in sort of classical Greek philosophy in a certain sense. But in any case, philosophy even in those times didn't so much represent a distinct, profession in the way that we think about those things today, right? I mean, and obviously it's ancient times, the world was very different. But for much of the history of philosophy, philosophers have been independently wealthy gentlemen. They've been those with patrons among the aristocracy and perhaps more importantly for our purposes, there have not been sharp lines to be drawn between philosophy on the one hand and science on the other between philosophy and politics. Philosophy was sort of intertwined with a wide variety of intellectual and ethical pursuits throughout most of its history, much of its history. But the story starts to change really in the 18th century, a little bit at the end of the 17th century perhaps, as you start to see the rise of something that starts to look like the modern university. And you start to see certain kinds of disciplinary specialization, right? And here there's a lot of interesting features to this history, intellectual history that go beyond our scope. But I think it's worth mentioning, especially that the German university system took the lead here in many respects. And one of the most important figures in this history who was working at the end of the latter half of the, mostly at the latter half of the 18th century, the German philosopher Emanuel Kant, right? You think about philosophy in the couple of centuries before Kant in the early modern period, figures from roughly Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, through Leibniz, Spinoza, Barkley-Hume, you know, we sort of lined them up as the canonical philosophers of the period. But there's nothing that really marks them as philosophers and then marks say Isaac Newton or Galileo as scientists or marks other thinkers as political thinkers like, you know, Hobbes sometimes is thought of as a more of a political thinker. But really these things, you know, they're not closely, they're not carefully distinguished. They're not separate from one another. And in many cases, the thinkers involved are in conversations across what we would think of as contemporary boundaries. So, you know, of any of these figures, if you ask, well, is Leibniz an important figure in the history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history of philosophy, that doesn't really make any sense. You know, you ask, is David Hume a psychologist or is David Hume a philosopher? Is John Locke a philosopher? Is John Locke a politician? None of these questions, I mean, really make a lot of sense because these are not separate identities that existed in this time period. But this starts to change with Kant. Now, Kant, like the early modern philosophers before him, he's engaged in what was then called natural philosophy, which we would think of today as science. He was engaged in natural history. He was particularly well known in his life as a teacher of anthropology and geography. Rather so much than epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics as we sort of think of him today. But his body of work marks an important turn. And the work I'm talking about is work from relatively late actually in his life. He published fairly late on in his life. And we know it today is the critical philosophy or the three critiques, the main works in which his full philosophical system is laid out, the critique of pure reason, the critique of practical reason and the critique of the power of judgment. In these three books, Kant articulates first an account of the understanding, how it produces knowledge and what the limits of our knowledge are. In that work, he also makes a very historically powerful and important argument that dogmatic metaphysics is not something we can have knowledge of. In the second critique, he posits another faculty of the human mind, which he calls reason. Reason is what is responsible for our moral, our morality, right, for ethics. Also for our belief, although not knowledge, in God, human freedom and the immortality of the soul. And in the third critique, he posits a power that he calls judgment or a faculty he calls judgment, which is the faculty through which we attribute purposes or teleology to things in nature and not just in ourselves. It does not produce a form of knowledge, but it does contribute to the production of what you might call a worldview in which the faculties of understanding and reason are supposed to be joined together, okay? So you see here, Kant is doing a number of key philosophical moves. He's providing the foundations for scientific knowledge. He's separating out special kinds of, you might call philosophical knowledge, not just of ethics, let's not call it knowledge because that's a special concept in Kant. Let's call it activity, right? So special kinds of philosophical activity concerning practical reason and the power of judgment. He is also in the first critique laying out not only a story about how empirical knowledge is produced, but also an account of how the operation of the understanding itself produces substantive what he calls synthetic a priori knowledge, prior to experience, but nevertheless, substantive knowledge, not just trivial, definitional knowledge or logical tautologies, but something substantive. And he also lays that into a kind of, that turns out to be a kind of focus for philosophy as well in Kant. So the other aspect I think that's important to think about with Kant is not only these aspects of the system, which, I mean, I'm running through this at a very high level and obviously it's a kind of cartoon, but it was so significant and also in many ways so difficult to interpret and in other ways, unsatisfying to the immediate sort of readers of Kant. That what happened was a very significant intellectual enterprise started up in particularly in German intellectual circles aimed at what they described as completing the Kantian system, right? So right away, this sort of tripartite distinction between understanding reason and judgment, the dichotomy also that Kant draws in the first critique between sensibility and understanding and various other sort of aspects of Kant systems were seen as inadequate or problematic by figures like Fikta and Schelling, and they tried to find ways of getting, sort of taking Kant's starting point and finding a deeper unity. This is the tradition of work that we now think of as German idealism, and it really culminates in the work of a second philosopher named Hegel. Hegel is in many ways the most important sort of follower of Kant, right? But also a significant reviser of Kant or some would say a critic who rejects a lot of Kant. In any case, Hegel is an idealist that doesn't necessarily mean that he, like Bishop Barkley believes that the only real things are spiritual substances or minds, a separate from them or sort of independent of matter. What idealism does mean in the sense is a little bit controversial to understand, but basically it's a view that our conceptual structures are the intelligible ways in which we understand the world, have a real existence, and it's not all as the materialist would have it. A matter of sort of corpuscles in motion, right? So what you see between the time of Kant and Hegel in the German philosophical scene is, professors really appointed to do philosophy as opposed to teaching politics or natural science or natural history, right? That sort of focus, which also spreads in a way with the ideas of Hegel to the UK by the middle of the 19th century, to the US by the end of the 19th century, and they follow along with the German with reforms in the university following the German model. And by the middle to end of the 19th century, it's really clear that philosophy is a thing. It's a separate pursuit from the sciences, which also in English get the name science as distinct from natural philosophy in the middle of the 19th century. As this professionalization process goes on and it continues well into the 20th century, at the same time, a couple of different things are happening. Philosophers are because of the relative novelty of their disciplinary identity, no matter the ancient sort of pedigree of their overall pursuit of wisdom. They are, I guess you would say, they're reflecting on the nature of philosophy itself, always a perennial topic, but particularly is acute in these two centuries. And what you start to see is a couple of different and important splits that arise, the first being the separation of philosophy and psychology. As I mentioned before, if you were to ask of David Hume, is he a philosopher or a psychologist? I mean, he's both. Those things weren't really distinct even into the middle of the 19th century. But a few different things happen. One of the most important is the importing of empirical experimental methods into psychology. And the other is a kind of academic politics, again, particularly acute within Germany, by which philosophers who don't do experimental research on the mind start to react negatively to the appointment of experimental psychologists to philosophical chairs and professorships, right? And a redefinition of what philosophy is independent of psychology, right? So you think about, you might think about this split. Some people have talked about this split as psychology sort of separating off from philosophy. I don't think that's quite the right way to put it. I think what you had, you had sort of a traditional approach to philosophy, which really included much of psychology and that separated out into the new discipline of philosophy and the new discipline of psychology. And psychology, it's really, you're really into the early decades of the 20th century before psychology becomes totally distinct from philosophy. Well, some would argue it's still not totally distinct, but anyway, so that's the first important split. And then starting around the turn of the century, the start of the 20th century, and but not really, not really complete until about halfway into the 20th century, about 1950 or so. You have the discipline of philosophy separates out into some distinct traditions that increasingly don't sort of talk to each other or read each other's work. The most sort of famous aspect of this split is the separation between analytic and continental philosophy, right? Both of these terms have retrospectively been applied to thinkers in the very early 20th century and even as far back as Kant. And Hegel is sometimes thought of as a continental philosopher, but really it's not until around 1940, 1950 that this distinction is meaningful, right? As a distinction within the discipline. Other aspects of this distinction though, there is what you might call American pragmatism, right? That's probably the best name for it, which is a type of philosophy that's not really analytic or continental, although it becomes influential on both in different respects. American pragmatism, so analytic and continental philosophy both define themselves very clearly against psychology, right? The sort of grandfather of analytic philosophy and the grandfather of continental philosophy Edmund Husserl were completely on the same page about the need to separate philosophy from psychology. And so these both began as kind of anti-naturalistic, anti-psychologist approaches to philosophy. American pragmatism, however, had a much more friendly relationship with psychology, two of its most important figures, William James and John Dewey, who we will read, participated in psychology in the 19th century, thought of themselves as psychologists as well as philosophers, although they both moved away from empirical psychology fairly early on in Dewey's case. Another approach to philosophy that I think is worth mentioning here, we could call traditionalist philosophy. Notice I've used traditionalist to distinguish it from traditional philosophy, traditionalist philosophy, tries to do philosophy in the traditional way. A lot of it is commentary on historical figures, but not all of it. This is a small but important part of Anglophone philosophy, but it's a significant part of philosophy in much of Europe today. Much of European philosophy doesn't fall into any of these categories. It is actually just kind of traditionalist, just doing philosophy in the way it's been done for centuries, or trying to do that. But relatively less influential on English speaking. Philosophy. And okay, another aspect of this development of the discipline over these two centuries, something important to mention is the sort of larger political aspect of it. I'm not sure if political is exactly the right word, but prior to Kant, prior to the end of the, prior to the latter half of the 18th century, historians of philosophy who sort of talked about the origins of philosophy as a pursuit. Even into, in this view, persisted well into the 19th century. You know, they saw the beginnings of philosophy in Asia and Africa, right? The idea that philosophy began in ancient Greece, in particular, is a quite recent view, articulated in the early, late 18th, early 19th century. The main purpose of this shift to thinking of Greek philosophy as the origin of philosophy is racism. I mean, the main motivator is racism. The thinkers in question wanted to shift our way of thinking of philosophy as primarily a European that is primarily a white development, right? And so thinking about ancient, African or ancient Eastern thought as philosophy troubled that narrative, right? And this, you know, I mentioned Kant's racist anthropology, right, the idea that Asians and Africans were not capable of philosophical thought was a claim that was made at that time. And so, you know, this whole picture I've been talking about about this whole sort of professionalization process, this historical framework, this sort of historical movement that's happening in Europe and in the Americas. There is a huge component of this movement which is motivated by racism and also sexism, right? So the early modern period saw a number of women participating in philosophical exchange, all of whom were written out of the canon by early 19th century neo-Kant and late 19th century neo-Kantian historians of philosophy. So, you know, you look at late 19th or early 20th century philosophy and there's a lot of marginalization of non-Western thought, of women, of people of color. And as a result, a lot of what we would call the philosophy being done by those groups is being done outside of the sort of official academic halls of philosophy. As the 20th century moves on, right, as you have political movements, women's rights movement, women's suffrage, feminism, civil rights movement and so forth, these things start to have an increasing effect on philosophy and you get sort of traditions or movements including feminist philosophy, right? Including what we might call Africana philosophy which is a name that's used to sort of group together philosophy with origins in Africa and the African diaspora including African-American philosophers. And various other movements, post-colonialism and a variety of other movements that are trying to undo, in part, undo the marginalization that the philosophy of the 18th and 19th century so aggressively introduced into the field as well as just bringing up philosophical ideas across the spectrum of philosophy that were of greater interest to feminist Africana philosophers, philosophers of settler colonial, traditionally settler colonial states and so forth, right? And so these maybe start the 20th century as largely outsider movements within the professional sphere but by the end of the 20th century they have had a significant beneficial effect and really are part of the academic scene. And they sort of cross cut these things. So you have analytic feminism, continental feminism, feminist pragmatism, you have Africana philosophy that arose from and then returns to American pragmatism and a variety of these other things that happened to the field, okay? So that gives you a kind of sense of the shape of philosophy over this time period, some of the important movements that we'll talk about in a lot more detail as we go through the semester. This has been a little bit of a long video lecture, it's longer than any other lecture will be this semester, but there's a lot of sort of ideas to throw out there. I look forward to talking these things over with you in class or on the class discord. Also, if you wanna leave a comment on the YouTube video you're welcome to do that as well. Otherwise, I'll see you in class and I'll see you next week.