Jonathan Derbyshire

In TPM 16, we published the results of a poll in which readers were asked to nominate works for inclusion in a hypothetical United Nations library of philosophy. The books attracting most nominations were, by a considerable distance, Plato's Republic and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. There is some irony in this outcome, since Kant once wrote that "there are no classical authors of philosophy." He intended this as a rebuke to those of his critics who had taken exception to his theory of sensible intuition, not on the grounds that the theory was false or incoherent, but because it contradicted the one argued for by Leibniz. It is human reason, and not the views of our illustrious predecessors, Kant insisted, that provides the standard by which we ought to judge philosophical theories. There are no classics in philosophy, in other words, just good arguments.

Mindful of the fact that this is an attitude shared by many contemporary philosophers, TPM brought together a panel of three well-known practitioners to discuss the poll and its implications further. Editor Julian Baggini began by asking the panel - which comprised Professors Simon Blackburn and Simon Critchley and Dr Stephen Law - whether the very idea of a poll of great works of philosophy is itself a non-starter.

Law wasinclined to think that it is and that philosophers' "reverence for the text" is misplaced. "Suppose we were to ask scientists to draw up their top one hundred scientific publications, including Darwin, Newton, Galileo and so on. One interesting thing about such a list is that very few contemporary scientists would have read many of the books on it. The suggestion that a contemporary scientist should be familiar with the texts themselves and not just the ideas in them seems rather odd." Past scientific works become obsolete because science is an activity in which there is progress towards or convergence upon the truth. But this is not the case with literature; we can, after all, reasonably expect a professor of English to be familiar with the texts themselves. He shouldn't just know the thoughts of Hamlet, he should be able to quote from them. And, "in an interesting sense," Law continued, "philosophy is like literature and unlike science. I find that rather disturbing, because I'd like to think that philosophy is rather more like science than it turns out to be." It is ideas that matter, and whether or not they are true.

This distinction between philosophy as truth-seeking and philosophy as literature ought to be treated with care, Simon Blackburn cautioned. For "one of the things that makes great literature great is that it manages to seize hold of something true. Perhaps the greatness of Hamlet is not divorced from the fact that it says something about human nature. So I think one shouldn't separate out the literary element from the truth-seeking or scientific element. I think that is itself a philosophical prejudice - the prejudice that only something called science can deliver truth."

Philosophy does differ from science, Blackburn went on, in that it deals with concepts. And these are human forms. What is more, concepts have a history. When a scientist inquires into some natural phenomenon or other, it's irrelevant whether or not anyone has thought about it before. But it would be an "exercise in vanity" for the philosopher interested in, say, the concepts of freedom and equality to ignore what his predecessors have said about these things. The tradition of thinking about such issues is not something merely to be sloughed off. "There's no way of knowing where we are now without having some sense of how we got there. If you're thinking about freedom and you're trying to do it without visiting John Stuart Mill, you'd be on a hiding to nothing. You're not going to be able to look over Mill's shoulders without standing on them." There can be progress in philosophy, but only so long as we "revisit the tradition in order to understand where we are and to see which way we can push it along."

Blackburn was, nonetheless, relaxed about a scientific work, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, appearing in the poll at number three. "Darwin presumably made a bigger difference to people's conception of who they are and what they are and what the world is they inhabit as living creatures than any philosopher has ever done." Though if those are our criteria, then a good case could also be made for Copernicus's inclusion, or Galileo's.

The issue of philosophy's relationship to science remains fraught, however. Simon Critchley, an avowed "textual fetishist," made two related claims on this score. First, if, as Blackburn suggested, philosophy is a humane discipline, then it doesn't progress. Pace Law, that is not a cause for complaint. Indeed, it is interesting that "we can find in the founding texts of Greek philosophy questions that are still questions for us and not objects of historical curiosity." We return to the works of Plato and Aristotle so that we might see the world afresh. "The prejudices that one brings to the world can be shaken up through the reading of philosophical texts. Maybe when we use the words 'reason,' or 'truth,' or 'meaning,' they don't mean what they meant earlier. And maybe by reading, say, Greek philosophy, one learns something astonishing about one's presuppositions, the prejudices one brings to the text." And that is not a merely literary exercise. Critchley insisted that he was no more warmly disposed towards antiquarianism or scholasticism than either of his colleagues.

Second, there is an important distinction to be made, not between philosophy's truth-seeking and literary aspects, but between philosophy as "contributing to the causal explanation of the way things are" and philosophy as a means of giving "further descriptions of phenomena." One of the tasks of philosophy is to sift and to separate different kinds of question: questions of science and questions of "humanistic elucidation." It is unfortunate, Critchley thought, that philosophy's appearance on the public stage often comes at the price of the blurring of this distinction.

Bearing all that in mind, Critchley suggested his own top ten. From Greek antiquity he added Augustine's Confessions, "an existentialist classic," to the Republic and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. He then considered, before eventually discounting, medieval texts by Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart. Philosophical modernity is inaugurated by Descartes' Meditations, and for that reason, if nothing else, it merits inclusion. He argued for Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality on more or less the same grounds as Blackburn had allowed Darwin: "This is a book of infinite worth, not just for philosophers but for a number of disciplines." The Critique of Pure Reason, meanwhile, gains admission to the pantheon precisely because it is a rare example of progress in philosophy. Once one feels the force of both Kant's attack on traditional metaphysics and his claim that, in some sense, the mind makes nature, "then the nature of philosophy changes." The same might be said of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and, indeed, of any number of texts by Nietzsche, of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and of Being and Time by Heidegger.

Blackburn remarked that Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, though not Heidegger, find their way into the top ten in spite of their obscurity. " Philosophical Investigations has to go there, just on the grounds that it's so beautifully written - even if you can't understand a word of it. The same goes for Nietzsche. I don't find the thought particularly compelling, but the writing's wonderful." In Law's eyes, though, such sensitivity is excessive. "Who cares if a philosophy book was beautifully written? I just want to know what's true!"