in praise of fashions in philosophy

During our recent job search in Cairo, we couldn’t fail to notice three separate dissertations among our applicants dealing in part or in total with the works of Collingwood. I don’t think I ever met anyone during graduate school who had even read Collingwood, let alone worked on him. It’s sort of like how, 12 or so years ago, there seemed to be a sudden surge of interest in Cassirer.

Just now, I was at the Vrin bookstore near the Sorbonne, and couldn’t help but notice a number of authors who seem to be newly fashionable in France in the past few years. The one that interested me most was the ongoing surge of interest in the Austro-Hungarian school of Brentano. Not only can you buy Brentano’s own works, you can also buy Carl Stumpf, which might be hard to do even in Berlin these days. In French you can also buy Twardowski’s little book, which contains as an appendix all of Husserl’s contemporary reactions to Twardowski: in essays, notes, and letters. If fate were to make me a 22-year-old again, in either an analytic or a continental program, I might well choose to write on the Twardowski-Husserl debate. It’s not just historical, because I don’t think the debate was ever satisfactorily resolved.

But to get to the wider point… People speak of “fashion” in philosophy usually only while scoffing at it. I think this is a big mistake. It is very important to have cycles of fashion in philosophy, just as it is important to go through various cycles in your life, which allow you to see different things from different angles.

Also, I think it’s good for authors to go out of style for awhile. This paves the way for their eventual revival, assuming they’re good enough to deserve it (and if they’re not, then it’s good for them to pass out of fashion anyway).

Too much has been done by the human race for all of it to be in style simultaneously. The lighthouse beam will always be pointing in one direction rather than another. If ten authors come into fashion and eight of them ultimately turn out to be substandard period pieces— so what? Little harm done.

We should want motion in philosophical trends just as we should want motion in the air in a room. I also returned with a new fan for this apartment, no less than a new volume of Carl Stumpf in French.

Speaking of fans… I’ve never had to buy one in France before now, but they’re surprisingly difficult to track down, and many of them have a strange design. By contrast, fans are everywhere in the USA, and they are often very powerful. My last fan in Chicago was designed for restaurant kitchens, and it was wonderful. The fact that the person from whom I’m subletting this place (a young French woman who is a medical student) doesn’t even own a fan, in a place where the air is this stagnant, suggests real cultural or even physical differences between the two peoples. I doubt any American would be able to spend a month in this apartment without a fan; it would drive any of us crazy. Even now, I have this one on “high” setting and it would be the same as “low” on any U.S.-made fan. It’s called a “ventilator,” actually, and it’s just a plastic cylinder that rotates back and forth.

Which classic author was I recently reading who said that you rarely see French people drunk? I’d never thought of that, but it’s true, isn’t it? But go to any Anglophone country, or to Germany, and you won’t have much problem finding examples of drunkenness within a few minutes.