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The Slightest Philosophy

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These days post-modernist philosophy haunts American universities like the undead haunt shopping malls in George A. Romero's zombie films. It's dead, but somehow it doesn't know it: it just trudges along, bumping into walls here and there, groaning the same futile arguments over and over, and still managing to take a bite into the brains of those most vulnerable--the young, the curious, the ill-informed.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this present state of affairs is that an intelligent person who would like to read philosophy (or criticism of whatever type) will find nothing of the sort at the local bookstore. Instead, a quick look at any bibliography reveals that, while the titles change, the ideology does not. You end up reading the same book over and over. Or, more realistically, the same words over and over--words that don't always make sense because the syntax is obscurant, terms are left undefined, and neologisms are coined for no apparent reason. Only fully-fledged members of an academic cult can even bother to read these texts, and in the end the payoff is often nil. It's junk food for the mind: you can keep eating it, but it's not nourishing you.

This is why "The Slightest Philosophy" is such a breath of fresh air. This is the kind of book I wish I had had while I was being assaulted by the Count Ugolino-like professors I studied under in grad school. It would have saved me so much time by guiding me through some of the most outrageous, arcane, and inane polemics that students are forced to contemplate today in the humanities: the so-called "social construction of reality;" the "prison-house" of language; et cetera.

Nelson's book is an historically-contextualized refutation of the various post-modernist arguments. This alone will make it refreshing as it allows you to trace the origins of post-modernist thought, and to see its development and evolution at the hands of Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others. As things come together, you get a better idea of where to place yourself and contemporary trends.

This is an intelligent text for an intelligent reader. You do not have to be a specialist; in fact, my field is not philosophy, yet I was able to follow the arguments easily. Nor are these Straw Man arguments. Many of them I recognized straight from the graduate courses I took in Comparative Literature (the footnotes helped me to finally identify the original sources of many of them). Nelson rigorously dissects each premise, carefully scrutinizing the logic (or lack thereof) that permits today's professors to say things that clearly fly in the face of reality, experience, or evidence of the senses. While at grad school I remember thinking "this can't be right," and yet lacking the words, insight, or knowledge that would have allowed me to formulate a refutation. This book will help you to do so by pointing out where so many of these arguments go wrong: usually at their very foundations, which can and must be identified and understood.

The first two chapters are lucidly written in standard essay form. The rest of the book is written as a Socratic Dialogue, though it is broken up into sub-chapters which address specific arguments. At first I was a bit suspicious of this strategy, but that changed when I realized that Nelson's antagonist (the Pragmatist/Post-modernist) was not a fool but an academic who aggressively attempted to defend his ideas. Again, no Straw Man arguments here; Nelson cites directly from the texts.

Particularly helpful is the appendix, which is a compendium of citations from the various philosophers whose ideas have evolved into what has become post-modernist theory.

Since (at the time of this writing) there is no link to the table of contents, I will list the chapters, but not all the sub-chapters as there are too many:

INTRODUCTION: The Postmodern Condition
CHAPTER 1: What Can Be Realism
CHAPTER 2: The Same Waking that Dreaming
CHAPTER 3: Seeing Things
CHAPTER 4: Doubting Skepticism

Some of the sub-chapters include, for example: Scientific Realism, Postmodern Hopelessness, The Postmodern Prison-House, Arguments from Illusion, Are Objects Objective?, Color and Subjectivity, Is This Epistemological Conservatism?--and others.

On page 166 of the book, Nelson states that the purpose of philosophy is "To learn how to reason more carefully, to identify and guard against common fallacies. To check ourselves for consistency. To find plausible beliefs and correct, or at least improve on, them. To combat false and harmful doctrines that people are suffering from. False beliefs are a hazard," she says. "Knowledge, on the other hand, is power." If this is what you think philosophy can and ought to be, then I encourage you to read this book.

Highly recommended: informed general readers, upper-level undergraduates, graduates and academics alike will find something here to chew on.

Quee Nelson's The Slightest Philosophy is a well-written, jargon-free critique of postmodern philosophy, tracking it from its skeptical and idealist origins in Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Hegel to its recent anti-realist manifestations in Rorty and the rest. Nelson also ambitiously and in take-no-prisoners-fashion connects that philosophical morass to deadly politics: "A Cambodian guerilla deep in a steaming jungle carries a paperback copy of Rousseau, and the next thing you know, a million people are dead." The political connections are less developed, but Nelson explains covers well some important philosophical developments in accessible and witty language.

This book is certain to raise the ire of the credentialed and tenured many who have happily adopted shape-shifting, post-modernist self-rationalization, as a basis on which to view world events and rationalize their own moral choices, secure in the knowledge that they are following in the footsteps of the "greats." For the author, the road less traveled ... and a detour very early on in the journey.

Herein is a rare, humor-filled, insider's insight into philosophy department indoctrination techniques of "smoking your own dope," abandonment of critical thinking, and the crushing of dissent. If you have ever wondered what it would have been like to study philosophy in school in the modern ages, look no further, and warn your college-age children. The author's common-sense, irreverent take on the rock-star like cult status of philosophical figures (Hume, Kant, et. al.), and the damage that their groupie-like heirs have wrought, provides a unique insight from a camp dissenter.

The interested would do well to view with skepticism the posted long-winded and ostensibly "positive" review, a classic example of "damning with faint praise," an oft-seen reviewer technique for discouraging potential readers from considering books with opposing philosophical views. The criticisms are not reflective of the actual content nor reflect the author's careful argumentation - most are out of context or off-topic -- smacking of a professor chastising a contrarian student, and seem almost a parody of the professorial archetypes so wickedly described in the book. The reviewer can't even resist getting off an irrelevant, vulgar, cheap shot at current political events. The author has clearly hit close to home, to drive the reviewer into such a frenzied long-winded recitation of "begats" and self-display, as if the mere recitation of any of the "popular" names in philosophy imbues either the speaker or the subjects themselves with gnostic infallibility.

There are terms in the book that require context and background, and a reference glossary for non-philosophy types would be useful, but given the subject matter, this is a strikingly jargonesque-free foray into the rarefied area of those considering themselves on the vanguard of epistemology. The author bravely dissects the logical fallacies generated from erroneous first principles of the anti-realists in clear, concise, non-obfuscating language, often in the form of a lively debate between a tenured philosophy professor and a "naïve" student (i.e., one who hasn't yet drunk the koolaid).

For non-philosophy buffs, such as myself, the author raises a veil to expose how some modern philosophers use of a layman's understanding of science (current favorites seem to be decades-old snapshots of quantum mechanics and ocular imaging) to prop up pet theories and overwhelm their generally non-scientific target audience, to suit their pet point of view.

Fascinating for both the content, and for the reaction that it inspires. A great addition to the library for those interested in the origins of many of today's fashionable, yet sinister, political and social philosophies.

Nelson in her book argues for "Vulgar Realism" and against postmodernist, antirealist notions. Nelson takes issue with the antirealist position that there exists no mind independent world of objects beyond our sensory experience. She places blame on Hume and secondarily Kant for ushering in irrationalism and antirealism, and asserts that postmodernism and its antirealist and idealist notions have had damaging consequences as result of their relativist conception of Truth. Almost 200 pages of her book consist of a bantering dialogue between Student and Professor tussling over naïve realism versus antirealism. In this theatrical debate the Student not surprisingly triumphs, at least in Nelson's mind. In this long and somewhat tiresome repartee, has anything new emerged? Have we been made any wiser? I think not.

Nelson's critique of postmodernist thinking is rather narrow in that she fails to give recognition to the excesses of rationalism and scientific models based on mechanistic and reductionistic explanations that counter-enlightenment thinkers sought to correct. It was a world devoid of the human emotional and spiritual elements that the counter-enlightenment thinkers protested against. While Nelson spends most of her energy on the antirealist aspect of postmodernist thinking, she breezes over the linguistic aspects of postmodernism, and the deep extent to which language seeps into our experience of reality. Yet ironically much of the debate between the Student and Professor hinges on definitional confusions on both sides, and incommensurable views of reality in which language is a beguiling player.

Nelson, as much as the postmodernist, interprets and constructs her reality. Early on in the section "Farewell to Reason" Nelson's interpretation of Kuhn's quoted passage reveals the problem of incommensurable views that arise out of language. She targets Kuhn as a key player in the Postmodernist camp, and lays a good degree of responsibility on him for sending us down the path toward unreason. She quotes from Kuhn: "Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction." Nelson in arguing against the antirealist view that two people cannot see the same thing uses Kuhn's passage as an example of what she rejects. However, she contorts Kuhn's sense of the word "see" to fit her argument. She uses "see" in the everyday common sense usage, such as when we "see" a thing that looks like a cup, and we agree it's a cup without too much fuss, and we pick it up and drink from it without worrying too much about its substantiality. Kuhn was using "see" in an entirely different sense, one more attached to scientific inquiry, and of little practical interest to contented coffee or tea drinkers. Nelson fails to inform us what Kuhn went on to say in the sentences that follow the quotation she selected in isolation to make her point. What Kuhn in fact goes on to say, and Nelson does not tell us, is crucial to avoiding a misunderstanding of the word "see" as he intends it. Kuhn continues, "Again, this is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other." Kuhn's sense of "see" is a complex cognitive, perceptual, interpretive one. He does not give argument to, for lack of a better term, the "thingness" of the world experienced by our senses. Nelson's misreading of Kuhn, ironically, is exemplary of what Kuhn was driving at in terms of incommensurable views of the world. Nelson and I can look at the same page in Kuhn's book and "see" something entirely different. The thingness of the black type and the thingness of the pages on which the type is found are for Kuhn not in question. In reading Nelson, what strikes most is how the very issue of construction and interpretation of reality expounded by postmodernists is an unwitting subtext that runs through the debate of the Student and Professor. Nelson has not been sufficiently attentive to the covert contextual shifts of meaning that occur when words like "world" and "thing" and "object" are used by different speakers.

Nelson's book has not altered the debate between realists and antirealists. While I think that it is simply foolish to say that tables and chairs as we human minds think of them exist in a world without minds, Nelson thinks otherwise. For me, such a world is unthinkable, though it can still exist. We can and do look at the same things and interpret them differently. We can only know objects, whether they have a mind independent status or not, as mind dependent things. Nelson feels uncomfortable in a world lacking absolutes to which one can progress, and her philosophy is driven by this need, as much as postmodernists find relativism more suited to their disposition. And the debate will continue. I do not find Nelson's argument that postmodern philosophy can create tyrants convincing. Tyrants always find justification somewhere, whether in antirealist notions or ideas of Absolute Truths. The debate that Nelson has engaged in is one of those philosophical debates in which the pendulum will eventually swing back to the middle, at least for a while, but will leave us little further ahead than we are. Nelson's book, as another round in the philosophical debate, offers ideas to think about, and perhaps she may sway some of the undecided. Those new to the debate should bear in mind that it is all too easy to be beguiled by language. In the final analysis, philosophy needs to go beyond these largely fruitless arguments. What is needed is not more pendulum swinging, but more of a kind of philosophy that acknowledges the shifting ground of our reality, that recognizes our limitations, our allurement to demystification and theories of everything, our easy entanglement in language, and asks, where do we go from here?

Q. Nelson gives a startling analysis of that branch of philosophy that is technically called "epistemology," "the study of knowledge." Epistemology asks such questions as, "what is knowledge," "how do we gain it," "what is the status or nature of the knowledge that we gain." It includes questions of the nature of the human mind, and whether we can trust experience.

Nelson is trying to understand why most contemporary philosophers are skeptics: why do they doubt the ability of humans to gain knowledge of the world, and of our experience of that world? She shows how modern skepticism is logical result of a 250-year intellectual development (the semi-technical word scholars use for this idea is "trajectory"), that begins in the work of Berkeley and Hume. She gives apt summaries of different thinkers, and argues that many of the most important ideas of modern western epistemology are non-sensical. Much of the work is done in dialogue form, and she doesn't hesitate to ask: what do you mean? why should I think that? what's your evidence? and so on.

She defends a position she calls "naive realism": experience gives us real, but not exhaustive knowledge. What I seem to perceive has an objective reality apart from my own experience.

I teach this stuff every semester, and her interpretations are solid, and her criticisms are apt. An exhilarating book that helps one think about these old ideas and debates in new way.

Quee Nelson (who successfully completed her graduate work in Philosophy at a major university in California) writes with great style and humor. Most of the book is a witty and wide-ranging dialog between an unnamed student and his unnammed, male professor. Wrapped around the dialog are more arguments forcefully putting the case against skepticism, postmodernism, anti-realism, Richard Rorty and his followers. Indeed, the book should be titled "The Slightest Philosophy: How Realism Refutes Rorty." Despite Nelson's great writing, which avoids jargon more than any other book on her subject, does it slightly overstate the case to say her book is jargon-free or to say that her book is avoiding technical jargon? Even if Nelson manages to avoid using jargon to make her own points, isn't there some jargon appearing nonetheless? Isn't on the book's cover and elsewhere, for example, "ding an sich" and don't we encounter academic jargon (only sometimes undefined) such as 'postmodernism' (p.ix), 'qualia' (p.12), 'representationalism' (p.12), 'fideism' (p.17), 'solipsism' (p.22); "the fallacy of equivocation" (p.53), 'sense-data' (p.72); 'duck-rabbit' (p.75), 'veridical' (p.79), "geometric corpuscles" (p.89), 'effluvium' (p.89), "elan vital" (p.89), 'quarks' (p.89), "phenomenal world" (p.102), "noumenal world" (p.102), "pre-existing non-homogeneities" (p.118), "snee program" (p.130), "windowless monad" (p.134), "a priori" (p.158), "prima facie plausibility" (p.192), 'Coherentism' (p.193), 'Pyrrhonism' (p.197); "infallibilist Foundationalism" (p.202), "reductio ad absurdum" (p.202); "da kine" (p.203); and "epistemological conservatism" (p.220)? Further, don't we encounter some technical neologisms by Nelson like 'scene-image' (p.60), 'inviddying' (p.61), 'ex-sist' (p.81), and "gleebing monops" (p.152), even though she evidently intends 3 of these terms as parodies? We can easily look up all these terms but it would be even better if Nelson let us know exactly what she thinks these key words mean. Wouldn't a glossary and an index have been extremely useful, and shouldn't they appear in later editions of this terrific book? She does helpfully provide endnotes and sources for the treasure trove of quotations from many sources. I'm perfectly content with Nelson using the jargon itself, since her book is the best introduction to epistemology and since such a book should introduce students to key technical terms in the relevant literature. So don't hold this against the book at all.

Nelson writes on p.xi: "The modern philosophy canon is the anti-realist canon; if twenty of the world's most popular epistemologists since Berkeley were made into baseball cards, you might not find a good champion of the vulgar [naive realism] in the pack." But isn't the modern philosophy canon just as much the realist canon as the anti-realist canon, since both rivals are well-represented in the canon? Doesn't modern philosophy include such realists as Francis Bacon, materialist Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, John Locke (believer in a mind-independent material substance), Thomas Reid, David Hume (after he retreats, on practical grounds, from skepticism), Immanuel Kant (since Kant thinks our phenomenal world of experience is due to a mind-independent noumenal world of things-in-themselves), and Soren Kierkegaard (who rejected Hegel's idealism), among others? Nelson evidently meant to say the true claim that the anti-realist canon IS INCLUDED IN the modern philosophy canon rather than say the questionable claim that the modern philosophy canon IS IDENTICAL TO the anti-realist canon. Nelson's second claim about what 'might' be true about the top 20 most popular epistemologists since Berkeley is such an extremely watered-down claim that it is true, but is it still misleading? It's watered-down because almost anything 'might' be true. Monkeys might fly out of President Bush's butt and win the war in Iraq. Does Nelson unintentionally mislead us to underestimate the realists among the top 20 most popular epistemologists since Berkeley? She admits to J.L. Austin, Thomas Reid, and G. E. Moore, but does she overlook or underemphasize these other realist candidates for the top 20 most popular epistemologists since Berkeley: Sir Karl Popper, the earlier Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Santayana, the later Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, scientific socialists and materialists such as Karl Marx and Mao Zedong, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Kuhn (who says in footnotes that "on pain of solipsism" he cannot avoid realism), the earlier Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, and John Searle?

I'd love to see Nelson instruct us more on how the 5 senses often mislead us. I'd love to see her confront the non-technical basics of a chapter on perception in an introductory textbook of psychology, and then apply her philosophy to it.

May Nelson turn her superb skills to legal, moral and political philosophy in her next book, though some points of morality and politics do crop up here. Is her isolated crack (irrelevant to her main argument) about her imagining some works of Rousseau being carried by the killers in the killing fields of Cambodia a cheap shot against Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Isn't Rousseau better understood as a defender of liberty and peaceful change through democracy? For example, nobody rightly blames The Beatles for the mass murders by Charles Manson's "Family" just because Manson was inspired to murder by The Beatles White Album. Similarly, isn't it unfair to blame Rousseau for the mass murders in Cambodia hundreds of years after Rousseau even if those Cambodian psychopaths somehow found inspiration in Rousseau (which Nelson never shows in her book)? Indeed, Rousseau never called for the socialist abolition of private property much less call for any socialist violence needed to abolish private property. The Beatles sang the praises of peace, love and freedom and are not responsible for The Manson Family mass murders inspired by misinterpretations of the Beatles' White Album. Rousseau defended liberty and democracy, so doesn't he avoid responsibility for The Killing Fields of Cambodia?

Nelson ambitiously claims to have solved Hume's Riddle of Induction. But on p.210, does she fall short of this great ambition and underplay the distinction between physical and logical possibility by saying: "If something is physically impossible, then it's impossible. Period."? Isn't Hume's Riddle: "how can we make inductive generalizations that are as certain as valid deductions, where there is no logical possibililty that all the premises can be true and the conclusion false?"? Isn't Hume right to say we are so far unable to do this without the logical flaw of begging the quesiton at issue by assuming as a premise that the future must be relevantly like the past and that natural laws must remain constant over time? Further, isn't Hume then right to conclude that we are unable even to get probably true scientific generalizations without the logical flaw of begging a key question at issue, namely, whether the future will be relevantly like the past (and whether natural laws will stay constant over time)?

Despite my mere questions about 4 sentences in Nelson's book of nearly 300 pages, there are two main take-away lessons from Nelson's excellent book: 1) Realism is true; and 2) "Admittedly, Hume was undeniably great." (Nelson, p.19.) I urge you to read this book.