My Philosophical Journey So Far

I contend that philosophy is a discipline distinct from the sciences pursuing questions not addressed by the sciences. Put classically, these questions concern being, truth, goodness, beauty and the one. But, as a substantive and methodological naturalist, I also maintain that philosophical questions are best pursued using the best current scientific theories and evidence available. There is no successful first philosophy. My working hypothesis, then, is that reality is a natural phenomenon where the characterization of what it means to be natural in all its variety derives from our best current scientific theories and evidence.

I count Aristotle, Aquinas and Sellars as my philosophical forbearers. Bertrand Russell claimed that people come to philosophy from either mathematics or religion. Religion, specifically Roman Catholicism, did it for me, though I enthusiastically confess that as far back as I can remember I have loved mathematics. In high school, presenting Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God was an early entry into Aquinas, philosophy and theology. My undergraduate degree was in Philosophy and the Classics. But, though I had naively thought of pursuing a major and graduate work in Latin and was told by a good friend that I should do History and was assigned (yes!) to major in Political Science, I knew from my first philosophy course (a course in metaphysics) that it had to be philosophy. Actually, my first philosophy class was in Aristotelian logic. I loved it. But metaphysics bowled me over, especially when I thought that I had found an inconsistency in my professor’s argument about -- sadly, I can’t remember!

My initial philosophical training was in Aristotelian Thomism. More precisely, it was called by its detractors “naïve realism”. It was a version of Thomism taught at St. Louis University in the 1950’s by Jesuit philosophers who had been trained at the University of Toronto under the tutelage of philosophers who followed Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritan. The naïve realist Thomists stand in contrast with both the more traditional Dominican Thomists who stuck more closely to scholastic metaphysical categories and philosophical methods, separating their philosophy from the sciences or adding it on as a distinct layer. Both schools parted company with the Transcendental Thomists whose stars were at the time theologian/philosophers Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner who took their philosophical approach from the Jesuit Belgian philosopher/theologian Joseph Marechal who had found in Aquinas, he claimed, an Hegelian way to break out from the Kantian phenomena and engage with the noumena.

Masters’ work and teaching mathematics and algebra in a high school followed. The director of my masters’ thesis was George Klubertanz who was working on Aquinas’ account of human nature, in particular, its psychological components and how to fit Aquinas’ views with the then current science of psychology. Part of his research program was to ascertain Aquinas’ overall views on human cognitive capacities. So he was systematically working through all of Aquinas’ works with the help of his graduate students. For my part, I worked on answering the question of what in Aquinas’ view was the object of the human intellect (that is, what precisely was it set up to achieve) as he detailed it in one of his early works, his four-volume commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Yes, four big volumes in Latin! Commenting on the works of noted predecessors was one of the major sorts of academic production for medieval university scholars in the 13^th century.

My path to further work in philosophy was a long, circuitous one. After the high school teaching, I moved on to study theology for four years, the Vatican II variety. Doing so at this particular time, allowed me a first hand encounter with the “tired” scholastic philosophy in terms of which Roman Catholic doctrine had been developed over a number of centuries after Aquinas and with the new ways of bringing philosophical understanding to bear on religious faith being deployed by theologians and philosophers, often influenced by both transcendental Thomism and by major continental philosophers such as Heidegger. But, perhaps, my most lasting conclusion of these years was that theology, though considered the queen of the sciences by its practitioners, was utterly dependent on its handmaiden, philosophy and that theology’s most helpful handmaiden would be one that allied itself with the best of the current sciences. So the scorecard showed Aristotle over Plato, Aristotelian Thomism over its multiple alternatives, naively realistic Thomism over transcendental Thomism, and most especially scientifically based philosophy over its multiple alternatives, broadly, both the Anglo-American analytic and Continental philosophical traditions.

My philosophical destiny spelled out philosophy of science. But what science(s) should I study? Of course, up until the 1970’s physics was the science that philosophers of science usually studied, discussed, and philosophized about. Philosophy of biology was just emerging and philosophy of psychology was not yet on the horizon. My mentors thought that either of the first two would be good choices. I am not sure why I chose physics. I had no biology classes and only one physics course in high school. As far as I can remember the physics course was all about (and, maybe, only about) how an automobile works. I loved my high school chemistry class and loved all my mathematics classes. Perhaps, my love of mathematics or my uneasiness about bugs led me to the at the time traditional choice of physics! Anyway, after a number of summers studying mathematics and physics (the regular school years were all theological) I was off to the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana for two and a half exhilarating years studying physics and mathematics. However, I have to say that learning Aristotelian physics before one learns Newtonian physics is not the best way to structure one’s learning experience. Suppose one had learned from Aristotle that vacuums are not only physically but also metaphysically impossible. And suppose further that all of one’s problem sets in mechanics began with “Assume that there is a vacuum and find ….” But, I survived! I concluded I did not have the imagination to be a theoretical physicist and with all my ineptness in a lab there was no way that I could be an experimentalist. But I loved what I learned and then there was all the wonderful mathematics.

As with Aristotle, so with his disciples, after physics comes metaphysics. So it was off to Boston University after a semester of teaching philosophy at St Louis University and sitting in on my first philosophy of science class, as well as a class on quantum physics. And there I was utterly blessed to be able to work with Abner Shimony, a philosopher of science, non pareil, with a PhD in physics from Princeton and a PhD in philosophy from Yale who was in the midst of experimentally establishing Bell’s Theorem, thereby confirming at least a local version of quantum mechanics while disconfirming local Bohmean hidden variable theory. A dissertation on Wilfrid Sellars’ views on the relationships between ordinary knowledge (the manifest image) and scientific knowledge (the scientific image) was the result. The focus of the dissertation set my most enduring research question: how best to understand the substantive and methodological relationships between the sciences and other human cognitive achievements especially, as it turned out, in morality and religion.

After three years of temporary appointments at SUNY, Oswego and SUNY Plattsburg, I was lucky enough to land a tenure track position at Lewis and Clark College in 1975. (Even way back then in the 1970’s there was a job crunch!) The department needed a philosopher of science, but also someone who could do philosophy of religion, the specialty of the person, I was replacing. Fortunately, I could do both. And, I was assigned also to be the logic person, though my only formal course in logic was in Aristotelian logic, the course I mentioned earlier. I had not thought it necessary to take any logic courses at BU since philosophy of science, so I thought at least, had moved into the Kuhnian age. Logical positivism and logical empiricism were out and the key tool now for philosophers of science was history of science, not logic. So I assumed that my background in mathematics and studying formal logic on my own would be enough to get me through the logic part of the qualifying exam. It did, though only on a second try. On first try all my fellow graduate students joined me in failing the formal logic part of the exam, save one; and he failed all the other parts! My Aristotelian Thomistic background did not stand me very well either in the inductive logic part of the qualifying exam since it had to survive the scrutiny of a well-known Popperian. But, really learning formal logic by having to teach it turned out to be a great blessing. I have come to love it! So much so that I have been trying my hand at teaching some advanced logic in my retirement years.

At Lewis and Clark, my growing scientific naturalistic roots found rich soil in the mathematics, psychology and biology departments. There I found in each department colleagues (Bob Owens, mathematics, Bill Knowlton, psychology and Dave Martinsen, biology) who were very interested in philosophical questions. And with the benefit of a very enlightened general education program, I was able to team-teach upper division courses with these colleagues, courses in History and Philosophy of Mathematics, History and Philosophy of Psychology, and a number of different philosophically oriented courses that focused on such topics as sociobiology, neuroscience, and science and values. So, though I made good use of my background in physics in my Philosophy of Science course, my scholarly work did not turn down the path of philosophy of physics, but down the road of the rapidly emerging philosophy of biology and one branch of philosophy of psychology, one that led me from behaviorism to social learning theory to cognitive social learning theory, especially as worked out in the experimental and theoretical work of psychologist Albert Bandura. I actually think this way of getting into philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology was a stroke of good fortune. What one might call the standard philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology that emerged in the 1980’s got caught up, I think, in the abstractions of analytic philosophy and a research tradition that was too removed from the lively experimentally grounded theorizing that characterized the path from Skinner to social cognitive theory. Too much about supervenience and multiple instantiation and not enough (nothing really) about learned helplessness and self-efficacy. Later developments in cognitive science have, I think, been a benefit to a scientifically based philosophy of mind and link it with the social cognitive tradition and neuro-science.

It turned out that my colleagues in psychology and biology were most interested in questions about science and values and about issues that related to moral agency. In addition my long time departmental colleagues Clayton Morgareidge and Sevin Koont often focused their research and teaching in their upper division philosophical studies course on pressing social, political and moral issues. In this sort of intellectual environment, I began to focus on the question of what are the biological and psychological bases of moral agency. I was blessed with the company of wonderful colleagues not only at Lewis and Clark but also from the more than several colleges and universities in the Portland area. Especially important for me was a local philosophy of science discussion group that I and a fellow philosopher of science from Pacific University, Dave Boersema, got started and which endured for more than twenty five years. In addition, Dave found a place for philosophers of science in the Oregon Academy of Science, founding the section in history, philosophy and social study of science and we took ample advantage of this opportunity.

As the Latins tell us “tempora mutantur” and so the department now has entirely new members. We have grown from three to five, becoming a new entity with enhanced philosophical prowess. And the new department has graciously allowed and helped me mightily to keep my philosophizing going, enabling me to “hang in” philosophy by “hanging out” in the department. With the new department also came a very lively colloquium program and, a most stimulating, long lasting philosophy department discussion group. I have done some teaching after retiring, most regularly, as I mentioned, advanced logic; and I have been able to interact with and learn a lot from some of our very talented philosophy majors. Since retirement I have also had the opportunity to present some papers at international conferences that have resulted in publications and to present a number of papers at Pacific APA meetings. I have also got a Pacific Division APA version of the Society for Empirical Ethics going.

I continue to pursue issues in a scientifically based account of moral agency spurred on by the recent incredible upsurge of developments in biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, psychology, the study of cultural evolution on the science side of things and by a booming philosophy of biology, the blossoming of a scientifically-based moral psychology and experimental philosophy on the philosophy side. And recently I have gotten back to my Sellarsian roots, spurred on by Jim O’Shea’s attempt to find a middle way between Right Wing and Left-Wing Sellarsians. Of course, I claim the Right is right! Besides that J. L. Schellenberg’s monumental trilogy in philosophy of religion, admirably summarized in his Evolutionary Religion, has inspired me to develop a naturalistic alternative to his view of religion that confines it to the epistemic side of things. That effort was aided by my recent concentration on issues concerning the extended mind and situated cognition that is soon, I hope, to come to fruition in a published paper on distributed cognition (scientific research groups as cognitive entities).

While, as the years go by, more time is subtracted from philosophizing and spent attending to bodily systems that use to take care of themselves, there are always movies to watch, anxieties about the Detroit Tigers to face and the ups and downs of the Portland Trail Blazers to keep me alive and kicking.

And so the philosophical adventure continues for a while longer despite the inevitable neuronal decline. But my philosophical journey would not have occurred without my wife, Marie Schickel Rottschaefer, my inspiration and joy, with whom philosophical conversations occur at the deepest level and to whom I shall be eternally grateful.