Today's philosophers are similar to today's jazz musician in this important respect: There are so few major players contributing to either art form. Indeed there are too many technicians in both philosophy and jazz. I despair using the term "jazz" for the usual reasons. I came across a term that I like much better, a term coined by the late Bill Dixon, viz. "THIS music". Of course, Mr Dixon was a very creative musician. Let's try out an indexical, context sensitive term on philosophy. "THIS philosophy" doesn't work so well. A better term for philosophy today would, I suggest, be "THAT philosophy". This term in my idiolect refers to the few major players in philosophy. Whereas philosophy was termed by A. N. Whitehead to be a footnote to Plato, THIS music could be reckoned to be footnotes to greats such as line from Louis Armstrong through John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. So THAT philosophy line would be the usual greats - Plato, Aristotle, . . . , Descartes, ..., Hume, Kant, ..., Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, ..., Quine, Strawson, Dummett, Kripke, Davidson, Lewis, .... Beginning with Frege there have been a hell of a lot of footnotes by lesser lights flying around.
I have been attending recently to two exciting recent works by co-authors Raymond Martin & John Barresi, the long titles of which are The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (2006) and Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteen Century (2000). If you're anxious (or willing) to face up to the formidable engineering problems associated with the transmigration of souls (Soul Stirrin'), these are the books for you. Talk of Heaven and Hell is easy; the engineering is quite hard.
Personal Identity. In 1965 I became interested in the philosophical problem of personal identity via A. J. Ayer's The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Chapter III, "The Egocentric Predicament". My interest in the problem of personal identity was a result of my reading for Professor Edmund Gettier's epistemology course. Gettier and Professor Richard Cartwright were my best teachers in philosophy at Wayne State University ("Fabulous 1960s!") Ayer's Foundations was a set text for Gettier's course. In the space of 35 pages, Ayer argued for 'his' Carnapian verificationist program for solving the egocentric predicament, whist treating the problems of other minds, pain perception, privacy, and sense-data. At the same time I was very taken by P. F. Strawson's paper "Persons" that had appeared in the series Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
Strawson in "Persons" and in his later publication, Individuals put forth a view of the self or (logical) subject that he terms the "no-ownership" or "no-subject" doctrine of the self. This view, according to Strawson could be found in a lecture of Wittgenstein's (as reported by G. E. Moore) and in a doctrine that Schlick attributes (but misunderstands) to Lichtenberg. In a long footnote (one of the few to be found in Individuals), Strawson writes, "Lichtenberg's anti-Cartesian dictum is ... one I endorse, if properly used; but it seems to have been repeated, without being understood by most of Descartes' critics."(p. 90) Strawson excepts Wittgenstein and Schlick from those misunderstanding Lichtenberg's dictum. I was very intrigued by the No-Ownership view of the self. P. F. Strawson's son Galen has recently published a book on these fascinating topics entitled Selves.
Today I am persuaded that instead of a self, the self, an ego, the ego that (which) I fail to find upon introspection; what instead seems to make sense of me are selves - my selves which I do not own. This is a long story though. I'll have more to report on my reading - concerning soul, nous, selves, mind and the rest - at a later date. I'm certain that music, especially THIS music - has more to do with these matters that had been supposed or accounted for in our philosophy.
Ah! "We wanna to cook" now! - In the Green, Gonzales, and Ammons sense of "cook" and THIS music.
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