Daniel Dennett has said that in twenty-five years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today, and remarks that the spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will “gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance.” What, according to Richard Dawkins, will clinch it (at any rate for the qualified or the gullible) is a “final scientific enlightenment” fulfilling Einstein’s dream of “unifying the fundamental laws of physics”. This vision will “deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.”

What information is such that, if only we had enough of it, we should all become tolerant and peaceful? What knowledge will make prayer redundant? Curing disease, prolonging life, uncovering the sources of violence (including religious), will that be enough to keep us from our knees? Treating existential angst as a pandemic to be treated with Prozac, would that be preferable to religion? That global chat may have an eirenic effect sounds reasonable, but that religion will prove redundant when the universe succumbs to a unified theory is almost embarrassing in its insensitivity to human nature. Missing here is something Nietzsche grasped when advising us not to “underestimate the value of having been religious”, something touched on by his further question: how, if we have not been religious, can we then “grow wise”?

Some wisdom may nevertheless be distilled from an idea that Dennett himself gave us much more than ten years ago: the intentional stance. This is a strategy recommended by Dennett for predicting without undue fuss how behavioural systems will behave. It assumes beliefs and desires and thus amounts to attributing an element of rationality to the system in question. It sounds like something human systems do all the time, though later Wittgensteinians will say it is a matter not of predicting but of sharing (institutions, practices, beliefs, judgements). But beliefs, yes, and desires, and having reasons based on these; that’s how we understand our understanding of each other.

Dennett, however, packaged the stance in a new proviso: we adopt it (with its “folk” psychology) because in doing so we make good enough predictions of how the system will behave, without having to go into the biological and other abstractions of functional design or the details of the underlying chemistry and physics. But in principle these would give us better or even perfect predictive possibilities, and (a special twist) the system could just as well be inhuman and even a minimal machine, for we are essentially no different. It would be nice to know if anyone has ever performed a perfect prediction about us on such a basis. But Dennett has a lot of theory and a quantum of metaphysics to support his faith in the possibility.

By association something similar might be said on behalf of faith in its traditional setting. Let us talk not of religions, with banners, creeds, doctrines, revelation, etc., but of a religious attitude, a way of reading and responding to the world. To suppose such an attitude should “work” predictively is, of course, to fall immediately into the kind of superstition wisdom-seekers seek to avoid. A religious stance, as we might call it, has no predictive function; indeed it has no instrumental attachments at all except in so far as it might enable one to rise above eventualities, above fortune and misfortune, daily joy and suffering. Its “function” would be to make room for a sense of wholeness or participation in the here and now that is not the mere negation of everyday suffering and loneliness. It is, however, like Dennett’s intentional stance, provisional, though in a different way. His is a useful makeshift in a state of less than certainty due to the contingent unavailability (or impracticability) of better but more cumbersome predictive strategies. Our stance, also provisional and lacking certainty, has no better stances to appeal to except notionally that enjoyed exclusively by God. With nowhere further to go, nor any theory or metaphysics to appeal to other than by way of decoration, the alternative to faith from the point of view of this stance is revocation. Being an entirely private matter and impervious to the outcomes of any predictions, faith can in principle be revoked at any time. Having faith is deciding not to revoke it. Uncertainty and ignorance, says this stance, are not such bad things after all.

Philosophers at their best bear witness to the strain of having undergone life’s stages themselves. They will tend to agree with Nietzsche that having been religious helps. Wittgenstein tempered his atheism with the acknowledgment that he would never try to deprive others of their faith. Recently the words “post-secular age” have formed on lips where we would least expect to find them; lifting an Enlightenment embargo, Habermas allows that religious experience can benefit public debate on ways and means to the good life, even if (reasonably) insisting that the terms in which the good life is defined be kept purely secular. Predicting long-term human behaviour is tricky from any stance, but (to parry Dennett’s own risky surmise) a redefined religion might be just what minds over-exposed to sheer information will find they need to have any mindset at all.

Further reading
On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory, David Martin (Ashgate, 2005)

Alastair Hannay is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo and author of Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (Routledge)

Read all fifty ideas and more in the special 50th issue of tpm

A philosopher confessing to being superstitious would be a bit like a priest admitting to being an atheist: true more often than you’d think but totally unacceptable to admit. However, it’s probable that virtually no one is without superstition whatsoever. In my own case, the closest I come to having one is that I don’t like to “tempt fate”. There are no “wills”, only “should bes”; no plans without a qualifying “I’m hoping that…” or “I’m planning to…”

Of course, I know it is absurd to think that the course of history will change just because I have the temerity to believe I know what’s going to happen next. I like to think that my caution here is based on the more intellectually respectable thought that the future is unknown and so we should never be so complacent as to assume tomorrow will involve anything more specific than the revolving of the planets or the spinning of atoms.

This is counter to the spirit of age, which asserts that we must think positively, almost willing a better future to arrive. The success of Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent Smile or Die (Bright-sided in the US), along with a rash of sceptical articles, provides some hope that the cult of positivity is losing its appeal. What should replace it is not negative thinking but realism, and the most brutal realistic fact we need to accept is that it all can end any … second … now!

I find this thought helpful rather than dispiriting. It should encourage us to make the most of the time we have, and to ensure that we do our best to make things happen, rather than assume they just will. The religious appending of “God willing” or “Insha’Allah” to any statement about the future is a helpful reminder of this uncertainty, but it can also go too far in understating the importance of our own actions in creating the future we want. In search of a secular alternative, I came across a Stoic phrase “if nothing prevents”. It seems it was never used like “God willing” as an everyday expression, but it does the trick for me.

The downside to this way of thinking, however, is one you’re currently observing: it becomes hard to say anything simple about the future without first getting all sorts of caveats out of the way. Assuming I’ve done that, and without tempting fate, let me just say that tpm is looking forward to a changed future. After 13 years, I’ll be moving out of the magazine editor’s chair and onto what I image to be the editor-in-chief’s chaise longue. I’ll still be very much involved, so this is not a time to start peeling onions as I say my goodbyes. But from issue 52, tpm will have a fresh, energetic and inspiring new editor, James Garvey, who many of you will know from our Talking Philosophy blog. James has been the stand-out candidate for my successor ever since we’ve been thinking of moving me on, and I’m delighted that he is crazy enough to try to build on the anarchic behind-the scenes mess I leave in my trail. I am confident James is going to reinvigorate the magazine without abandoning the values and qualities that have brought us this far.

If nothing prevents, that is.

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tpm cover art by Felix Bennett

Particularly in the “continental” philosophical tradition, the standard position has been powerful since Kant’s “Copernican revolution”, which brought about the “transcendental turn” in philosophy: no longer should we ask how our knowledge corresponds to objects, but rather how objects correspond to our knowledge. We investigate therefore not what we know, but under what conditions we know what we know. Phenomenology and Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology both stem from this tradition, as do those philosophies that assert a “correlation”, to use a term coined by Meillassoux in his 2008 book After Finitude, between thought or language and the world. Since, however, any philosophy that asserts the priority of questions concerning what we can know over what there is follows the standard position, all philosophical antirealisms, whether in continental philosophy, the philosophy of language, moral and political philosophy, or the philosophy of science, share the standard position.

Accordingly, the increasing numbers of philosophers interested in and identifying with speculative realism draw on a wide variety of philosophical problems, more usually associated with Anglo-American as opposed to continental philosophies. Those attending the first Speculative Realism workshop, for instance, discussed eliminativism and the philosophy of science; the metaphysics of powers and the philosophy of nature; object-oriented philosophy; and modality and ontology. The second workshop concentrated specifically on the nature of matter and the problem of materialism, drawing on materials from the philosophy of science and political philosophy, but also from Renaissance philosophy and the post-Kantian tradition alongside problems in contemporary metaphysics. For many contributors to these debates, the general revival in the fortunes of metaphysics in recent years across both main philosophical traditions entails a revaluation of philosophical resources from the history of metaphysics: theories of causation, philosophies of nature, idealisms and rationalisms.

Clearly realist (science, nature, objects and ontology), what makes these theories speculative is the degree to which Kant’s obstacles to realism are taken seriously, despite the theories’ objections to them. Therefore, rather than simply asserting realism against the standard position – to which the holder of that position might easily respond that the mere fact that a theory is being proposed reduces that theory to something posited by a finite rational being – speculative realism asserts that speculative means are the only ones available to philosophy for overcoming Kant’s Copernican revolution. Such realists, in other words, are also realists about the roots and grounds of the “transcendental” philosophies that Kant and his successors put forward. The challenge speculative philosophers therefore pose to standard realists is how they propose to account for the domain of experience within their realisms, since any realism that cannot do this must be considered simply to deny that experience, with all its objects, moods and stable characteristics, takes place at all.

Meanwhile, Speculative Realism continues to gather contributors on an international scale: it is taught in graduate programmes in the US, conferences are held in many universities, and an anthology of works will shortly appear in German. The roster of those attracted to the position continues to grow, and the number of workshops and conferences is correspondingly on the increase. The fact that contemporary philosophy has also recently seen a rise in neo-Hegelianism, in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, for instance, demonstrates the centrality not only of the problem of realism, but also that of transcendental arguments in contemporary philosophy. Like these philosophers, speculative realists persist in trying to solve the questions Kant posed two centuries ago.

Further reading
Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Ray Brassier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Iain Hamilton Grant is lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England and author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (Continuum)

tpm cover art by Felix Bennett

The idea I have chosen to write about here, which has been explicit in my work for at least a decade, illustrates this last point nicely. Conceptual innovation, the growth of meaning, is a recurring theme in the “worldly” philosophy of science I developed in Defending Science: Within Reason (2003). The meanings of scientific terms evolve as science advances; but this is not necessarily, as radical proponents of “meaning-variance” supposed, an impediment, but can actually contribute to the rationality of the scientific enterprise. (Think of the evolution of the concept of DNA over the century since Friedrich Miescher discovered “nuclein”.) As we should have learned from “grue”, supportiveness of evidence is not a purely logical matter, but depends on increment of explanatory integration, which in turn depends in part on the fit of scientific vocabulary to real kinds. This is one reason why purely formal models of science (deductivist, inductivist, or probabilistic) don’t work; and why scientists are constantly altering and adapting their vocabulary.

By the time of my paper “On Logic in the Law” (2007) – where I argued that purely formal models of legal reasoning are no more defensible than purely formal models of science – the growth-of-meaning idea had also woven into my legal thinking. Like the meanings of scientific terms, the meanings of legal terms – “insanity”, “causation”, “responsibility”, “privacy”, “marriage”, etc. – evolve: sometimes, as in the sciences, by the accretion of new information, more often by adaptation to new social conditions and values, or to technological advances. But this doesn’t mean that legal decisions are bound to be arbitrary and capricious; on the contrary, conceptual flexibility and growth is just what a legal system needs if it is to adapt appropriately as the world changes.

I was never a big fan of the “necessary and sufficient conditions” style of conceptual analysis; always resisted the idea that philosophical concepts “have no history”; and have long been given to neologisms (think of “foundherentism”). So, at some not-quite conscious level, I must always have known that conceptual innovation matters in philosophy, too. And by the time of “The Legitimacy of Metaphysics” (2007) this idea was weaving itself into an understanding of philosophical inquiry as continuous with scientific inquiry, and as depending on experience – though not, like scientific inquiry, recherché experience obtainable only by means of fancy instruments, etc., but close attention to familiar kinds of experience.

The growth of meaning can advance inquiry; but this is not to say that “change is good”, tout court. Some meaning-change advances inquiry; but some impedes it. So recently, in “The Growth of Meaning and the Limits of Formalism” and “The Meaning of Pragmatism” (2009), I have begun trying to articulate the difference: good, productive meaning-change is the kind we see when old words acquire new information or new words allow us to escape false dichotomies; bad, damaging meaning-change is the kind we see when old words acquire misinformation or are so stretched or fragmented that they lose meaning, or when new terms embody confusions – or are just foam-rubber public-relations words.

Finally: an admission I have deliberately been withholding thus far: the growth-of-meaning idea is not exactly new. “Meaning grows,” C. S. Peirce wrote, more than a century ago; “in use and in experience … . Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us a very different meaning than they bore to our barbarous ancestors.” But because this not-so-new idea is so alien to today’s resolutely ahistorical post-Fregean neo-analytic philosophy, its potential to illuminate familiar issues and to cross-fertilise with other ideas has gone largely unnoticed; which, I suppose, is why it was only relatively recently that I began to appreciate the “fresh truths” to which it can contribute.

Further reading
Defending Science: Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism, Susan Haack, (Prometheus, 2003).

Susan Haack is professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Miami

Read all fifty ideas and more in the special 50th issue of tpm

Ophelia Benson

On July 8, 2003 Chris Bertram, who was already an old hand at blogging as “Junius”, kicked off the group blog Crooked Timber with an introduction in cod Addisonian style, then did a post in more modern vein.

“A common device in the broad-canvassed social-realist novel is to have events throw together people who don’t seem to belong in the same universe, in such a way as to reveal the deeper social reality. … Such a real-life even occurred yesterday when an express train hit a minibus in central England. On the train were the Bishop of Hereford and a Tory MP, in the minibus were men variously described as Arabs and as Iraqi Kurds. … These people had all been drawn to Worcestershire by the promise of work. The agribusiness that hired them obtained their Labour from gangmasters based in cities like Birmingham. Perhaps some of the shoppers who bought their broccoli or cabbages did so because they had a preference for ‘English produce’ over the sugar-snap peas flown from Zambia. Who knows? Anyway, those fields are not tilled by cap-tipping yokels with pieces of straw between their teeth living in tied cottages.”

I want to read more. This is an outrage.

Brian Leiter started Leiter Reports a few weeks later, on August 22, 2003. He began, and decidedly did not finish, with the Discovery Institute, then along with more on the DI, Intelligent Design, revisions to a biology textbook, and the Texas School Board (do we detect a theme?), there’s an entry on “Derrida and Bullshit”:

“It was John Searle who famously remarked that Derrida’s work is the kind of stuff that gives bullshit a bad name. And now we have yet another case in point, thanks to interviews with Habermas and Derrida about the September 11th attacks on the U.S. Although I have my reservations about Habermas as a philosopher, there is no question that he is an important public intellectual and critic, especially in Europe (there are no public intellectuals in the U.S., since there is no public intellectual discourse, but that’s a topic for another day). And the integrity of Habermas on this score, and the ridiculousness of Derrida, comes out very nicely in this interview.”

But no, we can’t read the interview, we must press on. To June 15, 2007, when Jean Kazez started In Living Color with a post on her recent trip to Alaska, which turns out to be “all mountains, all spruce trees, full of light, and prodigiously filled with cappuccino machines.” Climbing up the page we get a post on the ethics of eating, one on examining ways of living and asking “how many planets would it take if everyone lived that way?”, and one on the morality we share with other apes.

“Because we are not just apes, we are capable of feeling concern beyond our group, but that means going way beyond the deep-seated, emotionally-rooted morality we have in common with apes. We have to use ‘reason’, which is much more fragile and involves a much greater effort.

“We can see, for a moment, that animals matter just like human beings, but it’s very natural to fall back to feeling that they don’t matter much at all. Taking animals seriously means resisting the very strong pull of our genes and emotions.”

On May 23, 2007 Feminist Philosophers began with posts on size-zero models, rape, a book on women’s occupational health, immigration and breastfeeding, makeup and veils, and “Pornography and Labiaplasty”. That’s right.

“Lih Mei Liao and Sarah Creighton have recently published a study in the British Medical Journal looking at the causes and effects of cosmetic labia/genitoplasty. They interviewed healthy adults who had undergone surgical reductions in ‘normal’ labia to find the reasons given for wanting this procedure. They found pornography was often implicated.

“They also suggest that the increase in numbers having this surgery is leading to a further increase in numbers wanting the surgery. They argue that the increased numbers of cosmetically altered labia contribute to the narrowing of our ideas about what counts as ‘normal’, leading women to feel greater concern about their own bodies, thereby increasing demand for labiaplasty.”

Stephen Law of the eponymous blog is another 2007 entrant. On February 7 of that year he started with a post on Intelligent Design along with one querying “the conclusion that the designer is all-powerful and all-good”. Then came Faith Schools, Moral Relativism, and “Relativism or Authoritarianism: you choose!”

“It’s precisely because Liberals think there really is a non-relative truth to discover about what’s right and what’s wrong that they place so much emphasis on questioning and critical thinking. If we simply invent or make up morality, why bother being so scrupulously careful about getting it right? If every moral opinion is a good as every other, then the judgement I arrive at after much careful thought will be no better than the one I started with. If relativism were true, there would be no point bothering with the sort of critical thinking Liberals recommend.”

A public conversation by and with philosophers has been a conspicuous feature of the past decade, and one that seems likely to keep expanding in the next one.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels. Her Threads column appears in every issue of tpm. Read them as soon as they are published by subscribing to the magazine.

tpm cover art by Felix Bennett

Neuroscience, psychology and philosophy here meet in richly promising combination, giving rise in the usage of its proponents to a new name: neurophilosophy. The armchair speculations of traditional philosophical enquiry here yield place to something with a more solid basis and some surprising and suggestive findings already to hand. Even before fMRI studies on decision and volition began to suggest that these are pre-conscious processes, we knew that people whose brain hemispheres had been separated by commissurotomy seemed to be two sometimes competing centres of selfhood; and studies of brain chemistry have provided insights into the nature of mental disturbance, emotion and social bonding (the voles of Patricia Churchland are a now familiar example of the last).

Without question, empirical neuroscience is teaching us much already, and will teach us vastly more along these lines as time goes by. It is an important project. It is not either sceptical or critical of this project to say, nevertheless, that a sense of proportion has to be kept regarding its philosophical promise. For when one thinks about persons, their characters, what they know and believe, the frameworks of concepts that organise their view of the world and their attitudes and responses to it, and the way they give weight to competing reasons for action, the neurophilosophical approach is only going to be part of the story, because in principle it cannot be the whole story. The reason is that minds have to be understood “broadly” as opposed to “narrowly”, in the same sense that we speak of “broad content” and “narrow content” in relation to mental content generally. For instance, individuating (“picking out”) referential thoughts necessarily involves mention of the referents of the thoughts; thus, to individuate a thought of a chair from the thought of a book necessitates reference to the chair and the book outside the thinker’s head.

The implication is that the character and content of one’s mind is the result of its interaction with the social and physical settings in which it became functional and increasingly mature. Any individual mind is accordingly the manufacture of a community of minds and of input from the world; it grows by continuous feedback in interaction with parents, teachers, the community, and the physical environment. Therefore to identify what a person knows and believes, and to describe how he thinks, is to see him as a node in a complex of relationships with other minds and a manifold of accompanying external stimuli. The point might illustratively be put by saying that a mind is the product of many brains in interaction; that externally-caused excitations – many of them from other brains – of some subset of sensory surfaces (fingertip dendrites, rods and cones, taste buds, ear drums) are necessary conditions for mental life, to which ineliminable reference must be made in explaining mental content; in short, that mind is brain plugged into two kinds of environment, social and physical, and a brain not thus plugged in is not the seat of a mind.

Perhaps this is obvious enough, but if so it does not seem to have been given full weight even in the preliminary indications that fMRI gives us about the nature of volition, decision, the place of emotion in reasoning, and like matters of philosophical significance. For example: experiments which suggest that decisions are reached some time (split seconds are aeons in neurological terms) before a subject is aware of having made a decision, take the form of choosing which button to press after receiving a given stimulus. Such decisions are a far cry from deciding where to invest one’s savings or whether to accept a certain job offer. Likewise, the suggestion that moral responses are hard-wired and amygdala-based fails to take into account the way moral attitudes change in individuals and societies over time and as a result of discussion and information.

Again: this is not to call neuropsychology and neurophilosophy into question; it is merely a reminder that questions about mind are not exhaustible by investigation of the brain; there is here still work for philosophy, without a prefixed “neuro”, to do.

Further reading
Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy, Patricia Smith Churchland (MIT Press, 2002)

AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Read all fifty ideas and more in the special 50th issue of tpm

tpm cover art by Felix Bennett

I want to recall that besides the Fukuyama-type pronouncements which hailed the “end-of-communism” event in terms of a messianic narrative of “good news” concerning the coming arrival (not here yet, Fukuyama constantly emphasised) of the end of history, other commentators were far less sanguine.

For example, also writing in 1990 but clearly wanting to keep a Marxist flame alive, the historian E.P. Thompson insisted that it was precipitate to suppose that the end of Soviet communism in the East was spelling or will spell a final victory for the capitalist liberal democracies of the West. He suggested we would do better to think of the scene as comparable to one where we see a wrestler being thrown off balance “when his opponent slips”. One wrestler may fall before the other, and in that moment we might expect victory for the one still currently standing, but soon enough both are flat out on the canvas. The specialist of Cold War international relations Fred Halliday developed the wrestling analogy in a different way, suggesting against Thompson that in truth the bout was simply over: at issue was not just a “slip” but an event in which one wrestler has completely “thrown down” his opponent. The West “has not lost its antagonist, it has subjugated it”.

And yet, in the light of a text that has taken its time to come to us, it is clear to me that neither Thompson nor Halliday hit the nail on the head. While the former was conceptually acute he was historically adrift; the latter, on the other hand, was historically honest but conceptually confused. Halliday was surely right about the history: one side had decisively defeated the other. On the other hand, however, Thompson was surely right about the dialectic: the one still standing might not, precisely as a result of the sudden collapse of his opponent, be so secure himself.

What happens when one comes to the view that one’s enemy in a current conflict has effectively ceased to pose an existential threat? The text I had been reading would insist that, at this point, conceptually speaking, the enemy effectively disappears as an enemy – in the throw, through it, the other who had been the principal antagonist (there he is, the old antagonist, just lying there, as Halliday implies) no longer provides the resistance of an actual antagonist. In subjugation, in defeat, he is transformed.

The victorious wrestler by contrast is not fundamentally transformed by his victory at all. On the contrary, for the winner, the whole fighting regime is still in place. The wrestler, qua wrestler, was made to wrestle. Everything still works – the martial machine still has its intentional directedness – but now, with the former principal antagonist no longer offering any effective resistance, that is, with the effective disappearance of that antagonist qua antagonist, this martial intentionality has lost its Bedeutung (its objective reference). The wrestler flails around like a half-wit, lunging at the empty space, grappling the air, groping about there where once there was an enemy. The one thing needed: a new enemy.

The disappearance of the principal antagonist of the West led many who were happy to see the back of Soviet communism to rejoice in a wave of Fukuyama-type pronouncements of a Hegelian end of history. But others – others who were just as pleased, honestly delighted, to see the collapse of that totalitarian nightmare – others who were beginning to take seriously the philosophical ideas of the German jurist and professor of law Carl Schmitt, anticipated no such coming end. Instead, as Derrida foresaw in 1990, what one could see coming was that “this West will be driven to seek to pose itself anew – and thereby find repose in itself again – through opposing still identifiable enemies.” But who? asked Derrida in 1990. “China? Islam?”, he wondered aloud.

In 1990 Derrida was not able to cite the new name, the new event, through which the Western political collectivity would “find repose in itself again” in opposition. Nevertheless, Derrida’s text also reveals that it was already on the horizon: “we could say a great deal today…on the [specific] choice of the example [of the enemy] in Schmitt: Islam.”

If we could already say a great deal only a year after the “fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall” event, how much more in the decade after the “9-11” event?

What all this suggests to me is that the idea from philosophy that has shown itself to be the most important over the last decade as we have actually lived through that time belongs to a figure who is (perhaps not coincidentally) only now beginning to penetrate discussions in the mainstream of philosophy in the English-speaking world. It belongs to Carl Schmitt who in his astonishing, challenging and profoundly troubling text The Concept of the Political (written in 1927 but translated into English only in 1976) identifies the specific and irreducible political distinction, the distinction of opposition itself, as “the distinction between friend and enemy”.

Further reading
Rogues, Jacques Derrida (Stanford University Press, 2005)

Simon Glendinning is reader in European philosophy at the London School of Economics and director of the Forum for European Philosophy

Read all fifty ideas and more in the special 50th issue of tpm

Jay Kennedy

Kennedy discovered the pattern when he rearranged the texts back into the form they would have had on the original papyri. Kennedy further argues that this pattern supports the claim made by Aristotle that Plato was a Pythagorean, and also points to hidden doctrines, contained at significant intervals in the text.

Kennedy has set out his arguments at length for a more general readership for the first time in the forthcoming issue of tpm. He has also been invited to the Institute for Classical Studies in London to talk about his findings.

Scholarly reaction has been cautious but far from dismissive. Leading Plato scholar Harold Tarrant told tpm, “I was, at first, pretty sceptical of the theory (as an academic is taught to be), but as I read through Jay’s arguments I became convinced that they should be taken seriously. …What would be really helpful now is for somebody to duplicate Jay’s work and find out how far she or he is led to the same conclusions, as there is a subjective element in the interpretation of results. What I can say is that if it stands up to this kind of scrutiny, then the work has important implications for our understanding of Plato’s working environment and even for Plato’s own philosophy – since his compositional techniques do relate closely to matters of theory.

“My reservations are no greater than would apply to any project in which the results are unfamiliar, the tests need independent verification, and the interpretation requires some sophistication – best if many minds are turned to it.”

John Dillon, a leading authority on Platonism, said “This is not the first time it has been suggested that there are at least some traces of a concern with mathematical proportions evident in the Platonic dialogues – particularly the Republic – and some evidence of a Golden Mean being employed, but I think that Jay Kennedy has been able to carry this to a new level of probability by employing stichometry, or the counting of lines on the basis of the probable length of a papyrus line in Plato’s day.”

Andrew Barker, a leading authority on ancient Greek music, said “I’m impressed by Jay Kennedy’s methodology, and I think he may be on to something. I’m not an expert in this field, but he seems to have done some quite thorough research in ancient methods of counting lines and so on, and the results he’s come up with look too neat to be accidental. … It’s clear that if his quantitative results (however interpreted) are confirmed, and if scholars who know more about stichometry etc than I do approve of his methods, he will have shown something quite startling about Plato’s methods of composition. That would be very interesting and significant, even if (as I rather suspect) we couldn’t find anything in it to change our views about Plato’s philosophy. … But we shall have to wait for scholarly reactions to his claims – probably, in fact, till he has published the book I think he is planning; one short paper is unlikely to be enough to elicit any clear reaction from the experts.”

Angela Hobbs, a Plato scholar and Reader in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at Warwick University, said “I believe it is perfectly possible that Plato embedded symbols and allegories within his dialogues; it is even possible, as Kennedy claims, that he embedded a twelve-note musical scale in each of his dialogues. We know that Plato was deeply interested in mathematical and musical theory, and there were many reports in antiquity (including from Aristotle) that Plato secretly transmitted esoteric doctrines to a chosen few.”

However she is “not yet convinced” that Kennedy has “successfully demonstrated that such a musical structuring of the dialogues actually exists, though I am keeping an open mind until more study is done. The problem is that if you claim that ‘significant’ concepts occur in the dialogues at mathematically ‘significant’ moments, you run an obvious risk of begging the question. Who – other than the modern scholar – is going to define ‘significant’?”

Even if the symbolism could be proved, “this still leaves the question of whether, and in what ways, our understanding of the dialogue might be enriched. Would the discovery of such symbols add anything more than elegant emphasis to concepts (such as harmony) that are clearly central to the dialogue anyway?”

The debate, already lively on scholarly blogs, looks set to continue.

Subscribe now September 2010 to read Kennedy’s article in issue 51 of tpm