PHILOSOPHY

REPORT ON THE TWENTIETH WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY

Speaker: Victor Suchar, on 5 November 1998

The 20th World Congress of philosophy held in Boston, USA, from 10 to 16 August, was the last and the largest in this century, with 2500 attendees and 600 papers read in over forty specialist sections. The Congress is the top forum for philosophy and it takes place every five years.
The speaker started the session by quoting a critical article which appeared in the New York Times, indicating that a seemingly straight forward question: “What have we learned from philosophy in the 20th century?” may have stumped a panel of leading philosophers, including Willard Van Orman Quine, who decided not to answer it, and others who quibbled over the meaning of the words “we” and “learned”. According to the author of the article, “the most concise and least misleading answer to this question might be “nothing”. But “nothing” may be a personal answer, and one which may not be based on profound study - that is why the panel struggled with “we”.
Philosophy, unlike fundamentalist religion and ideology, does not provide unique answers. In a traditional sense philosophy is an involvement in a process of study and reflection about the origin and evolution of our conceptions of knowledge and value, and the conditions under which they are formulated.
Since the first Congress in 1900, when the encounter between Bertrand Russell and the Italian logician Peano signalled the beginning of analytical philosophy, this process was gradually abandoned. Its substitute in Britain and America was a new programme of research into the logical foundations and methodology of science and into the structure of language - meaning, verification, reference. On the Continent, there was a different orientation more closely related to the interpretation of historical and literary text.
The failure of philosophy in this century has not been the lack of fecundity - witness the great diversity among forty-some branches represented at this Congress, but its inability to link Knowledge, Action and Valuation.
This synthesis is in turn contingent on developments in science, which ,so far, has not come up with a unified view, but rather with serious contradictions between two of its fundamental theories (the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics).
Quoting from my own paper at the Congress: “ Science may be unable to offer a unified theory but it does make a fundamental contribution to our view of the world. The concept of harmony informed ancient, medieval and renaissance philosophy, and the Newtonian physics greatly influenced the Enlightenment.
The concept of uncertainty, in turn, has been a key to the philosophy in this century often with strange results, since we do not have a completely formulated theory of knowledge associated with quantum mechanics as Kant's is with Newtonian physics”.
The considerable vitality and experimentation which came through many of the papers was illustrated by the speaker with several examples.
An active discussion followed in which several members of the group commented that biology and genetics will reorient philosophy toward value and will take an equal place with fundamental physical theories in determining the course which philosophy will take in the next century.
Victor Suchar