The ideal of intellectual integrity, in life and literature

New Literary History

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 359-373

  Haack, Susan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750214575     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2005.0043     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Francis Bacon, "Of Truth" (1625), in Francis Bacon's Essays, ed. Oliphant Smeaton (London: Dutton, 1906), 1, 2
2. I have in mind George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), on the power of ignorance; Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) and William Cooper's The Struggles of Albert Woods (1952), on the role of personality in science; and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903), on intellectual integrity - the novel on which I shall focus in this paper
3. My source is The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, ed. J. Gross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 262
4. My source for these quotations is the anonymous introduction to Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903; New York: Random House, 1998), v-vii. Subsequent page references to The Way of All Flesh in the text are to this edition
5. Commentators tell us that Overton represents the mature Butler, reflecting on the life of the young Butler, as represented by Ernest. As Overton observes, "[e]very man's work . . . is always a portrait of himself.... I may very likely be condemning myself, all the time that I am writing this book, for I know that whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters" (The Way of All Flesh, 67)
6. Of course, what Alfred Lord Tennyson had written, in In Memoriam XXVII, was: "T'is better to have loved and lost / than never to have loved at all."
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator" (1874), in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 125-94, 127
8. Now may be the time to say explicitly that, while this paper is a study of certain traits of intellectual character, it is emphatically not an exercise in the genre now known as "virtue epistemology." When Sosa, Greco, et al. write of "epistemic virtues," they are referring to such human cognitive powers as perception, introspection, and reasoning - "virtues" in a generic sense, as in Quine and Lillian's talk of "virtues of hypotheses." Ernest Sosa, "The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1980): 3-52
9. John Greco, "Virtue in Epistemology," in The Canon and Its Critics, ed. Todd M. Furman and Mitchell Avila (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), 226-42
10. W. V. Quine and Joseph Lillian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1978)
11. Moreover, Sosa's and Greco's account is reliabilist; but in Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), chap. 7, I gave a detailed critique of reliabilism. When Zagzebski writes of "intellectual virtue" it is in the more specific sense, and so does concern intellectual character. However, like Sosa et al., Zagzebski adopts a kind of reliabilism; and her suggestion that knowledge can be defined by appeal to "acts of intellectual virtue" reveals that she too expects the concept of virtue to do epistemological work for which, in my opinion, it is quite uusuited - work that can only be done by the concept of evidence
12. Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
13. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-58), 1.19. References to this source hereafter cited in text by volume and paragraph number
14. Of course, this isn't intended as a complete theory of belief, only as a First step. For a fuller account, see my Defending Science - Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 156-61
15. Of course, this isn't intended as a complete theory of truth, either. For steps towards a fuller account, see my "Confessions of an Old-Fashioned Prig," in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7-30, 21-23
16. and "One Truth, or Many Truths? Yes, and Yes" (presented at a conference on Pluralism at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, October 2003)
17. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.44
18. See my "Epistemology Legalized: Or, Truth, Justice, and the American Way" (the Olin Lecture, Notre Dame School of Law, Notre Dame, IN, October 2004), in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 49 (2004): 43-61
19. I thought I remembered this from Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11-33; but this turns out to have been a false memory, and I have not been able to discover the real source
20. Quoted in The New Elements of Mathematics, ed. Carolyn Eisele (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 4:977
21. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA, ed. Günther Stent (1967; New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 59
22. See also James Gouinlock, Eros and the Good (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 272-74, on the growth of intellectual independence, and 274-89 on "the scientific ideal."
23. Percy W. Bridgmaii, "The Struggle for Intellectual Integrity," Harper's Magazine, December 1933
24. reprinted in Bridgmaii, Reflections of a Physicist (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 361-79 (reprinted source hereafter cited in text)
25. See Haack, Defending Science, chap. 1 and 4
26. See my Defending Science, 196-201
27. and "Scientific Secrecy and 'Spin': The Sad, Sleazy Saga of the Trials of Remune" (presented at a conference on "Sequestered Science: The Consequences of Undisclosed Knowledge," organized by the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, New York, October 2004), forthcoming in Law and Contemporary Problems
28. My source is Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century (1995; New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 31
29. See, for example, my "Confessions of an Old-Fashioned Prig," "One Truth or Many Truths?", and "Fallibilism, Objectivity, and the New Cynicism," Episteme 1, no. 1 (June 2004): 35-48
30. Marvin Frankel, 'The Search for Truth: An Umpireal View," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 123, no. 5 (1975): 1038
31. On this topic, Thorsten Veblen's The Higher Learning in America (1919; Stanford, CA: Academic Reprints, 1954) is classic; and Jacques Barzuu, The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (1968; 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), is also essential
32. James B. Twitchell, "Higher Ed., Inc.," Wilson Quarterly 18, no. 7103 (Summer 2004): 46-59, is depressingly illuminating on the present situation
33. See also my "Preposterism and Its Consequences" (1996), reprinted in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, 188-208
34. "Old-fashioned prigs" is Richard Rorty's phrase: "You can still find [philosophers] who will solemnly tell you that they are seeking the truth ... lovably old-fashioned prigs." Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86