Barry Stroud’s recent essay collection comprises nineteen essays, the majority of which was published between 2001 and 2017. The book presents a representative overview over the themes, methods, and authors Stroud has engaged with throughout his philosophical life-work.

In the first two essays, “What is philosophy?”, and his Dewey Lecture, “The Pursuit of Philosophy”, Stroud invites the reader to join him in philosophising. His journey leads through questions of perception and perceptual knowledge (essays three to eight), via a treatment of the conceptual conditions of knowledge and judgements about the world (essays nine to twelve and sixteen) and an excursion to colours (essays thirteen to fifteen), and comes full circle in his considerations on meaning, understanding, and the limits of language (essays seventeen to nineteen). The opening essay’s title provides guidance in that its question, viz. what is philosophy?, underlies the subsequent ones as a kind of ostinato – all essays can be read as variations on this one theme, as exemplifying and further elucidating Stroud’s view of philosophy.

Stroud’s engaging with the question ‘what is philosophy?’ is paradigmatic for his philosophy in that he rejects any attempt to answer it straightforwardly and in the generality it seemingly demands as “absurd” (7). What philosophy is can at best be read off a particular philosopher’s philosophising at a given time in history under certain social and institutional conditions, which can, but need not be favourable to there emerging such a thing as philosophy at all. Stroud understands philosophy as the activity of engaging with most general questions of human life. Philosophy thus fares between religion and physics (or the natural sciences more generally), both of which are concerned with equally fundamental questions, but radically differ from philosophy in their respective ways of treating them. Unlike religion, philosophy does not allow its questions to be acquiesced with a belief, or sentence, or dogma it cannot understand and cannot question any further. And unlike physics, philosophy does not accumulate a body of knowledge about the  world in response to the questions it asks. There is no satisfaction and no progress in philosophy and not very much agreement about what is true among philosophers.

So what is philosophy about and what can we expect from it? Stroud characterises his own philosophising with Wittgenstein as ‘treating questions’ concerning the fundamental conditions of being human – thought and language, intentional action and morality, perception, knowledge, or science. As such, philosophy is involved in human self-reflection and, crucially, proceeds by employing the very faculties and capacities it seeks to understand. Hence Stroud’s understanding of philosophy as a “back and forth movement of thought” (37), as constantly shifting between the issue or question it is concerned with and its own ways of understanding that very issue or question. Philosophy so understood is always also concerned with itself – it is an inherently self-reflective enterprise. But philosophy first of all needs something to reflect on, something one takes for granted just by living and thinking in the way one does. The task of philosophy then consists in spelling out the conceptual conditions, the context and consequences of these commonsense ways of thinking and their philosophical reflection. This way of understanding philosophy is crucial to Stroud’s work, standing here ‘on the shoulders’ of commonsense philosophers, in particular Hume (for whom the yardstick of philosophical thinking was what is ‘obvious to the common man’) and G.E. Moore (who, according to Stroud, did nothing but insist on that things are thus-and-so and not such-and-such).

Stroud finds harsh words for such philosophy lapsing into either extreme: Philosophical self-reflection losing sight of the issues it is concerned with is prone to lapse into idle rhetoric, “mere play”, a “kamikaze of the intellect” (22). Philosophy trying to fit its subjects into an encompassing world-view ( ‘isms’ and ‘research programs’, 17), demanding an act of identification on part of the philosopher, comes close to religion and ideology. And philosophy seeking to quasi-scientifically explain the issue it is concerned with, by way of giving definitions or building theories, ceases to count as philosophy as soon as it concentrates on delivering ‘results’. Philosophy, conceived and practised as Stroud proposes, in contrast ‘leaves everything as it is’ (Wittgenstein), it can provide a clearer and more differentiated understanding of those aspects of human (everyday) life it started from – not much more, but not much less either. —

This, then, is Stroud’s philosophising: Most prominently in “Scepticism and the Senses” and his “Epistemological Self-Profile” (essays six and four), he scrutinises scepticism, i.e. the philosophical thesis that “no one can know anything about the world around us” (71). The question scepticism responds to is the question of the possibility of perceptual knowledge most generally, i.e. how can we come to know anything at all about an ‘external’, ‘public’, or ‘objective’ world, if every single one of our beliefs about that world can be false, and if we are not able to distinguish any instance of our really perceiving something from dreaming that we would? Stroud responds to scepticism and to philosophical attempts to dissipate the sceptical doubt by addressing the question in investigating its answers. He sees the source of the epistemological problem as framed above in a deep philosophical mistrust of perception, in deeming it incapable of delivering immediate knowledge about what is so in the world. On this “restrictive” view of perception, however, such knowledge is presupposed precisely in its questioning the contents of beliefs and experiences about the world. For in attributing a belief or experience of something ‘that is so’ to another, Stroud argues, we must understand ourselves as having perceptual beliefs or experiences of the very same thing and must take this sameness for granted. As long as we are involved in ascribing beliefs and experiences about the world to one another, that is, we cannot consistently deny our own believing or experiencing the world as it is independently of our believing or experiencing. In other words, the epistemological problem cannot be consistently formulated at first place. The sceptic, as Hume says, thus “still continues to reason and believe [about what is so in the world], tho’ he asserts, that he cannot defend his reason by reason” (Treatise, p.187), and this should be the philosophical answer to scepticism.

Stroud offers this line of argument in several variations, considering the relation between seeing or perceiving and believing (we perceptually know that p in that we perceive that p, essays three and five) as well as the preconditions of thereby gaining perceptual knowledge (the capacities of belief and judgement, essays seven, eight, eighteen, nineteen) and the differences between ‘simple’ (Dretske), or ‘objectual’, seeing and (knowingly) seeing that things are such-and-such (essay seven), whereby Stroud finds it possible that the former might not involve the conceptual capacities required for the latter. — Here, I wish to make a short digression. I find it questionable whether or not ‘objectual seeing’ – seeing objects – is so much different from seeing ‘what is so’ with regard to the conceptual capacities required in each case. For although it appears plausible at first sight to grant a being who lacks the capacity of conceptual thinking and judgement (an animal or a small child) with the capacity of ‘seeing a tree’ or ‘seeing a tomato’, ‘seeing a taxi’ already seems to require some conceptual capacities; and when it comes to perceiving processes or changes in the world – e.g. perceiving the wind, seeing a hare running across the field – the difference between perceiving ‘an object’ and perceiving ‘what is so’ seems to become less categorical. Of course, we say that the hare sees the fox running after him and thereby ascribe an instance of objectual seeing to him. But the kind of ‘triangulation’ (in Davidson’s sense) we thereby enter with the hare and the fox as our shared object of seeing remains incomplete without the hare’s responding to both his and our seeing the fox. This seems to require some conceptual capacities on part of the hare (and something like a common language). And although granting the capacity of perceiving objects to children who still lack concepts appears crucial to ostensive teaching (and how else could we imagine a child learning a language?), its success depends on there being some conceptual framework in place which determines which object is meant and on that the ‘role’ (Wittgenstein) the word has in language is already clear. It depends on the possibility of identifying the object and on singling it out from the state of affairs it is involved in. But if this is the case it might turn out that not only does thinking about objects presuppose propositional thought, but that also seeing an object presuppose seeing the state of affairs it is part of, and thus seeing ‘what is so’. This would make it even harder to understand how acquiring a language with the help of ostensive teaching is possible at all (89) – but it might equally well be that this question, too, demands an answer that would transgress the limits of philosophy (see Stroud’s own considerations in essay eighteen, 252, and below), and thus must be left in disappointment.

The concept of immediate knowledge – knowledge we have without further reasons – Stroud has gained in his discussion of perceptual knowledge is then applied to knowledge of intention (essay nine), self-knowledge (essay ten), knowledge of feelings (essay eleven), and ‘moral realities’ (essay seventeen). Stroud employs lines of argumentation in his discussion of colours (dispositionalism about colours presupposes a non-dispositional concept of colours, essays thirteen to fifteen) and his reply to James Conant (the quest for grounding logical necessity to him seems “to acknowledge and deny [the] necessity [of logical truths] in the same breath”, 217, essay sixteen).

The two closing essays, “Meaning and Understanding” (essay eighteen) and “Davidson and Wittgenstein on Meaning and Understanding” (essay nineteen), come back to Stroud’s initial question, what is philosophy?. Wittgenstein’s saying that the meaning of a sentence, the fact it describes, cannot be otherwise stated than by repeating that very sentence in Philosophical Grammar, his framing the paradox that our explaining a rule consists in replacing one interpretation with another in Philosophical Investigations, Davidson’s ‘theory of truth’, that mastery of a language consists in knowing the truth-conditions of a sentence (‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white) – these are interwoven to show the limits of philosophy in its striving for explaining meaning and understanding whilst language is, at the same time, its only instrument at hand. Taking seriously the quest for an explanatorily satisfactory theory of language, one that grounds its meaning in something beyond language, for Stroud means showing its futility, its necessarily leading into infinite regress. With language, we can explain meaning only to those who are already able to use it, and we can use language only if we have mastered its meaning. This of course does not satisfy the question as to the ‘grounds’ or ‘basis’ of the meaning of our concepts – but, to ask with Stroud (and Wittgenstein), “what exactly is that question […]? And what could ever put us in a position to answer it?” (204)

 Stroud does not simply discuss philosophical theses, but engages with their authors, with the questions they depart from, and he does so throughout in an appreciative, never polemic manner, polite in his criticism, succinct in his argumentation, convincing in his conclusions. In this book Stroud shows, rather than he would have to say, what analytical philosophy is, and could be, at its best.

© 2019 Ulla Schmid

Dr. phil. Ulla Schmid | University of Basel | ulla.schmid@unibas.ch | www.lukull.ch