international journal for the study of skepticism 4 (2014) 153-188 brill.com/skep
Introduction
Thompson Clarke’s Tightrope Walk Jean-Philippe Narboux
University Bordeaux Montaigne
[email protected]
Abstract Thompson Clarke’s central contention is that the project of traditional epistemology has been deemed invalid for the wrong reasons and its true legacy consequently missed. According to Clarke, the picture of traditional epistemology conveyed by its modern critics gets things about exactly upside down. While the sample situations examined by the traditional epistemologist and the standards in the light of which he assesses them, contrary to what his modern critics claim, are not the product of philosophizing, the logical relation that they are supposed to bear to ‘common sense’ and ultimately ‘common sense’ itself are. However, the ‘common sense’ assessed by traditional epistemology, although it is really an artifact of philosophizing, is neither the product of philosophical reflection nor the result of philosophical prejudice. It is not in the least gratuitous. A critique of the traditional philosophical project can only be as compelling as that project itself under the interpretation that it gives of it.
Keywords Thompson Clarke – traditional epistemology – ordinary language philosophy – contextualism
…
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22105700-04031157
154
Narboux We need to intricate ourselves before we extricate ourselves. Clarke, The Nature Of Traditional Epistemology
…
Philosophizing has to be as complicated as the knots it unties. Wittgenstein, Zettel §452
∵ 1
Clarke’s Unorthodox Way with Traditional Epistemology
The American philosopher Thompson M. Clarke (1928–2012) stands out within the history of analytic philosophy as one of its most anomalous figures. The disproportion between the extent of the thinking that he made public and the impact that it had upon the course of that history is arresting. The terseness and difficulty of his three pieces of published writing are nearly as confounding as their depth and originality. When Clarke submitted his Doctoral Thesis to the Harvard philosophy department in 1960, its unabashed philosophical unconventionality “caused a crisis that, so far as anyone knew or said, was unprecedented” (Cavell 2010: 369–370). His understanding of the mechanisms of the stock market enabled him to retire precociously from his teaching position at Berkeley and to give seminars at his discretion. He was eventually to withdraw altogether from the world of professional philosophy and to conduct his thinking in private (Cavell 2010: 368–369, 391).1 By and large, Clarke’s new forays into the question of “the nature of traditional epistemology” (the title of Clarke’s doctoral dissertation) were made indirectly available through the writings of other philosophers, often personally acquainted with Clarke, and for whom Clarke’s reinterpretation of the legacy of traditional epistemology was definitive.2 In the works of these philosophers, Clarke’s insights came to fruition, albeit in different and often conflicting ways, as they did not draw the same lessons from Clarke’s masterpiece, 1 Clarke has done a lot of (unpublished) philosophical work after 1972. 2 See Cavell (1969, 1979), Stroud (1984, 2000a, 2000b), Travis (1989, 2005, 2008, 2011). Other works directly influenced by Clarke include Nagel (1971, 1986), Unger (1975), Richardson (1986), McGinn (1991), and Williams (1991). An early (if highly compressed) response to Clarke (1965) figures in Anscombe (1981).
international journal for the study of skepticism 4 (2014) 153-188
Introduction<