I learned a couple days ago (here and here) that British philosopher Susan Haack had passed away on March 10 at the age of 80.
As a graduate student in the 1980s, I learned a great deal from her book Philosophy of Logics (1978) used in a course on the subject. It was not a book you sat on the shelf and forgot about. It was a book you consulted repeatedly while researching and writing seminar papers, preparing for prelims, etc. I considered it one of the most important items in my personal library.
Our paths actually crossed a couple of times in the 1990s. By this time I was out of graduate school and struggling to survive in “the profession.” By this time Professor Haack had left the University of Warwick in the U.K. and joined the faculty at the University of Miami, Coral Gables (that was in 1990). I attended a colloquium she gave at the University of South Carolina during which she outlined her “foundherentism” as she called it: her effort to steer a course between the foundationalism that had been under sustained attack for the past couple of decades and its coherentist alternative. This work had come together in her major work Evidence and Inquiry (1993). Later I sat in on an informal discussion with several faculty members where I learned of her disdain for Richard Rorty whom, even then, I thought might be the last philosopher of any significance the U.S. would produce.
Not long after that I uncovered her critiques of so-called “feminist epistemology” which she maintained was objectionable not politically but epistemologically. When I learned that she was editing an issue of The Monist on “Feminist Epistemology: For and Against” (or something close to that), I carefully researched and submitted an article which pulled together my contention that much of it actually fell into the epistemological relativism philosophers of science like Kuhn and Feyerabend had been accused of (as epistemologist-wannabes feminists weren’t as subtle as those thinkers), and that they frequently borrowed their ideas without giving proper credit.
The article got rejected on the basis of a one-liner type review. Actually, it extended to two lines.
I contacted Professor Haack to try and find out what had happened, and was surprised she actually remembered me from our South Carolina meeting.
As we discussed the rejection, she confessed to me that defenders of “feminist epistemology” weren’t held to the same standards as critics. That’s just the way “the profession” had gone. I remained impressed that she had admitted this, though.
When the issue appeared the following year, the criticisms, none of whom by people I’d ever heard of before, struck me as hopelessly lame, like they expected the roof to cave in if they wrote something decisive (maybe they did, and maybe their fear was justified, I don’t know if they had tenure or not).
I basically ceased writing about the subject, seeing no point. Since this was years before blogging, independent publication, etc., I’ve no idea what happened to that paper (I assume it’s in a box somewhere, as I have trouble throwing things out). Radical feminists struck me as bullies; but let someone better positioned in the discipline take them on directly. My own struggles to survive had magnified, after all, when my own first book Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) resulted in my being essentially blacklisted.
I never got around to delving into Evidence and Inquiry. My bad. Nor did I get around to reading her next book which I knew about: Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1997). While I eventually found more university teaching (something that basically fell into my lap), I had developed interests not well suited for academia; and especially after the rejection by multiple journals of two papers on which I’d spent years pouring every bit of intellectual energy I could muster (one on Descartes and how his cogito was not necessary, another on Comte’s law of three stages and how postmodernity had become a “fourth stage”), I completely lost faith in “the profession.”
For the remainder of her life, Susan Haack remained committed to the idea that “rational inquiry” was the way to resolve intellectual conflicts using evidence, and while she sought to avoid scientism she of course saw science as the ideal form of “rational inquiry.” In the problem domains it developed to address, it doubtless is. The problem, however, is that there always were, and remain, domains outside the reach of its methods; and it makes presuppositions its cannot confirm or disconfirm from within.
Among academic philosophers, I’d place her on the middle tier: people who deserve to be read seriously but aren’t likely ever to be regarded as historically pivotal — this places her well above the average academic philosopher who rarely writes anything deserving to be read seriously. And she strikes me as someone who could look herself in the mirror in the morning and say sincerely: “I am doing my very best, where I am, with what I have.” She was a survivor in a fundamentally corrupted and corrupting system.
While researching this piece I ran across this comment which I’ll close with — from the philosophy blog Daily Nous (link above; I don’t have an Open University account so I couldn’t get the embedded link to work but I’ll run with what’s here):
Haack gave a clear-headed assessment of the state of philosophy in 2020
[https://www-degruyterbrill-om.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/document/doi/10.1515/sats-2019-7001/html]: ‘Yes, something is rotten in the state of philosophy.’ (…) Some of the problems are the result of changes in the management of universities affecting the whole academy: the burgeoning bureaucracy, the ever-increasing stress on “productivity,” the ever-spreading culture of grants-and-research-projects, the ever-growing reliance on hopelessly flawed surrogate measures of the quality of intellectual work, the obsession with “prestige,” and so on. And some of the problems are the result of changes in academic publishing: the ever-more-extensive reach of enormous, predatory presses that treat authors as fungible content-providers whose rights in their work they can gobble up and sell on, the ever-increasing intrusiveness of copy-editors dedicated to ensuring that everyone write the same deadly, deadpan academic prose, the endless demands of a time- and energy-wasting peer-review process by now not only relentlessly conventional but also, sometimes, outright corrupt, and so forth. Other problems, however, are more specific to our discipline: our decades of over-production of Ph.D.s, for example, the pressure we put on graduate students to publish while they’re still wet behind the ears, the completely artificial importance we give to “contacts” and skill in grantsmanship’.
Lost Generation Philosopher 