Jonathan Bennett on Learning from Six Philosophers
The key to a life in philosophy — like the Devil — lies in the details
Jonathan Bennett recalls a challenging life spent wrestling philosophically with his great forebears
In 1956 I joined the Moral Science faculty at the University of Cambridge. My chief duty was to lecture on early modern philosophy, following a
prescribed eight-year pattern whose chronological disorder was never
explained to me. I ‘did’ Descartes and Spinoza for two years, then Kant for
two, then Berkeley and Hume, then Locke and Leibniz; and so round again
with - in the words of C. D. Broad, who had this assignment three decades
earlier – ‘the unhasting and unresting regularity of an astronomical process’.
My education in philosophy had been scrappy and brief. Beginning two years
at Oxford knowing little, I had ended them with a B. Phil. and a head
whirling with questions and ideas, but still with little knowledge, and
especially with no grasp of what the parts of my discipline are and how
they fit together. My years in Cambridge were remedial: I learned
philosophy through teaching its early modern practitioners.
For forty-five years, I have been engaged in, among other things,
wrestling philosophically with my great forebears, always finding the
struggle to be challenging, invigorating, and instructive.
Instructive how? Well, sometimes the target philosopher says something
true, and I learn it from him. I have learned from Berkeley about how
sight relates to touch, from Descartes about fallibility, from Hume about
kinds of possibility, from Spinoza and in a different way from Leibniz
about space and bodies, from Locke about personal identity.
Sometimes he puzzles or even bewilders me, and I learn from struggling to
understand. Descartes said that God made it the case that 2 + 2 = 4. When
after years of worrying at this baffling doctrine I eventually reached the
bottom of it, I found philosophical truth there.
More often, I find some fault with what he says, but am instructed by how
and why he went wrong: the errors of a powerful, courageous, deep,
wide-ranging thinker are apt to be more nourishing than tame truths offered
by a lesser mind. Berkeley held that there are no good reasons to believe
that there are physical things, supporting this with a sound critique of
reasons of a certain kind. Reasons of another kind do exist. Berkeley, who
did not know of them, nevertheless helps us – as stimulus and as guide – to
discover them.
I have thought, taught, and written in other parts of philosophy as well –
metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, ethics. The range of these
other interests is influenced by my early-modern preoccupations, which have
in turn drawn strength from my not being exclusively an early modernist.
I call mine the ‘collegial’ approach to early modern philosophy. It leads
one to treat great dead philosophers as colleagues - people to argue with,
learn from, and (in fantasy) teach. I have pursued it with the aid of
living colleagues, especially Peter Remnant in the 70s and Bill Alston in
the ensuing two decades, and of generations of graduate students who
sustained my belief in this work by the enthusiasm they brought to it.
Collegial early modern studies go best when directed to the great,
central, canonical texts. It can be useful to know about the lesser works,
and about the historical background; but most of what that yields is purely
historical, and so is not what I am after. It is a legitimate line of
study, though a risky one for those whose principal interests are
philosophical; because historical scholarship can, and I think often
does, induce in the scholar an attitude to texts that does not highly value
close attention to their fine details. The devil is in the details; so is the philosophical life.
My aim in Learning from Six Philosophers is to help others to engage in a collegial way with six great early modern philosophers.
Jonathan Bennett
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