Pseudophilosophy

Pseudophilosophy is a term applied to philosophical ideas or systems which are claimed not to meet mainstream academic standards. The term is almost always used pejoratively and is often contentious.

Nicholas Rescher, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, defines pseudo-philosophy as "deliberations that masquerade as philosophical but are inept, incompetent, deficient in intellectual seriousness, and reflective of an insufficient commitment to the pursuit of truth." Rescher adds that the term is particularly appropriate when applied to "those who use the resources of reason to substantiate the claim that rationality is unachievable in matters of inquiry."

Other terms used are "non-philosophy" and "cod philosophy".

Accusations against academic philosophers

Hegel

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote the following about Hegel:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudophilosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.^[1]

In addition to Hegel, Schopenhauer criticized Schelling, and Fichte for using deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous jargon and neologisms.^{[citation needed]}

Hegel is nevertheless a widely taught and influential philosopher. A colleague of Hegel at the University of Berlin, Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled his lectures to coincide with Hegel's, and as a result rarely had an audience.^[2]

Other

Accusations of pseudophilosophy have also been made against the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, as well as against some writers described as postmodernists, including certain French thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Luc Nancy. Such allegations have been leveled by philosophers working in the tradition of analytic philosophy, as well as the physicist Alan Sokal, who claimed that some so-called postmodernists' use of scientific concepts lacked rigor (see the Sokal affair).

The biologist Richard Dawkins has claimed that postmodernists are generally intellectual charlatans who deliberately obscure weak or nonsensical ideas with ostentatious and difficult to understand verbiage.^[3] W.V.O. Quine, along with Barry Smith, Hugh Mellor (then Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge), and various other academic philosophers, once wrote to protest Cambridge University's award of an honorary degree to the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and that it is made of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists".^[4]

Likewise, the tradition of analytic philosophy have been dismissed as pseudophilosophical by those working in the tradition of continental philosophy. Alain Badiou refers to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American linguistic sophistry", and claims that analytic philosophy of science relies wholly on untenable metaphysical presuppositions.^[5]

Accusations against popular philosophers

Alfred Korzybski's theory of General Semantics has been given this appellation (also by Quine).

Ayn Rand's Objectivism has been referred to as a pseudophilosophy,^[6] with varying justifications.^{[citation needed]} Many of her views are presented in her romantic realist-style novels, rather than in scholarly publications.

Integral thought is an example of new-age ideology, written for a popular audience, that at least strives for the appearance of philosophical rigor, but does not garner wide-spread acceptance within academia.^{[citation needed]}

References

See also

• Obscurantism
• Sophism
• Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics, a deliberate kind of "pseudophilosophy", or of philosophy presenting itself as "pseudophilosophy"