The Ordering of Time: Meditations on the History of Philosophy by George Lucas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ordering of Time: Meditations on the History of Philosophy by George Lucas Jeffrey Dirk Wilson LUCAS, George. The Ordering of Time: Meditations on the History of Philosophy. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2020. xii + 180 pp. Cloth, $100.00 George Lucas takes his title from Anaximander B1 and, thereby, signals to his reader that he intends to say something about the history of philosophy that will embrace the entire tradition. His “central thesis [is] . . . that Anaximander was . . . the first philosopher to harbour grave doubts about the remorseless workings of this historical process.” He juxtaposes “the creative individual genius” and “the collective discourse of some community,” the one impossible without the other. This method at its best he calls “reflective historical engagement” in which every philosophical claim is offered as an answer—but never dogmatically the answer—to some question. In the first five of the volume’s nine chapters, Lucas outlines the relationship of philosophy and its history. A question that dominated much of twentieth-century philosophy, discussed in chapter 3, is whether philosophy is distinguishable from its history (as the history of music is distinguishable from music or the history of science from science), or if philosophy and its history are coinherent. In this context, Lucas heralds “the decisive end of the hegemony of . . . ‘the analytic consensus,’” in which philosophy and its history are sharply distinguished. Evidence of that “decisive end” he finds in “the growing list of distinguished thinkers” from within that consensus who “call for a renewed dialogue with . . . ‘the tradition.’” There is the subsequent problem of rival conceptions of the history of philosophy that he discusses in chapter 4. The first conception is of refutation: Every generation of philosophers shows how its predecessors [End Page 150] were wrong. The second is to render the history of philosophy as narrative, often a master narrative with its totalizing temptation. The third conception is Lucas’s own, that of historical reflective engagement. Thus, philosophy is—he quotes Gadamer—“‘the conversation which we are.’” “Philosophy,” Lucas writes, “is not a scientific pursuit of random novel insights or discoveries; it is, rather, a living tradition: reflective, discursive, and dialogical.” Chapter 5 is given to the relationship of philosophy and aesthetics. Lucas explores the possibilities and limits of hermeneutics. He challenges Gadamer’s assertion that “hermeneutics is philosophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy.” Lucas shows great appreciation for Gadamer’s insights but—in the end—rejects hermeneutics as identical with philosophy because it necessarily entails “the conflation of being and meaning [that] would make it impossible, for example, to distinguish between history and fiction.” Hermeneutics emphasizes “interpretation and the interpreter [and] meaning, as if that is the only sense of being.” In history and, in particular, the history of philosophy, Lucas asserts, “[w]e have to do with one ‘being’ but many ‘meanings.’” Chapter 6 discusses the abuses of philosophy (discipleship, exegesis, hagiography, and caricature) before elaborating Lucas’s own view, namely, reflective historical engagement. Chapters 7 through 9 are examples of his method, and in this showing Lucas shines as a reader of texts and as a philosopher. In chapter 7, Lucas considers the Cambridge trinity of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Numerous biographical details as well references to specific texts over a long period bring this narrative to life. Make no mistake about it, Lucas is a committed, if atypical, Whiteheadian. He draws parallels especially between Whitehead and Wittgenstein, primarily, but also between each of them and Moore. All three of them he contrasts sharply with Russell. What Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and—to a lesser extent—Moore had in common was a critique of the Enlightenment and, with that, a recognition of logic’s limits. In an elegant analysis, Lucas exposes the obsession of many philosophers with a literal reading of texts and, indeed, of the world. He compares, for example, what he calls Wittgenstein’s “ineffability of language” and Whitehead’s claim “that philosophy has been misled by the example of mathematics.” Lucas shows that the “modernist confidence that Reason constitutes a wholly self-sufficient resource” is intellectually bankrupt. The reader may well conclude from Lucas...