1. Why podcasts?

An explanation of why I've been making podcasts, and why I think the structural-systematic philosophy has received so little attention to dte.

What is The Structural-Systematic Philosophy?

The Structural-Systematic Philosophy (SSP) is a systematic philosophy in progress. Books developing it so far are (in English) STRUCTURE AND BEING (2008), BEING AND GOD (2011), and TOWARD A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING (TAPTOE; 2014). Podcasts describe the project and present details.

Why podcasts? Well, not much attention is being paid to my written work. I'll say a bit more about that later. So I think it makes sense to try something else. The problem may be of course, that relatively few people know about the written work, but in 2005, before the book STRUCTURE AND BEING -- the first devoted to the project I've been working on since 2003, had been completed, I was teaching a graduate seminar on that work in progress as a visiting professor at Boston University. One who attended was my long-time friend, David Roochnik. He said he didn't find the written work very interesting, but was excited by my presentations of it. I'm hoping that the podcasts will be similarly appealing. Several are standalone pieces, but I also read my way through my book TOWARD A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING, theory of everything, adding comments as I proceed, but not explicitly distinguishing between what is in the text and what I will have added.

It may be helpful for me to say a bit more about the current situation in the academic discipline of
philosophy. Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his article "Reflections on my Career in Philosophy," published in 2015, wrote the following:
I believe that there is at least in this country a more or less general agreement among philosophers
and other scholars that our subject is currently in the doldrums. Until not very long ago, there were
powerful creative impulses moving energetically through the field. There was the work in England of
G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and of Gilbert Ryle, Paul Grice, H. L. A. Hart, as well as the work of
various Logical Positivists. And the United States, even after interest in William James and John
Dewey had receded, there was lively attention to contributions by Willard Quine and Donald
Davidson, John Rawls, and Saul Kripke. In addition, some philosophers were powerfully moved by the
gigantic speculative edifice of Whitehead. Heidegger was having a massive impact on European
philosophy as well as on other disciplines and not only in Europe, but here as well. And of course
there was everywhere a vigorously, appreciative and productive response to the work of
Wittgenstein.
The lively impact of these impressive figures has faded. We are no longer basically preoccupied
with responding to them, except for a few contributors of somewhat less general scope, such as
Habermas. No one has replaced the imposingly great figures of the recent past in providing us with
contagiously inspiring direction. Nowadays, there are really no conspicuously, fresh, bold, and
intellectually exciting new challenges or innovations. For the most part, the field is quiet. We seem
more or less to be marking time.
Well, for reasons, I'll explain a bit later, I take the work I've been doing since 2003, much of it in collaboration with Munich philosopher Lorenz B. Puntel Plentiful to be conspicuously fresh, bold, and intellectually exciting, and to present new challenges, and it is innovative. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, very few philosophers know about it. I'm hoping the podcasts will improve that situation.
Before the publication of STRUCTURE AND BEING, the first of by now three books on the project that I myself am pursuing, it came up in correspondence between me and Galen Strawson (then at Reading, if I recall correctly, and currently at the University of Texas at Austin). Strawson was sufficiently interested to try to arrange, after it was published, for a review that would appear in the Times Literary Supplement. He reported that many potential reviewers turned him down, but ultimately one accepted his offer. I asked him whether that meant that a review would actually appear. He said that the person who had agreed to write it had never in the past failed to come through with any promise to write a review. The person failed to come through with this one. I was never offered any explanation why, and I'm confident that Strawson never received one. He then ceased to try to find other reviewers. So there never was a review in the Times Literary Supplement.
Some years later, Peter van Inwagen of Notre Dame agreed to review both STRUCTURE AND BEING and BEING AND GOD, the second book devoted to the project, for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPRP. He never wrote the review. Again, there is no explanation that I am aware of. I believe that van Inwagen's Notre Dame colleague, Gary Gutting, who was at the time editor of the NDPR, never received any such explanation.
If the people who committed themselves to writing reviews for the TLS or for NDPR had concluded that the books they had agreed to review were bad, why didn't they write negative reviews? I have no good answer to this question, but I deem it worth adding that by agreeing to write the reviews and not
announcing that they were not going to do so the two prevented Strawson and Gutting from seeking others who might actually have written reviews.
There was a course, the CHOICE review of my TOWARD A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING (TAPTOE), the third book devoted to the project, that is quoted on my home page. The passage quoted there describes the book as "A critically important work for all those deeply interested
in philosophical issues and their significance for basic human concerns," but even after it became possible for Gary Gutting to quote from this review or indeed to send it as an attachment, he was unable to find anyone who would agree to review the book TAPTOE for NDPR. He wrote that he thought quoting it would help, but it didn't, or at least not enough. By now, the book has been out too long to qualify for being reviewed in NDPR. Again, the appearance of the review might have made a positive difference.
I have sent several philosophers I thought might be interested in the project either copies of TAPTOE or PDFs of relevant chapters. For example, chapters one, two, and six to some who have published on the issue of human freedom or one, two, and seven to some who have published on aesthetics. I sent a copy to Harry Frankfurt. I have received no acknowledgments, and have seen no indications that any has read what I sent.
Fair enough. They're all busy. And my messages were unsollicited. But there are others, albeit fewer of them, who have said that if I gave them copies of the book, they would read it. Again, I have no evidence that any has.
So, what's going on? At least two plausible explanations occur to me. One is that systematic philosophy is considered to be so dead a duck that it cannot be resuscitated. Both analytic and analytic and continental philosophy went through their Hegelian phases and perhaps some have concluded
from what they take to have been Hegel's failure with systematic philosophy that every systematic philosophy must fail. That would of course be a non-sequitur. But I wonder whether it nevertheless
may be at work. The only significant systematic philosopher widely recognized since Hegalianism, Alfred North Whitehead, is no longer widely popular.
The second plausible explanation is that philosophers at present, most of whom are highly specialized, think it not worth their while to delve into areas beyond their specializations. This might explain why those specializing in, for example, issues of human freedom 0and aesthetics might be unwilling to read TAPTOE's chapters one and two, which are presupposed by the chapters on freedom and beauty. Perhaps their response is more or less, "These are about topics like semantics and ontology, but I don't do semantics or ontology. This would be unreasonable given that they unavoidably rely on semantic and ontological presuppositions, but I deem it to be a possibility, nonetheless.
A distinct development -- perhaps better, non-development -- perhaps related to the non-responses
considered above, involves my "Rearticulating Being," a text I first delivered as the presidential
address for the Metaphysical Society of America in April 2014. Quoting a previous presidential address quoted by a previous speaker at that 2014 meeting of the MSA, I distinguished between engaged and
flabby pluralisms and urged all present to participate in an engaged pluralism by either accepting my rearticulation of being as superior to other currently available articulations, including their own, or explaining to me why some other articulation of being was superior to mine. No engaged pluralism was in evidence at that meeting, and I am aware of none relating to this issue that has emerged since.
The MSA's pluralism, as far as I can tell, is extremely flabby.
Harry Frankfurt cannot, I think, be the only philosopher to consider philosophy, at present, to be in the doldrums. Is it not reasonable to expect, or at least to hope, that some of those with this view might be open to, or indeed eager for, something new, something like the structural systematic philosophy on which I've been working?
I certainly was eager for that. In the summer of 2003, preparing for a tutorial on analytic theories of truth, far from my home philosophical turf at the time, I read widely and, as I did, I encountered several
articles by Lorenz B. Puntel. I had read his work on Hegel decades before when working on my
dissertation, but had not followed his subsequent development. The articles seemed clearly to be
contributions to a larger project. Intrigued by that project, I began to send him email messages. It was some weeks before I got his first response, because he had been traveling in Eastern Europe and
had had no internet connection. Once he did respond, our correspondence became intense, indeed so intense that my then teenage daughter took to calling him my internet boyfriend. When I learned, in November or December, that he was working to complete a book on the systematic philosophy he had been developing since the late 1970s, I immediately offered to translate it into English on the fly, as it were. I was so intrigued and excited by this project that I dropped all of the philosophical work not required by my teaching in order to work with Puntel on the structural-systematic philosophy. And I've been doing that ever since. I also completely changed the courses that I had been teaching. I'm no longer teaching courses on, for example, Hegel or Nietzsche or Heidegger.
One who appears to have had a similar experience upon encountering this project is Johan Siebers, whose seminar involving, centrally, the SSP's theory of being, was held in October 2015.
Surely -- I think and hope -- Siebers and I can't be alone (we're not quite; I could name a few others, but not many). But how to find others? Well, maybe some others will read this text or listen to this podcast. And maybe some in Siebers's seminar will be intrigued by the project, although I have no evidence that they have. And maybe some will read "Rearticulating Being," which appeared in print in September 2015, and then want to read more. Then again, maybe not. As I say, I've seen no evidence that any have.
It does seem to me that if significant interest in the structural-systematic philosophy is to emerge, it must rely centrally on the interest of tenured professors of philosophy. The reason is that such professors would, like me (I would say), sacrifice nothing of importance by paying attention to this philosophy. This is not the case with graduate students, some of whom have contacted me, as have some undergrads. The crucial problem there is that if a graduate student were to write a dissertation on the SSP, there would be no academic positions for which that student could apply. There simply are no positions for specialists in systematic philosophy with the exception, of course, of some historical systematic philosophies, including those of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel, but specialists in the SSP would not be viable candidates for such positions.
Perhaps worth adding is that among those to whom I have sent some or all of TAPTOE, two Spinoza specialists express expressed interest in the book, but, several years later, I have heard from neither of them, and both continue to publish on Spinoza. So that's where things stand.
Those of you who are listening to this podcast may, I hope, listen to others. And I emphasize that I'm
eager to correspond with you. My email address is [e-mail]. Thanks for listening.