Condillac, Dilthey and Goldman: knowing on 30 September and 1 October
Two calendar days gather thinkers who each moved a boundary of knowledge: Condillac, born 30 September 1714, who built a mind out of sensation; Rumi, traditionally born the same day in 1207; Claudia Card on atrocity; and, on 1 October, the death of Dilthey and the birth of Alvin Goldman, with Istvan Meszaros.
Some days in the philosophical calendar are crowded by accident, and the accident is worth reading. The thirtieth of September and the first of October, taken together, bring to one page a French abbe who built a mind out of nothing but the smell of a rose, a Persian poet who distrusted the mind entirely, an American philosopher who thought ethics had spent a century looking at the wrong things, and the German scholar who asked whether the study of human beings is a science at all. The two dates run here as a single entry because the figures on them rhyme, and the rhyme is this: each moved a boundary that the textbooks had treated as fixed.
What holds the pair together is one question worn in different clothes. Where does what we know come from, and what is left over once we have finished accounting for it? Condillac answered with sensation. Alvin Goldman, two and a half centuries later and, as it happens, on the same first of October, answered with reliable processes and the word of other people. Between the two sit Wilhelm Dilthey's doubt that the human world can be explained in the way a chemist explains a reaction, Jalal al-Din Rumi's conviction that the knowing that matters is not knowledge, and Claudia Card's charge that moral philosophy had theorised promises and lies while leaving genocide to the historians.
A caution the calendar itself demands. Anniversaries are slippery, and this pair has caught out steadier almanacs than ours. Dilthey is often listed as born on 1 October; he was not, he died on it, and was born on 19 November 1833. The Goldman of 1 October is Alvin, the epistemologist, not the anarchist Emma Goldman, whom careless lists sometimes summon whenever the name falls near this week; Emma was born in June and died in May, and has no claim on these days at all. Where a date is only traditional, as Rumi's is, we say so.
Etienne Bonnot de Condillac was born at Grenoble on 30 September 1714 into a family of the legal nobility, and took orders as a priest without, so far as the record shows, ever once preaching. He was a friend of Diderot and of Rousseau, tutor to the infant Ferdinand at the court of Parma, and in time a member of the Academie francaise, which is a respectable life for a man whose central idea was quietly destructive. Locke had argued that the mind furnishes itself from two springs, sensation and reflection, the second being the mind's awareness of its own operations. Condillac took the second spring away. In the Traite des sensations of 1754 there is nothing in the understanding that did not enter through the senses and then transform itself: memory, judgement, comparison, desire, even the sense of self, are sensation worked over.
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
The argument is carried by one of the most elegant fictions in the history of the subject. Condillac asks the reader to imagine a marble statue, organised inside like a man but inert, and then to grant it the senses one at a time. Give it only smell, and hold a rose beneath it: the statue does not smell a rose, because it has no notion of rose, of outside, of itself. It simply is the smell of the rose, a single undivided state of feeling. Add a second scent and it can compare; let scents come and go and it acquires memory, which is attention outlasting its object; from the difference between a present sensation and a remembered one come surprise, pleasure, pain, and the first stirrings of judgement and desire. Only with touch does the statue meet resistance, discover that some of what it feels is its own body and some is not, and arrive at the idea of an external world. Step by step, a self and a world are assembled out of feeling alone.
It is a thought experiment, not a theory of the brain, and Condillac knew the difference. But the move it makes — explain the complex by composing it from the simplest possible starting point, and let nothing in that has not been paid for — is the one that cognitive science still makes, and the priority Condillac gives to touch, to the body meeting resistance, is exactly what the current argument over embodied and embedded cognition has rediscovered. A machine that is to be said to perceive anything must, on this old view, first bump into something. He died in 1780 at Lailly-en-Val, having spent his last years writing a logic and a grammar on the same principle, that thinking is a refined way of handling what the senses deliver.
Rumi, and a knowing that the statue could not reach#
The thirtieth of September 1207 is the date by convention given for the birth of Jalal al-Din Rumi, and convention is the right word: the year rests on later hagiography rather than on a document, and recent scholarship places his birthplace not at Balkh, as the tradition holds, but at Wakhsh, in what is now Tajikistan. He lived most of his life at Konya and died there in December 1273. To file him under 'philosopher' without qualification would misdescribe him; he wrote as a mystic and a poet, and the Masnavi is a work of spiritual instruction, not of argument. Yet it stands in deliberate opposition to the very enterprise Condillac would later crown, and the opposition is instructive rather than merely picturesque.
For the tradition Rumi speaks from, the knowledge Condillac analyses — the mind assembling a world from its sensations — is real but low. Above it is a knowing that reason cannot supply and that the self reaches only by being undone: 'die before you die,' in the formula the Sufis made their own. Reason, in one of Rumi's images, is a leg good enough for walking but useless for the crossing that matters; for that one needs a wing. A modern reader need not share the metaphysics to see the challenge. Condillac's statue can be given every sense in turn and still, on Rumi's account, know nothing of the one thing worth knowing, because that is not a datum to be received but a transformation to be undergone. The quarrel between the two is old and has never been settled, and it reaches well beyond Islamic philosophy; our note on Ibn Hazm sits on the argumentative side of the same tradition, where Rumi sits on the far shore of it.
Claudia Card was born at Pardeeville, Wisconsin, on 30 September 1940, took her doctorate at Harvard under John Rawls, and taught for more than four decades at Wisconsin-Madison. Her complaint against the moral philosophy she had been trained in was that it was polite. It had a great deal to say about promises, lies and the fair distribution of goods, and almost nothing to say about the worst things people do to one another. In The Atrocity Paradigm (2002) and Confronting Evils (2010) she set out to repair the omission with a definition sober enough to be used: evils are foreseeable, intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs. The definition does two things at once. It refuses the theological picture of evil as a dark cosmic force, and it refuses the lazy modern reflex of calling every serious wrong 'evil' — the harm must be one that ruins a life or makes it unbearable, and the wrong must be one for which no excuse will serve.
Card brought that apparatus to genocide, terrorism, torture and rape, and her most cited contribution, the idea of 'social death' at the core of genocide, holds that what genocide destroys is not only lives but the web of relations that gave those lives their meaning, so that cultural and sexual violence belong in the analysis alongside killing. She was also a founder of lesbian and feminist ethics, and she pressed, uncomfortably for some of her allies, the point that women are not only the victims of evil but sometimes its agents. She died on 12 September 2015, and the question her work leaves is sharper than 'what is evil?' It is: what does a society have to arrange before atrocity becomes possible, and ordinary?
The first of October 1911 took Wilhelm Dilthey, who died on holiday at Seis am Schlern in the South Tyrol, then Austria-Hungary and now Italy. He had held Hegel's old chair at Berlin from 1882, and he had spent his career on a single problem that the confident positivism of the age had declared already solved. The natural sciences, said the positivists, are the model of all knowledge; the study of society and history must become a science like them or remain gossip. Dilthey's answer, worked out from the Introduction to the Human Sciences of 1883 onward, was that the human world asks for a different operation. 'We explain nature,' runs the slogan drawn from him, 'but mental life we understand.' We can understand history, law, art and religion because we are ourselves living, meaning-making beings, and can grasp an expression from the inside in a way we can never grasp the fall of a stone.
He called the disciplines that do this the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of spirit or mind, and he spent his last years trying to give them a foundation as rigorous as the one Kant had given physics — a 'critique of historical reason' to stand beside the critique of pure reason. He never finished it, and the late work that circles the triad of lived experience, expression and understanding is fragmentary. But the influence outran the fragments. The line that runs from Dilthey through Heidegger to Gadamer's claim that understanding is an event rather than a method, and the kindred tradition we traced in reporting the Schleiermacher hermeneutics lectures, both begin in his distinction. So, at a different remove, does every qualitative social scientist who insists that interpreting what an action means is not a second-best substitute for measuring it.
Alvin Goldman was born in Brooklyn on 1 October 1938 and died in August 2024, and between those dates he did as much as anyone to turn epistemology outward. His 1967 paper 'A Causal Theory of Knowing' was among the first substantial replies to the puzzle Edmund Gettier had posed two years before, which had shown that a justified true belief can still fail to be knowledge if it is true by luck. Goldman's thought was that knowledge needs the right kind of causal connection between the fact and the belief, and from it grew the position that made his name. Reliabilism holds that what justifies a belief is not whatever the believer can produce by introspection, but whether the process that formed it — perception, memory, sound inference — is one that reliably yields truths. Justification, on this account, is a matter of how your beliefs are actually produced, not of what you can say in their defence. Epistemology and Cognition (1986) pushed the point further, arguing that empirical psychology is relevant to the theory of knowledge, that a philosopher who wants to know which processes are reliable had better find out how perception and memory in fact work.
The last turn is the one that reads as prophecy. Knowledge in a Social World (1999) founded, more or less single-handedly, the field of social epistemology: the study of knowledge as something produced and transmitted among people and institutions rather than spun by a solitary mind. Testimony, expertise, the design of courts and voting systems and the media all became proper objects of the theory of knowledge. A generation on, with misinformation, recommender algorithms and systems that generate fluent falsehood on demand, this is the liveliest quarter of the subject, and it shares a border with the work on epistemic injustice we examined in Miranda Fricker's account of the moral structure of knowing. Set Goldman beside Condillac and the shape of the two days appears. Both ask where knowledge comes from; one looks inward to the senses of a single statue, the other outward to the traffic between many minds.
The first of October also marks the death, in 2017 at Margate on the Kent coast, of Istvan Meszaros, the Hungarian Marxist who had been Georg Lukacs's assistant in Budapest and who left Hungary after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 rising. He taught for years at Sussex, won the Isaac Deutscher Prize in 1970 for Marx's Theory of Alienation, and spent decades on the vast Beyond Capital (1995). Its governing claim is that capital is not merely an economic arrangement but a mode of organising social life as a whole, a 'social metabolism' that reproduces itself across the state, education and work, so that abolishing private ownership without dismantling that wider system changes less than its opponents hope. The argument, which owes a great deal to Marx's own analysis of alienation, was read again after the crash of 2008 and informs current attempts to think the political economy of automation. Meszaros belongs on this page as the day's reminder that 'how do we know?' is not the only boundary a thinker can try to move; so is 'what is it that holds a social order together?'
The thirtieth of September 2018 took the American pragmatist John J. McDermott, long of Texas A&M, who edited the writings of William James and John Dewey and taught that a philosophy worth having begins when a person takes their own experience seriously. His death is a fitting hinge, because this week Columbia hosts Miranda Fricker's John Dewey Lectures, which we have reported — Dewey's name, and the conviction behind it that philosophy answers to lived experience, running from McDermott's editing straight into a contemporary lecture hall.
From 1 to 3 October the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame holds its twenty-sixth annual fall conference under a title lifted from the Book of Job, 'But Where Can She Be Found? Wisdom from Age to Age.' The question is pointed in a period when information is cheap and abundant: whether wisdom, the old distinction between knowing much and knowing how to live, can be recovered as a subject rather than a sentiment. It is the question Rumi and Condillac would have divided on, and the one the Confucius entry in this series sets beside the Western tradition. The wider season is in our October conference diary, and the most recent entry of this series to reach the archive, on Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises, is here.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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