Never Truly There: the Soul of History and Philosophy of Science

The soul is the form of the living body, uniting the various limbs and organs to jointly function towards the realization of a goal. Whereas talk of the soul in our age is rare and oft reserved for private expressions of affection, talk of the body still takes many public shapes, in terms of “health”, “fitness” and “beauty”. Philosophy too has a body: the material conditions that make it possible to occur. Philosophy needs social organs to maintain its operation. Today, those organs are academic: university programs, professional associations, academic journals, the ever-growing need for social validation and its associated funding. Bodies are a difficult matter to discuss. Sometimes they repulse us, they do not follow our wishes, they fail, they make us feel lesser than others, they make us worry. Still, in our great concern, we cannot stop talking about them. The soul, however, is a different matter: a great silence rests over the soul.

The archangel Michael is weighing the souls at the last judgement - painting by Rogier van der Weyden.

In philosophy, it is the same. Philosophers cannot stop talking about the body of philosophy. There is an endless gossip about departments, university policies, colleagues, journals, publication strategies, career advice or grant applications. If one reads blogs, visits conferences, converses with speakers after lectures, it is the body of philosophy that ranks the highest as a topic of concern. Most often philosophy’s soul is simply taken for granted as an unarticulated, or even inexplicable, fact of the matter for which all philosophers share a common passion, and for which they have organized their lives so willingly. We rarely wonder what is the soul of philosophy that is binding us to its bodies, irreversibly reorganizing the course of our lives.

It is often said that we are all born with a soul, given to us without request, making up who we are, but - surely - the particular soul we have was never given to us for all eternity. We crafted it, with or without much care, out of our surroundings. And so it must be for philosophy. Ghent University was the organ of emergence for the soul of philosophy that has bound me to its body. To all who have visited this organ of emergence - its library, its lecture halls, its coursework, its research centers - it should be obvious that philosophy at Ghent is strange, wild, and uncategorizable in international terms. It carries a history of its own, incomprehensible to strangers, it has ghosts that one can meet in the hallways, and its students are often besotted with the myths of its “projects” or its “mission” to the world outside of philosophy.[1] 

One of the first anecdotes I heard as a beginning student was about a visit to the Ghent philosophy department of professors from Leuven in the 1970s.[2] As the story went, the Leuven people couldn't stop talking about one paragraph of Heidegger, going over it again and again, reinterpreting every word. Supposedly, at some point, the Ghent professors and students could stand this hermeneutic exercise no longer and cried out: “but people have problems, and while we are going over this Heidegger quote, their real problems remain.” To the philosophers of Leuven, the Ghent department was often understood as “analytic”, opposed to the careful study of the great continental thinkers. However, none of my professors had much interest in analytic epistemology or metaphysics. We read no Lewis, Kripke, or Williamson. If we did hear of analytic philosophy, it was mostly to scold it, as a futile scholastic exercise. Some of my professors professed to be pragmatists, but curiously I was never invited to read any classical pragmatism. Rudolph Boehm, Jaap Kruithof and Leo Apostel were regularly invoked as the great minds of Ghent's past.[3] Ironically, however, the students were actively discouraged from reading them. Philosophy at Ghent became even stranger, when Eric Schliesser arrived on the scene in 2010.

A photo of Eric Schliesser from a 2016 newspaper article of "parool". This is how Ghent students would remember him: always a phone in hand, ready to give a blog-update, caffeinated drink close by, and, of course, the inevitable sunglasses on his head, even when there was no sun to be had for weeks.

Initially - at least from the perspective of a student - Schliesser behaved like a conquistador, exploring a mysterious country, completely unaware of the lifestyle of its natives, ready to conquer it in the name of professional Anglo-Saxon philosophy or perhaps establish a beachhead for the international profession to take a hold in Ghent's hostile, but potentially productive locale. This invasion force invited fierce resistance. Students rebelled against the outrageous reading assignments of classic texts, professors defended their idiosyncratic programs against American customs and, despite many attempts at reconciliation, most things just stayed the same. On 28 March 2012, it came to an ultimate clash. The student organization "'T zal wel gaan" had organized a public debate on the nature of philosophy. The speakers drew almost 300 people to the auditorium. The emeritus professors Etienne Vermeersch and Diderik Batens represented Ghent's old guard, while Bart Vandenabeele (graduated in Leuven) and Eric Schliesser represented the new generation. Anna De Bruyckere, one of Ghent's most promising students at the time, was given the daunting task to moderate. Before she could start, Schliesser, in a cunning rhetorical move and in his typically bold style, took the microphone to announce that Anna had just been accepted to continue her studies at Cambridge University and that this deserved an applause. Perhaps unconscious of it, Schliesser had just publicly reinforced his agenda: if a Ghent student wanted to learn real philosophy, they would have to aim higher than the Belgian backwater familiar to them. Immediately, people beside me started to whisper: in Cambridge, Anna would study under Hasok Chang, thé philosopher of science of our time, a revolutionary thinker who would turn our Eric Weber-infused pragmatist philosophy of science on its head, a philosopher who was putting practice before theory, an inspiration not only to philosophers, but also to scientists.[4] The seed of internationalization was planted for my generation then and there: the world of philosophy had suddenly grown beyond Ghent and we simply did not know it.

Etienne Vermeersch captured the public imagination in Flanders as no other philosopher since his passing ever could; he is the archetype of the public intellectual, having published very little in traditional academic outlets.

The debate itself would become legendary. As everyone in the audience had expected, Etienne Vermeersch first expounded his familiar theory of science – we had all heard it a hundred times before – involving “levels of rationality” decreasing from mathematics to physics and ending in the behavioral sciences. This was a version of Vermeersch's enigmatic reading of logical empiricism that he had defended in his PhD of 1965 and had stuck to.[5] Before Vermeersch could claim that philosophy is valuable as long as its ideas result in aids to the “levels of rationality”, Schliesser started yelling in his microphone: "Madness! Madness! Someone stop this man! Batens, say something, you are the professor of epistemology here!" Everyone in the audience and the other panel members were awe-struck. No one could grasp what was going on. Never had Vermeersch, a TV personality of great fame in Flanders, a former dean and Vice-rector of the university, been so brutally silenced in the middle of his exposé. Schliesser continued the assault without second thoughts, arguing for the irreducibility of different elements in classical physics, using concrete examples from aerodynamics, yelling in the auditorium that Vermeersch's ideas were grossly misguided, completely outdated and, above all, scolding his colleagues for having kept up the illusion that Vermeersch was an authority to be taken seriously on these matters. Vermeersch's face was turning white. In the audience, people began to whisper worriedly: "if this continues, the old man might have a heart attack." Looking back at the event, I now see how professional philosophy of science had made a devastating, brutal landing in the public sphere of Ghent University. Vermeersch was faced with the fact that the philosophical reflection on science had lived beyond the 1950s and he could not retort. When he made a final attempt to recompose himself and revisit his earlier ideas, Schliesser urged the others to “take away the microphone.” During the break, with the microphones still on, an exhausted Vermeersch turned to Schliesser and confusedly exclaimed: "But, I do not even know you.” An ancient chieftain had just lost his world to foreign imperial powers and knew that it would never return. Although the debate that evening was officially about philosophy's soul, I barely remember any of the discussions. The debate, as Schliesser had presumably wanted it, was about philosophy's body. It was about the institutions and authorities that ought to matter to us, the students: the Cambridge HPS department was to be admired, the Philosophy of Science journal was to be read, people like Daniel Garber ought to be our exemplars and local authorities like Vermeersch or Batens could be discarded as irrelevant.

Of course, Eric Schliesser was only the most visible contributor to the internationalization taking place at Ghent when I was a student. In 2011, Maarten Van Dyck had already abandoned Dirk Batens's coursework and had lectured on classics in post-positivist philosophy of science, Feyerabend, van Fraassen, Friedman and Rorty. In 2013, Dunja Šešelja took over the master's course in philosophy of science, introducing Heather Douglas, Martin Carrier, Helen Longino and, of course, Hasok Chang. Students of my generation, like Fien De Block, Pieter Beck or Jan Potters, devoured Chang's work. "The Myth of the Boiling Point of Water" was paradigmatic for us.[6] Not only did that innovative, online-only paper question our knowledge of the boiling point, it also questioned how we were taught scientific knowledge and how, as philosophers, one could publish in a style different from the traditional research paper. Philosophy was to be an active effort to integrate history, practice and science such that it would matter in some way.

When I began my PhD studies in 2014, the Ghent philosophy department was filled with enthusiastic PhD students doing work in History and Philosophy of Science, who were all interested to think of science as a practice. Since Anna De Bruyckere and Maarten Van Dyck had written a paper on another important figure in the turn to practice, Joseph Rouse, the idea was formed to start a reading group on Rouse's “How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism.”[7] Laura Georgescu, Barnaby Hutchins, Pieter Beck, Boris Demarest, Wim Vanrie, Inge De Bal, we were all abandoning Ghent's earlier idiosyncratism and trying to find connections with the professional scene. The turn to practice in philosophy of science was debated from Pain Perdu to Or - the coffee bar was still somewhat of a novel phenomenon then, equally taking over Ghent's older styles of meeting-up. As a counterbalance to our practice-infused group, with an inherent bias against traditional realism, Eric Schliesser hired Jon Shaheen to introduce the Ghent department to "proper" analytic philosophy and to the "proper" intuitions that come along with it. Jon did not disappoint. Upon arrival in 2015 in the practice-dominated office, he immediately noticed Chang's temperature book on Pieter Beck's desk and remarked “the title is wrong: temperature was not invented, it was discovered.”[8] On Jon's recommendation, we began reading Kripke's Naming and Necessity, to root out our misguided relativistic constructivism - resulting in some of the most animated discussions the Ghent philosophy floor had ever seen. As a PhD student you can sometimes have the misguided impression that you are fighting over the fate of philosophy.

In early 2016, the news came out (on the HOPOS mailing list, of course, when Steve Fuller was still trolling people around) that Martin Carrier would organize a workshop with Hasok Chang in Bielefeld in May 2016. Pieter Beck, Jan Potters and I decided to heed the call and undertake a pilgrimage to hear the oracle speak of the latest developments in understanding science as a way of doing. We prepared relentlessly: over several weeks, the three of us came together in Brussels to read and discuss some of Chang's latest work, on pluralism and systems of practice, and to master the assigned Dewey material. My notes of that time encircled “aims” multiple times: “what are aims?”, “where do aims come from?”, “who decides the aims of a practice?” Enigmatically, I scribbled in wonder: “If science is a practice, then what is the practice of philosophy?” Driving on the German Autobahns to Bielefeld in a borrowed, tiny Renault Clio, we played Kraftwerk and mourned David Bowie. We were young and searching for the soul of philosophy. We were determined to return to Belgium, inspired or repulsed, invigorated or filled with remorse, but we would find something in Bielefeld to direct us on our journey, to bind us to the body of philosophy.[9]

Philosophy's soul is a strange thing. It is difficult to locate in action, it eludes us easily.  In ordinary life, aims and achievements often need no explication at all. The judgment what is success or failure, is entailed in the actions themselves. You either find your way to the destination or you get lost, you either sell your goods or you grow bankrupt, you either win support in parliament or you lose it. Philosophy, however, is a muddle. What does it aim at? When are you successful? What is the point? We can confine philosophy merely to its body: success in philosophy entails to be successful in the academic game, to know the right people, to get the correct grants, to familiarize yourself with the fashionable literature, to write in the appropriate style. Or, as Eric Schliesser once dramatically emphasized during a work-in-progress seminar for the Ghent PhD students (to my deep disappointment at the time): "never, under any circumstance, give up your place in the queue for questions." Initially, I revolted against the reduction of philosophy to its academic body. There is, I thought, something that matters beyond it, something which the academic body was supposed to foster and protect, something to be engaged in. Whatever practice History and Philosophy of Science might be, its aim could not be captured in light of academic success and such success could not be understood as a proxy for success in philosophy. After all, we can only judge whether our body operates well given the function of the soul that guides it. There is no meaning to the body achieving something, unless it has an aim - and this aim does not originate in the body itself. To equate philosophy's success with academic success, is to be lost: confusing the material conditions for one's activity with the activity itself. Is it possible to reach clarity of purpose, to grasp the soul of philosophy that is manifested in its academic body?

There is a well-known conspiracy theory about Bielefeld, namely that it doesn't exist. People from Bielefeld, "Die gibt's doch gar nicht..."

I have over 30 pages of notes on the Bielefeld workshop. They are riddled with question marks and points of exclamation. Almost ten years later, I wonder what I learned. Did I achieve clarity of purpose? On the last page, I wrote: “Nature is a concept that unites the commitments to which we are bound in our coherent practices; independent of those practices, nature is meaningless.” Earlier, I noted down that fundamental principles were not propositions, but "commitments to which we are bound in practice". And scientific practices are expressions of such commitments. It is philosophy's mission - its soul - to make them explicit and to open them up, from within the activities themselves.[10] If I were now to describe philosophy to anyone, this might still be my description: philosophy is the attempt to make the commitments explicit that shape our doings and to open up these commitments to our judgement. It is an easy message to convey, it is an arduous mission to achieve. In my Bielefeld notes, I equally remark that “we are talking more about philosophy than actually doing it.” To do it, we would have to be part of the activity itself that we open up to judgment. What impressed Pieter, Jan and me to go to Bielefeld in the first place, was Chang's engagement with thermometry and the measurement of the boiling point of water. Chang actually performed measurements himself; he practiced, albeit as an outsider, as an amateur. However, such philosophy in action only rarely happens. Philosophers quickly revert to typing on their keyboards, thinking in terms of those important papers. Philosophy has a tendency to remain aloof, away from the doings themselves, outside of the world it is supposed to be a part of. Professional philosophers have a tendency to excuse themselves: scientists have their own agenda's, society works on its own rhythm and nobody is waiting for reflection to halt them in their daily lives. Out of this, a mystery is born: if the soul of philosophy is to be part of an activity, how come philosophers have such trouble being part of that activity? To understand this mystery, one must go to a subject of which philosophers speak so often, but not in depth: their body.

Earlier, I alluded to one sin, to mistake the body for the soul, to equate academic success with philosophy. Now, I come to another, to mismanage the body in which the soul must manifest itself. If you want to sing an opera, you must train your voice in the appropriate way. If you want to run a marathon, you cannot disregard the rigorous preparation it requires. Academic philosophy is organized primarily as if philosophy is just another "area of specialization" within the university system, treating the philosopher as a specialist among other specialists. Next to the linguist, the physicist, the biologist and the economist, there is the philosopher. And this applies to subdivisions within philosophy as well: just like there are astrophysicists or sociolinguists, there are philosophers of science and philosophers of language (and so the subdivisions keep going on and on). This structure of academic training and rewarding does not serve philosophy's soul: a specialist is destined to remain inept when crossing their boundaries and reaching out to other areas. Of course, there are some happy specialists who might occasionally succeed in creating a niche environment in which philosophy's soul actually finds a home. However, this is destined to remain the exception as long as philosophers train and reward themselves to be academic specialists. Philosophy's academic body is not properly adjusted to its soul. If the practice "History and Philosophy of Science" aims to make the commitments explicit that shape our science and to open up these commitments to our judgement, then this is simply not fostered by the academic structures in which it is practiced. This problem necessarily proliferates itself, as long as HPS practitioners reproduce themselves within professional, academic philosophy. At one and the same time, the academic body of philosophy of science enables us to do our work and withholds us from doing what we aim to do with that work. The very structure that allows the activity to take place also makes it meaningless at the same time: the body of philosophy is not attuned to its aim. Unbeknownst to most, the 20th century did something weird to philosophy in general: it got cemented in an academic body which was not aligned with its soul.[11]

Where does this leave us, inheritors of philosophy – body and soul – as we find it today? Perhaps madness is the name for the state in which we find ourselves: doing something of which we know it cannot serve its purpose. Such madness is king in this world: we live with institutions, economic, political, cultural and social, of which we know they do not serve their purpose. One must only look up when riding the public transportation, and gape at the non-sense everyone engages with on a tiny screen, to know that madness is our being, to know that in the social bodies in which we live our lives, we find little support for the soul, even for life itself. How to reshape the body of philosophy such that its soul might flourish is a question that reaches far beyond my imagination, and, looking back at my own trajectory, I find myself wondering if it was ever any different, when Socrates harassed people in the marketplace, when Plato secluded himself with the other rich kids in Akadèmia, when Pico della Mirandolla fled Rome to avoid prosecution leaving those 900 theses behind, when Kant published “Was ist Aufklärung?” in the newspaper, and Arendt reported on Eichmann in Jerusalem? Was it any different then? Was the body of philosophy to which they bound themselves better adjusted to its soul, or did they too philosophize in a state of madness? Is philosophy perhaps an activity that cannot have a stable body? Or have I misunderstood it from the very beginning and is philosophy not an activity at all? Have I been searching for a soul that was never truly there?

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Hasok Chang ultimately published parts of the Bielefeld workshop in late 2022 as Realism for Realistic People. That same year, at it so happened, he presented his results from the book at the conference of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice organized at Ghent University. In that session, none other than Joseph Rouse and Maarten van Dyck also presented a paper. One decade after Eric Schliesser’s brutal landing, I realized that my presence there, my interests and my questions were parts of its result. I had come full circle. Ever since Schliesser’s sly hints at the importance of the Cambridge HPS department in 2012, for me, Chang’s work has always been there in the background, as a benchmark to live up to. Recently, I have written a paper on Chang’s book and its attempt at understanding science as a practice. In the background of my discussion, you also find the lay-out of the various bodies (institutions, courses, correspondence networks and reading groups) which have bound me to philosophy. https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28446/

[1] The Locus Classicus for this is, of course, the wonderful oral history interviews initiated by Constantijn Vermaut: https://www.ethiekenmaatschappij.ugent.be/jg-12-n%c2%b0-2-2009

[2] Of course, this anecdote was given by Ronald Commers in one of his two legendary courses on “philosophical ethics”. I don’t remember its details, but my description represents how I understood its core moral. For anyone able to read Dutch, please consult the incomprehensibly wonderful: Commers, Ronald. 2009. Kritiek van Het Ethisch Bewustzijn: Van Liefde Met Recht En Rede. Vol. 1. Den Haag: Acco.

[3] The classics associated with them are: Kruithof, Jaap. 1968. De zingever : een inleiding tot de studie van de mens als betekenend, waarderend en agerend wezen. Antwerpen: Standaard; Apostel, Leo. 1974. Matière et forme : introduction à une épistemologie realiste. Ghent : Communication and cognition; Boehm, Rudolf. 1977. Kritiek der Grondslagen onzer Tijd. Baarn: Wereldvenster. All three classics are still worth reading in several respects, although Apostel’s is quite obviously the most difficult to engage with (as the text switches between French and English midway).

[4] Of course, Chang himself had just moved to Cambridge and published “Is Water H2O?

Evidence, Realism and Pluralism” (2012, Cham: Springer).

[5] This PhD can still be consulted: https://libcatalog.ugent.be/permalink/32RUG_INST/1hqfqgf/alma9936924903109161 

[6] http://www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/boiling/ 

[7] de Bruyckere, Anna and Van Dyck, Maarten. 2013. “Being in or Getting at the Real: Kochan on Rouse, Heidegger and Minimal Realism.” Perspectives on Science 21 (4): 453 -462; Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[8] Chang, Hasok. 2008. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[9] Clearly something happened in Bielefeld. All three of us are still in academia. Jan has since directed his efforts to the history of quantum physics and how it intersected with Kuhn’s work. Pieter has focused on the 18^th century interface of crafting instrument, epistemic virtues and associated institutions.

See e.g. Potters, Jan. 2022. Conceptualizing paradigms: on reading Kuhn’s history of the quantum. Annals of Science, 79(3), 386–405; Beck, P.T.L. 2025 “Patience, diligence, and humility: epistemic virtues and chemistry in the eighteenth century Dutch Republic”. Synthese 205 (10).

[10] Clearly, in the background, Chang was thinking along these lines: Chang, Hasok. 2008. “Contingent Transcendental Arguments for Metaphysical Principles.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 63: 113–33. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246108000076.

[11] Here, we should remind ourselves of those strange academics who profess to have written all their abstractions in order to be “now finally” in a position to “do something meaningful”, and then promise, “from now on” to contribute to improving the public sphere, help combat climate change, or what have you. The irony is that they simply continue doing what they did before and live by the rules of the academic body in which they have cemented their lives. Ultimately, to escape the body in which you live always turns out to be impossible. We need our bodies.