Well, she does sound a bit curmudgeonly. "Harrumph," indeed. And to this complaint Haack finds a liberating answer: You bet! If philosophers who think of themselves as seeking truth are, in Richard Rorty's patronizing phrase, "lovably old- fashioned prigs," then sign her up. She is among those who, she says, "find Peirce's curmudgeonliness refreshing." Many, I think, will in turn be refreshed by her own treatment of what she calls "foam-rubber language," of "preposterism," of "fake reasoning" (a.k.a. "bullshitting"--spinning theories without really caring whether they're true). Narcissistic cleverness, to Haack, is positively immoral.
Therein lies what I think is most important in her book: not her (often shrewd) observations on the culture wars, nor her (usually convincing) philosophical demonstrations, but the attitude she embodies. She talks in a voice that echoes from the age of William James, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Peirce himself, an age when Anglo-American philosophy was not just a literary game or a café argument about politics. Rather, philosophy was about something: how to conduct personal and social inquiry, and thus how to learn, and thus how to live. The best way to convey what I mean about the air-clearing quality of this voice is to quote it:
"`Diversity' has become one of those foam-rubber, public-relations words which muffles the otherwise obvious: that a philosophy department as varied as you like with respect to sex, race, ethnicity, and all that, all of [whose members] were students of Professor Davidson's working on adverbs ending in `ingly' (or all of whom were students of Professor Harding's tracking down rape and torture metaphors in Newton--or whatever) would not, for all its diversity in one sense, be diverse in the sense that matters."
So the virtue of Haack's book, and I mean virtue in the ethical sense, is that it embodies the attitude that it exalts. Good teachers give us not just the right idea but the right frame of mind. Haack's voice is urbane, sensible, passionate--the voice of philosophy that matters. How good to hear it again.
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