On a footnote in Darwall's Second-Person Standpoint.

I had a busy day in a mandatory faculty training. So little time for a fresh digression.

Yesterday a PhD student I had never met before wrote me an email about a footnote in Stephen (‘Steve’) Darwall’s (2006) The Second-Person Standpoint (Harvard). It’s footnote 48 on p. 24 of Chapter 1. My new correspondent wrote, “I am curious what exactly (if you remember) you were pressing him on.”

I have to admit that my original response to this query was confusion. I thought my only contribution to Steve’s argument in his big book was a reference to a passage in Adam Smith’s essay, “Of The External Senses.” My memory turns out not to be all bad because, indeed, that shows up with an acknowledgment to me on pp. 48-49 note 21 of Chapter 3.

Anyway, I didn’t take me long to find the passage my correspondent was asking about:

It’s probably been twenty years since I would have pressed him on this point.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I met (in the extended sense) Darwall while I was a PhD student because there were relatively close contacts between the Michigan and UofC departments in those days and faculty often functioned as external readers to each other’s students back then. But the first time meeting and doing philosophy together that I have a distinct memory of was, almost surely, at Wesleyan in the Fall of 2002. It was my first (excellent!) visiting job out of graduate school, and the philosophy faculty there had a lovely habit of doing a faculty reading group and then to cap it with a distinguished visitor who would do a pro-seminar, give a talk, and also allow one to ask questions about the work you just read. (I had the distinct honor to visit in that capacity a few years later myself!) I think in 2002 we read Butler’s Sermons, and Darwall was the distinguished visitor. (But it’s not impossible we read his The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' in the reading group, or both.)

The next few years, I bumped into Steve quite a few times at APAs and conferences, including, of course, his famous presidential address at the central APA in 2004. At the time it was a major morale booster he showed interest in my views, including on topics of shared interest. Judging by my email headers, we even corresponded on topics pertaining to the second-person standpoint. But, alas, I don’t recall any of the circumstances that gave rise to footnote 48 on p. 24 of Chapter 1.

My guess would be that I was probably much impressed by the fact back then that for Hume (and also for Smith) all kinds of dispositions and capacities that define humanity now are themselves historical/evolutionary achievements. This is a major theme in my papers on Hume and Smith at the time. And given that’s kind of what Darwall goes on to say in the sentence after the footnote to me in his book, I assume I had something like that in mind. In my note to the PhD student I added a few speculative thoughts, but nothing that merits wide circulation. If the PhD student does important work with the objection they are developing, I am pretty confident it’s an original discovery on their part. (If my correspondence with the PhD student develops, I may take a look at the details of my past correspondence with Darwall if anything is to be found in there.)

I have cited Darwall’s book both in correspondence and in print since it appeared, and I have had views on how Darwall’s position may well connect to Adam Smith’s philosophy. But I never taught it or carefully worked my way through it any point since because I never used it as a vehicle to develop my own views. (Since I teach in a political science department the odds are low that this will change any time soon.) So, subsequently — and this is key, I suspect — I never told stories about my sense of the work on the anvil as Steve was hammering out the final touches on it in public presentations and workshops.

Such stories matter in education as framing devices or useful mythmaking, but they should be treated with non-trivial suspicion by historians as evidence about the development of people’s views. (They can be instructive, of course, about how the narrator of the story views things in a re-telling of the story.) But without such stories there is also little chance that active long-term memories are formed. I have never told stories about the Second-Person because the truth is I was not invested in having contributed to it.

I was kind of disappointed that in my response to the query I could not spin a great tale about pressing an objection that always made me suspect a vulnerability at the heart of Steve’s great edifice and so inscribe myself into the history of recent and unfolding philosophy. To be sure I have harbored objections like that (and repeated them to myself over the years), including ones expressed in hostile Q&As back in the day when such things still occurred against all kinds of projects by all kinds of people, who would never have thought to or did not footnote my point in print. And, perhaps, just perhaps, that’s connected to my longevity and avidity as a blogger.