Does a philosopher’s writing style have any bearing on the quality of their philosophy?

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Inspired by

Some Souls

, a long-awaited Substack that answers questions from the All Souls exam, I will be taking a series of quick, bloggy stabs at questions from All Souls past papers, which I’ll reserve for my paid subscribers, all of whom I love very much.

Also, in news I will repeat in the header of my next few blog posts, I am now unleashing the Awol Archives! Posts that I paywalled during exam season so that paid subscribers could get their money’s worth will now be made free for everyone, especially you (old posts that were originally paywalled will remain paywalled, since they are sometimes of a controversial nature.)

If you’re new to this blog and thinking, “wow, which archival banger should I read first?”, consider reading this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, or this one.

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In “Philosophers whose prose is so dreamy it won’t even send you to sleep”, I catalogued some of my favourite prose-stylists in the analytic tradition. Incidentally, the philosophers I listed were/are good philosophers, with arguably one exception.

But what if the ‘incidental link’ were more than that? In particular, what one’s writing style was linked—causally, constitutively—to the quality of one’s philosophy?

Today I will uncover five positive links between the quality of one’s prose and the quality of one’s philosophy, and one way in which having ugly prose is a boon to one’s philosophy, considered as a space-time worm.

(1) Clear prose partially constitutes good philosophy.

In a moment, I’ll consider some ways in which prose quality could be causally linked to philosophical quality. Before I do, it’s worth asking whether the link between the quality of one’s prose and the quality of one’s philosophy is constitutive rather than causal.

Roughly, X constitutes Y when Y “consists in” — i.e., “is nothing over and above” — X, but not vice versa. For example, you might think a sandcastle is constituted by grains of sand, where the sandcastle consists in — is nothing over and above — grains of sand, but where the grains of sand don’t consist in being a sandcastle.

You might think good philosophy is part constituted by good writing. Here is an argument for why you should.

First, if God exists, is He a good philosopher? Perhaps He is the classical sense of loving wisdom, since God would love all things good; but in a crucial sense, it seems like He couldn’t possible be. In particular, philosophy seems to partly consist in intellectual achievements—and whatever other good things we might want to say about necessary omniscience, the attribute seems to rule out intellectual achievements with respect to the sorts of propositional questions that philosophers are concerned with, since God’s propositional knowledge would come automatically.

So philosophy requires intellectual achievements. Many intellectual achievements take place in the head, prior to writing them down. But others take place as they are being written on the page.

If you accept Clark and Chalmers’ first argument in “The Extended Mind” (which concludes, roughly, that cognition extends beyond the head, and can take place, in part, on a notepad), then the process of writing an idea down on a notepad could partially constitute an intellectual achievement. In turn, I claim, the quality of the prose the idea is written down may bear constitutively on the quality of the philosophy.

Here is the thought fleshed out. According to the extended mind thesis, it’s possible for things outside the head—like a laptop or notepad—to literally form part of our cognitive processing. Suppose, in one case, you hold a number in mind while doing mental maths so that you can use it later on, and in another case, you write the number down while doing mental maths so you can make use of it later on. In the second case, the scratches on the notebook are doing some work that, were it done by something inside the head, would be considered part of the cognitive process.

Seeing no relevant difference between what happens outside the bone of one’s skull and what happens inside it, Clark and Chalmers’s claim that, sometimes, scratchings on notebooks and rat-a-tats on keyboards are literally part of our cognitive processing, even though they happen outside the head.¹

To quote

Victor Kumar

in a recent post on AI in the classroom, “Writing doesn’t just improve thinking—writing is thinking.”

Suppose you buy that cognitive processes can be part-constituted by stuff outside the skull. Well, intellectual achievements—including philosophical achievements—are (at least partly) cognitive processes, and sometimes they happen concurrently with writing them down.

Conditional, then, on Clark and Chalmers’s claim that cognition ain’t all in the head, keyboard taps and notebook scribbles can form constitutive parts of intellectual achievements, including philosophical ones.

The quality of a philosophical achievements partly depends on its clarity. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, in its published form, is no doubt clearer than its initial drafts; had Parfit telepathically projected his seedling ideas onto a stack of papers, the philosophical work would no doubt be of lesser quality.

As with philosophical works, so too with philosophical achievements. To the extent that one’s written prose is partially constitutive of the cognitive process that constitutes a philosophical achievement, the clarity of that prose—which is one aspect of its quality—bears directly on the quality of that philosophical achievement. Thus, in this sense, the quality of one’s philosophy can be part-constituted by the quality of one’s prose.

(2) Clear writing makes for clear thinking.

I’ve had—and observed—a lot of arguments with professional philosophers where at one point, one party screws up their face, sits back, and says, “I think I need to see this written down.”

The quality of an argument—one’s own or someone else’s—isn’t always transparent to trained philosophers, because its hard to hold every assumption in mind for mulling over. When an argument is written down, thoughts are imprisoned in ink: as a result, they are powerless, unable to hide behind self-deception or cute rhetoric, and are therefore much simpler to spot.

Writing down a philosophical idea, writing it down in full, renders it imprisoned—immobile—on a page; as a result, it’s easier to pull the idea apart, notice logical slips, crucial ambiguities, glaring omissions, undefended premises, implausible claims, and dead dogmas.

This process chews up bad ideas and allows better one’s to marinate; and the clearer one’s prose is, the more harsh and unblinking, the more ideas are put in paper jail, and can be subjected to equal scrutiny; in this way, again, the clarity of prose—an aspect of its quality—bears directly on the quality of one’s philosophy, except this time the link is causal (prose → philosophy).

(3) How impenetrable prose can be a boon to one’s philosophy, considered as a space-time worm.