That a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.
So can a unserious and bad one.
The analysis of on
Much attention has been devoted to analyzing articles like if, and, or, it, this, and that. These concepts have been scrutinized in the fields of logical analysis, indexicals, and proper names theories, to name a few.
On the other hand, very little attention has been given to the article “on”.
This comes as a surprise given so many important works start with this article.
Notable examples include Parmenides’ On Nature, Aristotle’s On the soul, Lucretius’ On the nature of things, Russeau’s On Education, Mill’s On Liberty, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Russell’s On denoting, Quine’s On What There Is, Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds, Bell’s On the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen Paradox, Parfit’s On What Matters and this very On On.
This is not to exclude titles where “on” is present, though not as the first word: Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, and many others.
If we are to make sense of all the works above, we must turn our attention to the meaning and usage of “on”.
What on means
The Oxford dictionary lists twelve different meanings for “on” as a preposition, plus another five when used as an adverb. Of these, it’s quite clear that all the texts mentioned use “on” in a very narrow, technical sense, namely: “Having (the thing mentioned) as a topic; about.”.
We could safely — not losing any meaning or purpose — rephrase our title to Having on as a topic or About on, even though philosophical works rarely start with “about”. But to make our title clearer, we must say the first occurrence of on is quite different than the second. The first on, as discussed, means “about”. The second one is the subject of our inquiry, that is, what we’re talking about. A proper way to make it clearer would be to rely on the use-mention distinction, and update our title to “On ‘On’”.
So what these authors wanted to convey by adding “on” to their titles? Clearly, they wanted to state their topics, concisely. But it seems they could be even terser by dropping it: “The Plurality of Worlds” or “Liberty” do not lose anything from the originals. This points to the possibility that on is a vacuous preposition.
“On” as a vacuous preposition
The sentence “I’m talking Nature” seems a bit odd, but this may be simply because we’re used to adding “about” in such construction. After all, we can understand what the utterer meant. This oddness doesn’t occur when dealing with titles: “Nature” is a perfectly appropriate title for a book that intends to be about Nature. The reason here is quite obvious: titles themselves are supposed to relate to what the rest of the book is about.
Surely, in rare opportunities, they don’t. Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow is not about pregnancy and the movie The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing doesn’t feature cats and, deductively, no cats dancing — Cat Dancing is the name of an Indian character. But that’s because there are no strict rules when giving something a title — only implicit ones. Bending these rules may be used to create an aura of mystery around the work or to add a humorous twist. In some cases, it may even summon an ethical debate, like in Haneke’s ‘Funny’ games (quotes on funny are mine) — an extremely violent movie –, or when brothers Cohen added a “this is a true story” disclaimer to Fargo, to play with people’s credulity.
But this doesn’t seem to be so common in philosophy. The implicit rules around titles appear to have a greater social binding. In all examples presented earlier the duty to present the subject enunciated in the title is fulfilled — unless the Vienna Circle was right and they were all nonsense anyways.
The vacuousness of “on”, when used this way in titles, seems to extend to other concepts as well. Titles such as “Discourse on …”, or “Meditations on …” or “Tractate about …” happen to add little — or nothing at all — to it, being only a way to restate the aboutness of the topic.
This is in perfect alignment with current academical practices, especially in analytic philosophy, where titles often contain just a list of two or three concepts that are the subject of the work, like Quine’s Word and Object, Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, Davidson’s Truth and Meaning, Grice’s Logic and Conversation, Gamut’s Logic, Language and Meaning, Goodman’s Fact, Fiction and Forecast and finally Boolo’s Logic, Logic and Logic.
Notably, even though analytical and continental camps do not agree on much, they seem to agree on the uselessness of “on”, and the trend of removing it from titles. Examples in the continental camp, are Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, to keep this list short.
A counterexample
Titles, especially in philosophy have an implicit “About:” prepended to them, making any usage of “on” or “about” redundant. Given this overwhelming evidence, is there anything to say in defense of “on”?
There’s one clear counter-example to our main thesis. The title of this article could very well be changed to “About the Preposition ‘On’” or “A Treatise on ‘On’”, but leaving it simply “On” would be quite unhelpful. One would not be able to know what it is about from this title. Nevertheless, this counterexample stems from the reflective nature of this title.
Conclusion
The vacuity of on was presented and argued for. The spread usage of such prepositions in the past can only be explained by sociology. Perhaps it was common in the past because of the psychological urge to look relevant and pompous and its drop in usage attests that, nowadays, looking technical and to the point is much more en vogue, emulating Science. The era of the treatise and the big systems is gone.
A surprising implication of our analysis is an ethical and ecological one: a lot of resources could have been saved by dropping “on” (and other related terms) from papers and articles — paper, ink, and power to feed servers. This could also apply to this one, but I shall argue that, in bringing attention to this problem, we may have an overall positive effect.
