NEH grants for developing Philosophy courses

People shouldn’t confuse anti-intellectualism with a slam at philosophy in specific. Sure, philosophers have been kicking these things around since ancient Greece, and in the main haven’t said anything new or interesting since ancient Greece. If you’re going to discuss “Is there a human nature” why wouldn’t you want an evolutionary biologist to write it? If a philosopher writes it, you’re just going to get ancient Greece plus potted evolutionary biology.

And I’ve never seen a philosopher do well at “what are the limits of scientific understanding” unless they are a philosopher who once actually did science. “What is good government” you’d think would be political science. “What are the origins of the modern world” seems like history. Philosophers may have owned these questions at one time, but now that we actually know something about them, they don’t.

I had already heard about this, and as a science person found it very intriguing, and a potential opportunity to design a course that might fashionably knit back together the tear between science disciplines and other disciplines, humanities in particular in this case. I won’t reveal my own great enduring question (not on the list) but if I decide to pursue it I was thinking about reaching out to colleagues in history and art history, which are humanities disciplines as much as philosophy, are they not? I agree that the list had a philosophical ring, and am wondering if this is supposed to be pro-philosophy, anti-philosophy or neither?

It is profoundly perverse to turn philosophy into a job description.

Walter Sinnott Armstrong has, or had, a terrific business card that reads, “Walter Sinnott Armstrong, Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College” and then underneath that, “Arguments Refuted; Paradoxes Resolved; Contradictions Exposed — Call for a Quote”.

Learner, from my personal experience the need for a connect between science people and history or arts people is much greater than between the sciences and philosophy.

Here in the Netherlands at least, a significant part of philosophy students are in fact students of the sciences doing a second study, and conversely most science departments have some form of ethics or philosophy of the sciences courses for their students.

I’d say the communication between philosophy and the sciences is already decent and two-way. It can always be better, but the disconnect between the sciences and other humanities seems much deeper, in personal connections and in even a vague understanding of what the other’s goals and methods are.

Honestly, my first reaction was to think they were trying to put a “it’s not philosophy” spin on what they obviously know is philosophy. And maybe they’re doing that because of a conscious awareness that these questions are interesting to freshmen but Kant isn’t. Or maybe they’re trying to engage non-Philosophy humanities in these questions deliberately. Or maybe they really are clueless. But the language they use has all the trappings of deliberate spin.

“obviously not be likely”. Damn.

John: Do US universities really not address “big questions” in their philosophy departments? By comparison with what?

Here are a few course lists for nearby colleges and universities:
http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/Courses/Philosophy.html
http://www.bu.edu/philo/academics/courses.html
http://fmwww.bc.edu/pl/undergrad.html and http://fmwww.bc.edu/pl/courses.html
http://www.umass.edu/ug_programguide/philosophycourses.html
The small state college around the corner from my house turns out not to have a philosophy department.

Harry, what you describe sounds like something I think Rorty alludes to: that philosophy departments are around to tell people in other academic departments what they’re really thinking when they get into jams. I thought this was probably his own take (assuming I’d even read it right). Is it actually held fairly generally to be the case?

(Also, I seem to have a comment stuck in moderation, probably because of excessive external links, but they are all to reputable university course syllabi.)

I think this probably stems from the notion that philosophy is not an applied study, and these questions – while discussed – remain entirely in the theoretical sense. The other fields (astronomy, biology, art history even) may be seen as more grounded and offering a more physical or real-world connection to the “big questions”.

“That is, as other mention, Philosophy Departments aren’t exactly rockin’ (though you should have seen my Ancient Greek class)—would be good to stimulate the outreach from the other disciplines into philosophy.”

Or as the dept head here put it, “it’s psychology with out the people problems.”

“I’m talking about making money.”

I think you have this backwards. The college didn’t propose the idea for these courses to the NEH in an attempt to get money; the NEH offered money to colleges if they would teach these courses.

Whatever the motivation behind coming up with these courses I don’t think they are a money-making ploy.

“I guess that my take on the “human nature” question, and many others, is that I suspect that too many people in too many disciplines think that they have the resources to answer, or at least discuss them, satisfactorily without looking to other disciplines ”

Perhaps — but really, I suspect that disciplinary conversations about these things would quickly turn into philosophy plus. Contra John E, philosophers may do their research in what he calls the Fregian tendency, but any attempt to teach the ancient-Greek questions in introductory courses is firmly held as part of their bread and butter. I think that an evolutionary biologist consulting with a philosopher on human nature would end up with maybe a quarter of the course on evolutionary biology.

Which seems to me to be what Atherton’s comment, quoted above, is about. How dare the astronomy department teach what the nature of the universe is — why, that’s anti-intellectual! But really, the nature of the universe is a more interesting area when approached through cosmology than through philosophy. I’d rather just have an astrophysicist go to town on it and skimp the philosophy than the reverse.

If it must be pluralistic. then I suppose the best way to do it would be to pick whichever disciplines seem relevant and someone from each take over a share of the class time, making no attempt to minimize their answer or give the others any undue credence. That way everyone gets to talk about what they know about and you avoid the footnotes to Plato syndrome.

I know you were half joking, dsquared, but there really are some important, structural similarities between the mainstreams of economics and philosophy in the U.S. today.

I’ll let other elaborate as I duck out of the line of fire….

This is all less mysterious once you realize that neoclassical economics is a branch of analytic philosophy.

In Inwagen’s book and the Nietzsche book, and even more egregiously in recent professional works about Chinese philosophy, I frequently see locutions of the sort “I think that it is fair to summarize his argument as follows:”. It isn’t fair, though. It amounts to saying “X was not really a philosopher properly speaking, but if he had been one and had our powerful tools in his possession, he might have said something like this:” In general, when discussing philosophers describable as “literary”, that is, philosophers who choose to present their ideas in a literary rather than in an argumentative or formal manner, a selective version of what the philosopher actually wrote is translated into contemporary terms and forms of statement. I’ve seen entire Chinese authors boiled down to a handful of citations or even paraphraes upon which the professional philosopher then builds a structure of argument.

Jaybird 21: knowing as little as I do, I can’t be sure that you’re wrong, but your assurance seems stupid to me.

Rich — I’d bet there’s an empirical test of that (evolutionary biologist and philosopher teaching together): I know that people write together from the two disciplines, and am curious what actual courses look like. Remember, what we are talking about is undergraduate classes that are supposed to be open and accessible to anyone whatever their major: many teachers are quite responsible int he way they design and teach courses. I, too, would much sooner take a class on the nature of the universe from an astrophycist than a philosopher; but i would add that every philosopher I know probably has the same preference, and a co-taught class might well turn into the reverse of what yoou fear, one in which the philosopher stands back to admire what the scientist does. Very unlikely to have the same dynamic in a class co-taught with someone else in the humanities; I think what Atherton (with some reason) fears is people who can’t do philosophy teaching philosophy and doing it badly.

Remember, what we are talking about is undergraduate classes that are supposed to be open and accessible to anyone whatever their major:

Is this specified in the proposal? Or is it just the professional philosopher’s assumption that general, practical philosophy can only be for stupid people, and that higher-level work cannot be done in the field.

Unrelated credentialization scandal.

Can’t we all just get along?

What an awfully big question.

“wounds”. “operates”. The Chinese are right about inflection, but the Chinese truths cannot be prematurely imposed.

My burrow is impregnable. I borrowed the design from Kafka, making certain changes which definitively solve the Russellian, Godelian, and Heisenberg problems.

I forgot to mention the dominant group, the country-club Republicans, who are only free-marketers when they don’t need government money and when tax rates are set.

You favor a rather drastic narrowing of the curriculum from the current broad menu approach to something like: just the pragmatism bits that John Emerson thinks are best. (Because what you like is already there, but it isn’t the exclusively favored approach. There are also other things there that you don’t like. Your complaint reduces to this.

I flatly deny that. I look for that stuff and don’t find it. I leaf through journals and don’t find it. A pseudonymous poster affiliated with CT explained to me that pragmatists are the lowest-ranking tendency in philosophy. Process philosophy is virtually extinct.

I’m willing to confess to being narrow like Rorty, though. Or narrow like Toulmin. Do you actually think about the meaning of the words you write? Were Rorty and Toulmin trying to narrow philosophy?

Emeritus individual exceptions don’t prove me wrong if their grad students don’t get jobs.

And I think: well, we’ve got that.

This is your key point, and I say you’re wrong. I look for it and don’t find it. From time to time I read a book someone recommends to me. I leaf through journals. The philosophy I like is by non-philosophers, ex-philosophers, emeritus philosophers and dead philosophers.

For Christ’s sake, Holbo, go read Dsquared’s post and locate your response there. He already made it for you.

Dear John Emerson,

Oliver Cromwell once wrote to the Scottish Parliament, apropos their considering secession: “I beseech you by the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be wrong.” Ditto for your breezy dismissal of Nietzsche. Read Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, and/or The Gay Science as soon as ever you can. Once you’ve recovered your powers of speech, we can figure out how you can compensate me for this invaluable, life-changing advice.

Emerson, Holbo advised looking first. Did you look at the course listings linked upthread in comment 14? The BU listings, for example, show quite a bit of “big question” material.

I don’t say that your point is entirely mistaken; but it’s worth looking at what’s offered to undergraduates.

“So basically, John, there’s no problem at all except in my fevered imagination? And nobody with any sense thinks that there is? And that you, along with everyone else, wants to maintain a hard line against external criticism?”

Of course not. I don’t maintain even a soft line against external criticism. You know that. As I’ve told you many times, I think it’s important that external non-academic critics – like my friend John Emerson – should not be dismissed. But I do think the existing problems don’t map very well onto what you imagine them to be. (But again, denying you are right is not tantamount to denying that any criticisms are, or could be, correct.)

“I’m willing to confess to being narrow like Rorty, though. Or narrow like Toulmin. Do you actually think about the meaning of the words you write? Were Rorty and Toulmin trying to narrow philosophy?”

Careful. If you start getting all picky-picky about the meanings of words, you’ll turn into an analytic philosopher.

Was Rorty trying to narrow philosophy. Was Toulmin? Yes and yes, in a sense. Although, in my opinion, for somewhat different reasons.

What I have called Rorty’s ‘rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective’ – that is, these visions of a future in which the discourse will arrive where Rorty hopes to will go in which it will ‘no longer occur to people’ to ask the sorts of questions Rorty finds pointless – amount to inadvertent advocacy of narrowing the field.

Because if everybody in the scene ‘gets big picture’ – in the immortal words of the Hold Steady, then, paradoxically, that would be something of a narrow intellectual monoculture. Where are the specialists? Where are the non-pragmatists?

The problem is not that this is actually what Rorty wants – he’s a generous sort of fellow, as are you, in your grumpy way. But this is what you are, in effect, asking for, which suggests maybe you should reformulate the request. In Rorty’s pragmatist case, there’s no space in his argument between saying ‘this is the right view’ and ‘this is the view the discourse would do best to converge on’ (pick your pragmatic formulation for the latter envisioned state). Justification and intellectual ecology get all mixed up and it becomes oddly hard to hold together the virtues of pragmatism and intellectual pluralism. I think this is the problem you have as well.

As to Toulmin. An interesting example is Toulmin and Janik’s “Wittgenstein’s Vienna”, which is a strangely narrow work. But the source of the problem is different than in Rorty’s case. Toulmin and Janik see that the Frege/Russell view of W.’s influences is seriously skewed away from all the things they want to consider. But they commit the sin of leaning too far in the other direction. As Kierkegaard says: ‘a corrective mistaken for a norm is confusion.’ Toulmin and Janik were confused in just this sense. And I think many of your criticisms are confused in this sense. You are leaning very far out, because you perceive that the ship is leaning very far in the other direciton. But you also talk as though you are standing up straight. It seems to me you are all leaned over to one side.

I am willing to grant being on one side, but what’s your point? I’m saying that the ship is leaning the other way, and isn’t it?

“Perhaps it represents an attempt to break an intellectual monopoly […]”

I still think you’re wrong about this, John E. If it were that, it would affect research. This is explicitly limited to undergrad courses. Philosophers routinely teach “literary” philosophy to undergrads, even if they don’t publish it in the journals.

So there may be a communal interest on the part of philosophers here, but I think you’re misreading it. The offense would be breaking not into an intellectual monopoly, but into a financial one. Departments are funded to a great extent on the basis of how many undergrads they teach. If some other department starts teaching those freshman about the meaning of life, it equates to fewer philosophy profs over the long term.

When I was an astrophysics grad student, the same situation obtained. The profs’ individual success depended on research, but as far as the university was concerned, the department was there to teach Astronomy 100. And since the university required every undergrad to take one science course, and it was reputed to be the easiest one, probably 90% of the undergrads took it. If another department had come out with, say, an easy interdisciplinary “earth sciences” course, the astronomers would have been up in arms about anti-intellectualism and so on. (I’m not suggesting an exact analogy, since there is no indication that the courses proposed by this grant would be unusually easy.)

I may be wrong about the possibility that the grant offer was intended to actually improve philosophy.

If you want to reform philosophy departments, or even replace them, surely the way to do it is not to scrupulously feign their current non-existence.>/i>

Oh, poo, John. That’s a quibble. Boilerplate is boilerplate. Polite fictions are polite fictions.

harry b: “I think what Atherton (with some reason) fears is people who can’t do philosophy teaching philosophy and doing it badly.”

In an interdisciplinary course, something is going to be taught badly. (Unless, maybe, people can actually work out my suggestion that the course be split among 5 teachers or so. In which case you’d probably get coordination problems that would be even worse.)

I fully accept that philosophers are currently teaching this kind of thing to undergrads. Other disciplines aren’t, not with this “big questions” focus. That means that all else being equal, it’s least important for the philosophy to be got right. Interested students will be able to take other courses in philosophy that involve enduring questions. They won’t be able to in most other departments.

Ok. From my perspective, as an inebriated graduate student ‘in a related field’ (apologies to Chun the Unavoidable), here’s the real issue: yes, Holbo is absolutely right; the classes are there. I’ve taken classes on the authority of the state, on political/legal theory generally, on the nature of normativity, on ‘what matters’–all at the graduate level at the best department. The classes are there.

But that’s not really what Emerson is arguing. I really think (as someone who has also taken PhD econ classes with two Nobel laureates) that the econ parallel is absolutely right: if you look, yes, there are economists studying whatever it is that you care about. But that’s a distraction. What matters is the profession, in a very sociological sense.

So: as I see it, there are at least three levels (in increasing importance) to the problem: 1- who is encouraged to be a philosopher; 2- what are they encouraged to study as a philosopher; 3- what are philosophers trying to impart to non-philosophers when they teach undergrad classes. And here I think Emerson is right: there is little (not none! but little!) attempt to connect to those who don’t have an affinity for that particular way of thinking and approaching problems, and a particular sense of what sort of thing matters.

In some way, this is just Ian Shapiro’s gripe about ‘problem-centered’ rather than ‘method-centered’ poli sci, but fuck it, it’s a good gripe. I was just at a conference where someone presented a decent paper on the interaction between psychology and philosophical accounts of sympathy, and one questioner asked, ‘But is this really philosophy?’ And quite frankly, the only appropriate response is a cold stare/violence. When you start defining your subject by distance from the armchair … bah. As Norcross said in a nice paper, “WWJSMD?” (What Would JSMill Do?)

When I think about undergrad classes I took, those that best addressed ‘the big questions’ were either political theory ones or explicitly non-departmental–common core, interdisciplinary ‘human rights’ concentration, etc. Sometimes those who taught them were philosophers (no matter how tightly one draws the boundaries), but they were the sort who would be willing/forced to teach that kind of class. Which says something in itself.

Look, the bottom line is this: if you’re really offended by the NEH thing, you need to get a grip. If you’re doing something that could remotely qualify, apply for the grant, why not? If you’re doing philosophy of L/E/M/M, but not of the sort that would qualify, and are offended on behalf of your brethren–just stop. Relax. They’ll be fine. And if you’re in ‘a related field’, and have always wanted to teach a course like this, go for it! Talk to the philosophers! Have fun!

Sigh.

And so to bed.

I would rather that Soames had left philosophy instead of Rorty and Toulmin. I don’t see the parity at all.

And now really to bed.

“I would rather that Soames had left philosophy instead of Rorty and Toulmin.”

That’s fine but only leads to a further question. You are proposing some sort of fairly radical institutional restructuring. What is it, and why would it be good? I feel like you are proposing burning the house down and then, when I ask why, you are saying “I would rather that the house hadn’t been painted that particular color.” That is, your objections, to the extent that they are definite, are fairly incidental. You like Rorty better than Soames. But liking Rorty better than Soames is not really a reason to accept your indictment of philosophy. I like Rorty better, too. I think he’s a more interesting thinker. But I don’t buy your sweeping case against academic philosophy. (Rorty went to Stanford and was in Comp. Lit. I think it was. But the philosophers – some, enough – went right on arguing with him. So it’s not like he ‘left philosophy’ in any intellectually dire sense.)

Thus do I test the hypothesis that John Emerson didn’t really go to bed, after all. He’s probably in the kitchen, making a sandwich.

What is highly peculiar about this program is […] that it is apparently considered entirely appropriate for members of, it seems, economics or astronomy departments to offer such courses. This is anti-intellectualism run amuck.

Honestly, I am a bit puzzled by the general reaction, and by this one in particular. It seems to me entirely appropriate that departments of History, Political science, Literature, Law, Economics, Biology, Astronomy (and preferably a mix of all those) could offer very nice courses attempting to tackle some of the questions presented. So Mrs. Atherton’s reaction really baffles me, as does Harry’s quotation of her.

Besides, as these questions are typical philosophical questions, Philosophy departments should be the best at getting those grants, so basically this is extra money for them. Frankly, if the NEH wrote a grant proposal called “Enduring questions” with money for courses entitled “What is a continuous function?”, “What are numbers and geometric forms?”, “When is on thing equal to some other thing?” (the latter being the title of a real essay by Barry Mazur), my thoughts would be along the lines of “Yay, free money for creative mathematicians”, and I wouldn’t be offended in the least, quite the contrary, by the suggestion that the departments of Anthropology, Arts, Literature, Philosophy, Physics, Law (etc.) could conceivably compete.

John, I think you’re being a bit disingenuous here:

Or do you want a department in which you can be like Rorty OR like Soames, whichever you think best (but if you are like Rorty, Soames will say you are doing it wrong, and if you are like Soames, Rorty will say you are doing it wrong). Or do you just want the proportions jiggered a bit. Yeah what we’ve got is right, but a bit more Rorty and a bit less Soames in the ecological mix. If that’s it, then what’s with the apocalyptic tone?

The point is surely that JE is saying that the social and industrial structure of the philosophy industry is set up to systematically exclude and marginalise Rortylike philosophers (and at times, to be saying that this is a worsening trend – that Rorty types are being increasingly forced out of philosophy) by making it unacceptably difficult for them to find a job in philosophy that pays their bills. That’s a fairly clear empirical proposition, it might or might not be true but there’s nothing ambiguous about it at all. And you seem to agree on John’s implicit moral premis here (that such a state of affairs is bad for philosophy) so the empirical proposition is all there is.

“The point is surely that JE is saying that the social and industrial structure of the philosophy industry is set up to systematically exclude and marginalise Rortylike philosophers”

Well, that’s certainly supposed to be part of the point, although I do think JE is reaching for a bit more. I guess insofar as this is all JE is claiming, my main complaint is that it seems to be more false than true.

Yes, Harry, that’s your version of “a” — that what I’m saying is unworthy of response. And also is not a real threat, because philosophy is solidly institutionalized and I’m just a Cheeto-eating blogger in pajamas. You guys didn’t know what you were getting into when you enabled comments, did you?

Whereas John is mostly saying that I’m happy but don’t know it, as in the old USSR, I guess, because everything is fine. None of the things I’m talking about happened, and if they did happen they were good things and I’d like them, if I only understood.

I’m still claiming that this is a bureaucratic turf war, as Leiter’s, Harry’s, and Atherton’s statements all reveal. The activity of philosophy has now been identified with a tight, well-bureaucratized, hierarchal institution, with clear procedures and protocols and reward structures, and failure to respect the institutional boundaries is highly problematic — “anti-intellectualism run amuck.” Leiter is the institutional enforcer, though the real power lies with more eminent people who do not intervene directly, though they did succeed in squashing that loser Rorty.

Now if you would just nicely say “We won, you lost — get over it, loser, your stuff is worthless crap!”, then we will have a frank exchange of views, and a very satisfying one too. Someone indulge me in this.

Or, call me mentally disturbed. That works too.

Rich, I did spend about 20-30 years as a non-institutional philosopher, and it doesn’t really work. Without exception my friends got sucked into the institution, and most of them stopped talking to me.

For reasons which many here will find understandable.

Inwagen’s book was totally crappy, Cala, not just “not the kind of book I like to read”. His substantive content was all cribbed from CS Lewis, which is bad enough, and he’s surrounded it with intricate analytic-philosophy argumentation studded with question-begging. I actually rather like his argument that philosophical argument can never convince anyone, but I regard that as a criticism of the kind of philosophical arguments he uses and of the way analytical philosophers frame arguments, not as some kind of weird irony.

I was particularly astonished by his bibliography, which (as I said) contained three authors who wrote before 1950: CS Lewis (whom he supports), JS Mill (whom he opposes), and weirdly, a book about African exploration including an anecdote Inwagen likes.

So, like in any discipline, there are technical professionals (intellectual orthodoxy), usually a relatively closed group with their jargons and so on. Then there is also this “usable general thinking” which is what we non-professionals want. If (regrettably) there isn’t enough of “general thinking”, is this really a good reason to attack the professionals? They’re just doing their job. These grants might help.

When someone is mentioned but not bibliographed, I assume that the canned version in a secondary source is being used. I think that that’s the most reasonable assumption.

One of the steppingstones on the way to my present disgruntlement was the assertion by a friend in grad school that no one really needs to read any philosophy written before 1950. That’s science mimicry of a very destructive sort, and while I understand that my friend’s attitude isn’t universal, it rather bothers me that it’s even possible — I know that he didn’t figure it out all by himself.

If you look at the history of philosophy, it’s littered with schools which claim to have summed up, perfected, and superceded all earlier philosophy, and so far they’ve always been laughably wrong.

John, do you really think that I think philosophy departments are a Worker’s Paradise? What would that even mean?

Some people in philosophy ask what the specialization of philosophy really is. For example, philosophy of mind seems to be being absorbed by AI, psychology, brain physiology, etc. It really is becoming science, as it has long tried to be, but is it philosophy any more?

Some of the the unscientized residue in ethics, politics, history, social thought, etc. is necessarily practical; it’s the very stuff theorists bracketed out in order to become scientific and formal. My claim is that this is what philosophy should be, and it should direct itself to the more general problems where Truth in the scientific, formal, rigorous sense is not really available. The attempt to rigorize these areas seems to me to have been futile. Inwagen seems to agree about the futility, and in a different sense Velleman and Dworkin seem to think that ethicists have nothing much to say about primary ethics, but only about secondary ethics (meta-ethics, I think).

Harry, there are a lot of Crooked Timberites.

I think it’s natural for any discipline to specialize itself into hundreds of subset areas these days. I agree that it probably causes them to concentrate less on the big picture, but I’m afraid that’s just how it is; narrow specialization is the game.

Pretty much in every discipline. 20 years ago I knew everything there was to know about IT, now it’s one little piece of the very big puzzle.

Goodness, a lot of things happened since yesterday.

Another anecdote from my own experience that I will use to generalize about the whole entire world:

The Philosophy Club at my school was run by the kids who showed up. So if, like, 10 people showed up and 8 of them wanted to discuss A and 2 of them wanted to discuss B, well, we’d end up talking about A for about 80% of the session and B for about 20% of it… which, I suppose, seems fair but the following week would have 8 people who wanted to show up, not 10, and the 8 people would be able to discuss A to their heart’s content.

We’d read our papers to each other and ask professors to show up and give little speeches to us… but we tended to ask the professors who specialized in A and the ones who specialized in B got asked less often and turned us down a little more often.

Well, when I was there, the big thing we tended to discuss was Moral Philosophy, Religious History, and Existentialism (yeah, those heady college days)… every session was a “Big Questions” session… and we did a good job of chasing off the Marxists who had, apparently, been in charge of the philosophy club in years past.

Anyway, we asked a particular professor if she would like to come to our little meeting and her response was, and this is pretty close to a direct quote, “Why would I want to waste a perfectly good evening talking about God and shit?”

My eyes grew huge and I said “Dude! That’s going to be the new name of the Philosophy Club!”

Theon kai Capron!!!

Anyway, I’ve lost the point of my story.

OH! I remember. If the NEH folks behind the grant had the majority of their experiences with professors like the one in the story, they could come to the conclusion that Philosophy departments are serious places where serious questions are dealt with seriously and courses like the one mentioned fall outside of the scope of philosophy as it is practiced today.

If most philosophy departments teach Philosophy 2.0 (and have professors who specialize in 2.0), saying “we need a Philosophy 1.0 course” would make sense, I’d think.

I am happy to follow up John Emerson’s least relevant comment with the NRO’s take on the credential scandal. Caveat emptor when choosing doctors fellas.

John E (and others): please remember that the moderation filter selects posts not exactly randomly but rather capriciously (it has a seemingly pathological hostility to the same person posting consecutively which regularly catches me), and once a post is put in the moderation queue, it stays there until a poster who is a) logged in b) clicks through to the dashboard c) notices that there are comments held in moderation d) can be bothered approving them, happens by. I am a big fan of conspiracy theories in general, but in the specific case of CT comments, I grudgingly accept cock-up.

I guess insofar as this is all JE is claiming, my main complaint is that it seems to be more false than true

But come on mate; could there really possibly be a worse basis on which to judge this question than how it seems to you (or less personally, to someone in your professional and social situation with respect to the profession). It’s amazingly difficult to get any sort of objective view of the sociology of one’s own milieu. At the very least, you’d need to acknowledge that there are an awful lot of people to whom it seems to be more true than false – this reminds me a bit of Galbraith’s slogan that “an acceptable rate of unemployment” means one which is acceptable to those who are employed.

I don’t know thing one about academic philosophy, but what Emerson wants seems perfectly clear. There is philosophy he finds useful, and philosophy he doesn’t. He believes that people doing the philosophy he doesn’t find useful control all the relevant academic institutions, and have pushed people doing the philosophy he does find useful to the margins, or out of the academy entirely. (This is an empirical question, of course, and I don’t have any relevant knowledge about whether it has actually happened.)

He would like the relevant academic institutions to change such that people doing the sort of philosophy he does find useful have higher status and more resources, that their grad students get good, statusy, jobs, and so forth. While this would necessarily mean that people doing the sort of philosophy he doesn’t find useful would have less status and resources, I don’t believe that he’s asking that they be marginalized in return, just demoted to a facet of the greater field rather than the unquestioned mainstream.

Seriously, his facts could be totally wrong, and I wouldn’t know. But what he believes the facts to be, and what he wants, seem absolutely clear to me.

Lizard Breath- the problem is what you state in the end- Emerson just has no idea what he’s talking about. You’ve been around him enough on-line that you should know that the fact that he knows nothing about some subject is no cause for him to not yammer away on it at great, great length. Emerson knows nothing about this, which is why his comments often seem so baffling to those who do know something about it. But that’s never stopped him.

Matt, 106 – if you’re a professional philosopher, then Emerson is your customer. Dissatisfied customer. “You don’t understand anything, shut the fuck up” is not really an adequate response, whether your business is to sell toothpaste or philosophy papers. An adequate response would be to tell him that unfortunately his taste in philosophy is not very popular, like others did.

I’m coming into this late but for whatever it’s worth (nothing much, or nothing at all), I happen to have two philosophy PhDs in my immediate family, one of whom teaches in a moderately presitigous graduate program. And my impression of the state of academic philosophy today is exactly the same as Emerson’s.

I wonder, tho, if it could really be any different, or if the narrowness, formalization, disconnect from broader humanistic tradition, indifference to the concerns of nonspecialists, etc., are just part of what it means to be an academic discipline today. In other words, rather than calling for better professional philosophers, why not try to turn philosophy into a kind of discourse in which professionals have no special authority. Sort of like poetry: most poetry departments suck but who cares?

Toward which, incidentally, forums like CT where nobodies like Emerson and me can speak as equals with eminences like Harry B., John H. and John Q., seem like at least a small step.

I cannot speak about Rorty, but I know something of Toulmin’s work and its reception. His 1958 book on argumentation was panned by mainstream philosophers when it appeared (and may be still FAIK), but, outside the mainstream, this book helped initiate the renewal of interest in the 1960s in methods of argument which became the discipline called Informal Logic AND was very influential in the 1990s in the new field of computational dialectics, the engineering of computer systems able to engage in practical reasoning, in dialog and in argument. There are now regular international conferences and workshops on computational argument.

As a result, Stephen Toulmin was honoured as an invited speaker at an OSSA meeting several years ago (the main North American conference on argumentation), where he spoke movingly about the disdain his work received from mainstream philosophers.

Daly became an outcast in economics

What does that mean?

Matt, 106 – if you’re a professional philosopher, then Emerson is your customer. Dissatisfied customer.

Emerson might be dissatisfied, but enrollments are up here and I believe generally.

Sucker born every minute, Cala. But as I said, I’m not a customer.

Perhaps he lived long enough to be discovered. He was mild-manneredly grumpy in the intro to FTCG, which was written awhile back.

OK, I think this will probably be my final attempt, since I’ve pretty much said it already. As some people have pointed out, there is a charitable and an uncharitable interpretation of John E.’s criticisms, and I’m taking the uncharitable line. The trouble with the charitable line is that it doesn’t seem any better. JE wants people to be doing the kind of stuff he likes. Well there are people doing that. So he wants more. Then what? Instead of 30% doing what Emerson likes we need 40%. Or 60%? 80% At this point the burden is really on Emerson to get seriously empirical about all this. This is what I was saying above about conflating intellectual justification and departmental ecology. If he wants to say that a certain neglected view has more merit than people then, then fine. Defend it. if he wants to say that departments hire too many of the wrong sorts, then fine. But it seems to me that what he says is this: I think the following approach is the best one. Looking at philosophy departments, I see that most individuals in them are not doing what I want. Therefore, I conclude that philosophy departments need more people taking this approach. That really isn’t a very sensible way to argue, I think. Because, whatever approach you favor, most people aren’t going to be taking it. There is just too much variety in the discipline for that. So justification of some approach, and recommendations about healthy ecological mixes, are always going to diverge.

Also, we need to consider the very likely possibility that the problem isn’t that the philosophers are approaching their subject in some narrow, positivist conformbot kind of way, and that is why their work sucks (by Emerson’s lights). Rather, Emerson just thinks most academic work he reads sucks (welcome to the club) and he has wrongly inferred that the reason why he thinks that most academic work sucks is that he is in possession of some superior conception of how the discipline should be pursued which, were it but tried on a large scale …

(This is the significance of my asking Emerson what special thing it is he believes about philosophy, which then turns out to be what most other people believe. That thing he believes is the key can’t be the key because we’ve already turned it in the lock, and the door of not sucking still won’t open. Although the door to the discipline is now wide open.)

Conclusion: philosophy is hard.

Lemme tell you a sad story from my own academic life. I have all this stuff on philosophy and literature and literary theory. I send it to literary studies journals and it is rejected as ‘too obviously wrong’. I send it to philosophy journals and it’s rejected as ‘too obviously right’. Life sucks. And yet, according to Emerson, I think I’m living in a worker’s paradise. Is this because, as Emerson hypothesizes, I am just aggressively incurious? Maybe so, but forgive me if I have my doubts.

I do tend to chalk up my personal publication misfortune and aggravations to institutional dysfunction. But I don’t do it in the Emerson-style broad brush fashion, which seems to me just to ignore the facts on the ground. (I know, I know. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’m entitled to my opinion, too, Dsquared.) I think a bit more closely than he does (so it seems to me) about why it is that stuff I think is smart keeps getting rejected for what seem to me like woefully inadequate reasons. I don’t actually think it’s true that academics are, per se, incurious and instilled with a nigh-instictive hatred of interdisciplinary work. Although, if that were true, it would certainly explain my personal misfortunes.

Lizardbreath, let me insist again, (I think I’m here agreeing with John) that what Emerson says, at least in the degree he says it, is false, and that’s what’s so annoying about his position. Even more than that, he asserts it as if it were obviously true, but it’s not. He’s basing his opinion on a very narrow slice of observation but acting as if he had a grand view while it’s obvious to anyone who knows much about philosophy that he doesn’t. (Consider, for example, the way he’ll argue like mad against Rawls but once admitted that he’d never actually read Rawls, only a single not very good critic of Rawls by a non-philosopher who didn’t seem to understand him well. That doesn’t stop Emerson from repeating this same stupid critic over and over.) If someone did the same thing about the law you’d throw your hands up and walk away, thinking this person is primarily interested in being a jerk. That’s Emerson. There’s no point in engaging him because he’s not interested in getting things right.

LizardBreath, I think Emerson is just mostly wrong on the facts. But, per Dsquared’s comments, it’s a bit hard to settle that. Neither insider nor outsider testimony can be taken as entirely trustworthy. So I have been striving to get us off this facet of Emerson’s critique. I do see it. But I see no good way to argue about it in the context of this thread.

It is a possible story that a field could have two subdisciplines, and one could get administrative control of all the rewards and freeze the other out.

I’d say that there’s a weak version and a strong version of this, and that most philosophers would agree with the weak version or something similar being true: influence of a certain kind of toolset, prominence of certain fields, how some subfields are disfavored as specialties, how that affects the job market, the perhaps undue influence of the Leiter report.

The stronger claim (and here the goalposts seem to change a lot) is the one that seems to me to be false: that it’s systematic (ime, more vestigial), universal (varies a lot by department, by which I mean, a *lot*), getting worse (the analytic/synthetic war is something that I associate with a tetchy older generation, not my peers) and those who do not get with the program are left wailing and gnashing their teeth (said option has been upgraded these days to include tenure at R1s..)

It’s the strong claim that most people are disagreeing with. And the weaker claim, while it’s a problem, doesn’t strike me as one peculiar to academic philosophy.

I know that you’re friends with Emerson from unfogged, LB, but does he ever really contribute anything over there, either, other than just yammering away, whether he knows anything about the subject or not? Even if you’re friends with him, isn’t that so?

I see Matt is determined to make the kind of high-quality contribution that can only reflect positively on the field of philosophy.

I’d put it more like this:

Xs were all drummed out of the academy!
What about so and so who does X?
Xs were all drummed out of the top programs!
What about so and so, who does X, at a top program?
Ah, but Xs do not have successful track records at placing graduate students? No one wants to work with them!
What about so and so, who does X, and whose students are hired!
But their job market sucks!
EVERYONE’S JOB MARKET SUCKS.
…

In short order, we’re down to the weaker claim again, which I don’t think many would dispute. (Well, we’ll dispute it. Philosophers, natch.) I think part of the problem is that Emerson’s favorite writers are a little more ghettoized than most*, and analytic philosophers have a very strong web presence.

*What complicates this more is that I know people personally who teach the sort of stuff Emerson wants to see**, but it isn’t their *primary* research area. But this is true of plenty of subdisciplines, not just his hobby horses.

**As near as I can guess.

But hopefully they’ll now have nifty new course ideas, and these will get grants.

Isn’t it painfully obvious that most modern academic research is over-specialized, myopic, and inbred? Never have so many produced so much of such low average value. Risk taking and synthesis across specialization boundaries are strongly discouraged by cultural and financial disincentives. Academics are punished for pursuing Promethean efforts and rewarded for running on a treadmill.

Philosophy is hard, but it is impossible if you are locked into the isolation cell of your “specialty.” If ever there was a time for grand synthesis, this is it. Intellectual adventurers like Stuart Kaufman are looking for the fundamental laws of extropic complexity, spanning biology, economics, linguistics, politics and many other domains. There is no endowed chair for pursuing this knowledge.

Certainly we don’t live in a renaissance period, that’s for sure, but that isn’t the fault of anybody in particular. Wait a couple of years – or a couple hundred years, – let it all synthesize, and you’ll see new Leonardos and Michelangelos. But it doesn’t happen every day.

John H, I’m surprised that you don’t seem to get what John E. means. Since you study intellectual history, I think that you have to pretty much agree that what he’s complaining about is possible, although possibly not true. Namely, that there was a turn towards a certain set of ideas, a certain style, and that’s now the de facto standard of respectability, cutting-edge-ness.

It doesn’t have anything to do with whether the people doing it are 10% of philosophers or 90%. No new intellectual trend ever fully displaces what came before, any more than (to take a literary example) Theory meant that the New Criticism was never ever done any more. But the people who want to be academic stars had better be doing the new thing. Sure, it’s fine for people in the hinterland or the fringes to be doing virtue ethics or whatever — they can be trotted out whenever these discussions come up — they may be 50% of philosophy departments, for all I know — they even have tenure. But no one really pays attention to them at anything more than a local level.

And it’s possible to look at a particular turn in intellectual history and say that it was a mistaken one. Yes, this is an inherently crankish thing to do. And when people were discussing Theory’s Empire, say, that word came up repeatedly, at least in implication. But it has nothing to do with that kind of percentage argument that you refer to. In fact, the theory people in that one kept using the percentage argument themselves — paraphrased as “not that many people in English departments really do theory” — but it doesn’t matter, does it? Not when those ideas are the important ones.

As I’ve written above, I think that John E is going about it the wrong way. “Wanting the goodies”, as he says, equates to selling out. You’ll never get far in a punk DIY way if you announce that you want to sell out. And it has to be a countercultural way, because a head-on charge runs right into people like Leiter, whose first comments tend to be on publication records and why should we listen to people who aren’t in the system already. The people who successfully change intellectual trends tend to — well, look at Silliman again. There is now no formalist poet, I’d guess, who does not have the phrase SoQ at least grate on their nerves.

Heh. Brian Leiter.

Note his stiff warning to the CT people. Even not deleting my comments might get you in trouble, guys. He’s a man you don’t mess with. And his spies are everywhere.

“the question of whether the “philosophy I like” is just a taste of mine, like liking black cherry ice cream, or whether actually not very good stuff is presently being systematically favored over better stuff. For John relativism is a knock-em-dead answer to this, which would be an effective argument if I were Rorty.”

Which John has accused you of being a relativist? (I trust you are not talking about me here.)

“To accuse me of thinking that my style of philosophy is better than the style that I see as typical of contemporary philosophy apparently counts as a refutation in today’s world. I fail to understand this.”

I’ll assume you are still arguing with that other John. I, by contrast with this fool who shares my name, might suggest – in a friendly sort of way – that claiming you are right, and then failing to make clear what distinguishes you from those you are allegedly righter than, leaves the issue in some doubt.

It’s not much use to go on trading ‘it seems to me’ empirical claims. Except maybe this last one: it seems to me that what remains is for you to articulate what positions it is that you think have merit, but are intolerably marginalized. What is it that you believe, which is – allegedly – career death to believe as a professional philosopher? (Or very hazardous to believe, so that only the courageous will persevere along such heretic doxastic paths?)

Rich P. notes the parallel between my criticisms of literary studies and John E.’s criticisms of philosophy. But it seems to me that my claims are more closely based on texts I am criticizing, and that my criticisms are more a matter of specific disputed claims. There are intellectual stakes that can, to some degree, be made explicit and then settled by argument (or at least hashed out with a definite sense of what is being hashed). But what are the stakes in the case of John Emerson vs. professional philosophy in the Angl0-American academy? What argument is it that you want to have, which you are being prevented from having because (allegedly) the philosophers won’t even engage on this point. They will just dismiss it as nonsense. Well, what IS it?

John,

“a willingness to write more persuasively on more ambitious topics”

You mean: a willingness to do better philosophy? Do you think that the people in the department know how to write more persuasively about more ambitious topics but are consciously – voluntarily – holding back? out of careerist motives? Does that sound psychologically plausible?

“If you choose to be Horatio at the bridge and defend your discipline, you’re going to win, to your own satisfaction at least.”

John, snap out of it. I’m willing to listen to you. I’m not Horatio at the bridge. I’m Horatio on a blog. I am asking you what you think, and what you think is wrong. As responses to a specific request to articulate what you want to say, this seems sort of weak: “I originally started saying these things vaguely hoping that some people in the biz might actually already be somewhat aware of the things I’m saying.”

Yes, but WHAT? No, really, man. I’m asking. I don’t mean the ‘institutions breed mediocrity stuff’. I mean the specifically philosophical stuff. Lay it on me, man.

“I don’t recall that more temperate approaches, e.g. Rorty’s, got very far either.”

Rorty died a famous and successful academic philosopher, admired by many and despised by not a few. What the hell do you want of out academic life if not to be admired by many and despised by not a few? I say nice work if you can get it.

“For me it’s more or less axiomatic that established bodies of thought have systematic blind spots, but to academic professionals today it seems axiomatic that their own specialization, at least, doesn’t.”

Look, it seems to be axiomatic to you that I can’t possible be saying what I am damn sure I appear to be saying. Namely, I am not averse to criticism. I am just a bit skeptical about this particular line of criticism, so I’m inquiring into it a bit more closely. What thing is it that you think philosophers ought to be able to do, which they can’t, on pain of professional death? Approximately.

“Didn’t Rorty, like Toulmin, end up giving up on philosophy and working in other areas?”

It depends on whether by ‘philosophy’ you mean the department or the institution. Departmentally, yes he left – for comp. lit. Institutionally, no. He was still publishing and arguing with academic philosophers, in the usual sorts of ways, up to the end.

Moving right along. You say I should know what you are talking about because I’ve read the sort of thing you write, or should have by this point. But that doesn’t cut it. I’ve read the stuff you write. I kinda like your stuff. So here’s the problem: I kinda like your stuff. Except one thing. You keep tediously insisting, against all plausibility, that these sorts of thoughts are shocking, heretical philosophical insights/stances that would get you fired if you dare to develop them as a professional philosopher. In short, your writings look to me like pretty solid counter-examples to your claim that the things you say are shocking heresies that philosophers can scarcely imagine being true; and if they could, they would probably be hounded out of the profession.

Your time piece. It sounds to me like you think philosophy of time should involve more phenomenology. I must regretfully inform you that you will not be shot dead on the spot for saying such things. The proof: Reading Husserl and Heidegger is not a capital offense, even if some people will look down their noses at you. (Not that you have to be a Husserlian or Heideggerian.) But saying the philosophy of time is a matter for phenomenological investigation is not shocking.

Now take your Sen/Putnam piece. It’s a bit polemical and very contemptuous in tone and quite blunt. That will often get you kicked back if you submit it to a journal (don’t I know it!) Other than that you are most likely to be harassed by the following charge, and very justly. ‘The author keeps saying that philosophers are not trying to do x, and need to try. But most philosophers think they are already trying to do x. So the author needs to substantial or clarify his argument and criticism.’

To illustrate: “Philosophy needs to deal with indexicality (so-called “subjectivity”) as something other than a source of error.”

Author needs to acquaint himself with the rich literature on indexicality and subjectivity, very little (if any) of it assuming that these things can only be sources of error.

“It has to recognize that the future is open and indeterminate and that, of necessity, all humans face an unknowable future in the process of being made.”

Vague. Does the author think that other philosophers are unaware that the future cannot be predicted with absolute certainty? Presumably he is not so benighted. Then the author must either be saying nothing or saying that the future is a lot less predictable than we think it is. But he makes no argument to that effect.

“Truth” is only about the past and the eternal and universal, but philosophy also needs to learn to deal with the future and projects.”

As a technical point, this is debatable. As a practical matter, the author needs to explain better why he thinks that philosophy can’t deal with ‘the future’, can’t deal with ‘projects’. Is he just saying, in a generic sort of way, that professional philosophers are all obviously prize idiots? Or is he saying something more specific. If so, what?

“Philosophy has to fully accept not only ethics, but also practical reason governing action. Practical engagement is not a debased form of theory, but a way of making reality, and (as a kind of experimentation) an essential source of knowledge.”

Why does the author think that ethicists do not accept that ethics is a matter of action, rather than theory? Just because they have theories of ethics? But what would the author propose to fill the seminar room with, if not moderately rigorous, semi-systematic talk (about something)? ‘Way of making reality’ and ‘essential source of knowledge’ is just vagueness, to which what follows gives no more definite shape.

Skipping down a bit: “Practical reason works with concrete actualities in real time and has to account for all the details that theory brackets out in order to make the material manageable. Theorists assume that these details are of marginal importance and that the theoretical substrate is what’s really real, but this is only ever more-or-less true, and in some cases it is not true at all.”

This is nonsense. There are volumes of discussion of this very thing. The author may think it is bad discussion. But then he should say so, and explain why he thinks so.

You make the following criticism of Putnam and Sen: “both were giving technical academic authorizations allowing people to think perfectly ordinary, valid things that everyone in the world, except most economists and many philosophers, has always thought.” I actually agree with that, at least with regard to Putnam. And I recently published a paper making exactly that case against Putnam (and so far I have not been drummed out of the academy – that’s one data point against you.) But it seems to me the problem with what you write is that you want to argue for fairly agreeable things (the future substantially unknown, ethics about what people do, not just what is said about what people do) while insisting that no one else already thinks them. A variation on this theme: you want to urge better philosophy. Well, everyone is in favor of that – see also, motherhood and apple pie. So, to distinguish yourself, you have to feign that everyone else is perversely opposed to better philosophy, per se. This is psychologically implausible.

You are determined to set yourself up as an embattled, lone champion of positions that are actually quite generously subscribed. God knows I suffer from the same disease of recreational contemptsmanship myself, in some forms. And it’s not such a terrible thing. Recommended therapy: get a blog. (At least we don’t have the disease as bad as Schopenhauer did. He really needed a blog.) Still, it doesn’t amount to the philosophic breakthrough you seem to think it is. And it muddies up whatever empirical validity there may be to your institutional critique. Again, I’m not going to argue about it here. But if you want to pursue the question of how bad the institutional disease is – what sorts of bad post-positivist path-dependence we suffer from – then you need to distinguish all that from your hobbyhorse of recreational contemptsmanship. Feel free to feel free-floating contempt for academic philosophers. But don’t mistake that for philosophical insight, per se. Is all I’m saying. I mean: no one ever went broke betting that institutions sort of make people stupid. So your free-floating contempt is sure to bump into a lot of truth. But it’s still sorta not tied down enough.

I’m really talking about the institution, not the activity. When Rorty switched departments after several decades, that did mean something. I’ve had it explained to me more than once that real philosophers don’t think as highly of Rorty as I do. That seems to have been his experience too, especially given his and his allies’ failure to change philosophy.

It sounds to me like you think philosophy of time should involve more phenomenology.

No. What I think is that philosophy of time should recognize that what is true of ahistorical quantum physics time and relativity time is not at all true of the time of the entities we actually experience. (NOT: of our experience of entities). What I say would be true without human consciousness at all; it’s not subjective. It’s true of any world with life forms, and probably is true of a lifeless geological world: it’s the fact of history and irreversibility. The reversible time of fundamental physics and the irreversible time of entities subject to entropy are two different things, and our lives and world are governed mostly by the latter. This is only even mentioned at all, noncommittally and without emphasis, by a single one of the authors in the Oxford book, which (unbelievably to me) keys on McTaggart’s century old sophistry. Someone reading this book, which seems to be intended as an authoritative survey for intermediate students, would come away understanding time worse than he had before.

A Dsquared almost said, one of the things about philosophy is that all of the right answers are there to be found, mixed in higgledy-piggledy with all the wrong answers. So of course I’m wrong, because the right answers are to be found in there somewhere, as in a Borgesian library, along with every developments of the logical possibly wrong answers, and all the ways of making a case for all the logically possible wrong answers — and he who makes the best arguments wins, as in Phaedrus. The discipline of asking “Does this work?” seems to have been not just neglected, but suppressed. (A philosopher who argues something like this is the mathematical logician Hao Wang, Kurt Goedel’s biographer and literary executor. He calls his philosophy “substantial factualism”)

I don’t really think that I have unique and revolutionary philosophical insights, or that I’m capable of defeating the whole ingenious, diligent, argumentative profession singlehanded. I’m also not really trying to horn in on the biz. I’m just trying to put together aa sort of natural historian’s outside view of philosophy as it functions and communicate it to my fellow non-philosophers (and maybe a few philosophers) and indicate some of the ways it could be better. “He who has ears, let him hear” — I haven’t claimed to prove anything or to have done a definitive study. My Putnam-Sen piece wasn’t intended for journal publication, but I think that it’s basically right.

The game is pretty much over for me, but I’m not dead yet, and being thought of as a crank does me no real harm. For me, as for many others, philosophy is a big unhappy might-have-been, and I am not ashamed to say that.

I think that I have a pretty sensible, intelligent generalist point of view about things in general, which I’ve put together from a lot of sources, and contemporary philosophy has not been a resource for me, when it really should have been. Not only is there too much crap, but the crap seems to be dominant, and as far as I can tell, an undergrad who takes a few philosophy courses runs a better than even chance in getting stuck in an infinite argument loop leaving him wronger and more confused than he had been before. (And in the big human picture, for anyone who is not in the biz, undergrad philosophy is philosophy’s main product, regardless of what philosophers think. And yes, I think that professions should relate to their outside. Perfect professional autonomy is literally insanity.)

Recommended therapy: get a blog: well, I do that, and I also parasitize other people’s blogs.

As far as the future goes: constructive proposals about possible futures cannot be either true or false. If a philosopher is dominated by the standard of truth and true propositions, he cannot make constructive proposals for the future, but only predictive statements about the future. It’s not merely that absolute prediction isn’t possible, it’s that it’s not the goal. (It seems to be the disease of Western philosophy, starting with Plato, to present constructive proposals as statements of fact).

My point about Putnam was not merely that he was right, but that it’s a scandal that he (and Sen) should have to argue that at all, and that it really indicates a fifty to seventy year black hole during which philosophy (and economics) were doing more harm than good. And all Putnam really was doing is proposing the possibility of doing things differently and pointing out a direction — it’s a very preliminary result or proposal. If there are lots of people moving in that direction, good. My sampling of philosophy has not brought me into contact with them, while it has introduced me to many of the others. (By their acts, many of philosophers do seem perversely committed to worse philosophy.)

I am open to suggestions as to the good philosophers. Parfit is on the list. I somewhat like Charles Taylor, but are there others like him? I like Ernest Gellner too, without agreeing with him, but I’ve been assured that he’s not a philosopher, so screw him. And Toulmin, who gave up in disgust. And Michel Meyer, who no one seems ever to have heard of.

I do appreciate your willingness to respond, which surprised me.

As I’ve said, I think that this kind of problem is pervasive across many though not all departments, and has been deliberately worsened since 1950 or so.

1957 and Sputnik fever, more likely, and the increasing professionalisation of the American education system as a response to the Soviet threat.

The university is just another factory and as its product it delivers nicely tamed intellectuals not just eager to put their skills in service of capitalism but who think this is all there is to their profession.

“I’m just trying to put together aa sort of natural historian’s outside view of philosophy as it functions and communicate it to my fellow non-philosophers (and maybe a few philosophers) and indicate some of the ways it could be better. “He who has ears, let him hear”—I haven’t claimed to prove anything or to have done a definitive study.”

I think it’s more of a ‘he who hears but has no ears ought to consider that he is subject to aural hallucinations’ situation, John. That is, I’ll sign off this thread by simply reiterating my opinion – expressed by others upstream: Matt, for example – that concerning all those empirical matters that we can’t profitably debate in a thread: you’re pretty much consistently in the wrong on the facts. This is the problem with calling it a ‘natural historian’s view’. “I haven’t claimed to prove anything or to have done a definitive study.” Not only that, but you haven’t done a study. You have an assemblage of impressions, which I suspect you have not so much gather as embroidered to suit your taste for feeling lonely and embattled.

John, I think that I have accurately described the footprint of professional philosophy in the greater culture. People who are not in the biz but have philosophical questions (in the older and more inclusive meaning of the word) look for answers elsewhere. If there’s a lot of wonderful contemporary philosophy that people don’t know about, you should strive mightily to get the word out, but in my opinion they are quite right to ignore professional philosophy. There was a cost to making philosophy a specialty for experts.

Next chance I have I’ll do another random journal search. My most recent one confirmed my opinion.

But again: not that there’s anything wrong with that. In my personal nemesis relationships, I think I go more for the Doofenschmirtz model, even though he’s the evil one. Perry is too inscrutable.

But in a nice way.