Comment Re:What about philosophy professors? (Score 5, Interesting) 285
In your post, you were trying to defend philosophy from the /. masses. I admire this, and agree with most of what you said to them, but still I can't shake the feeling that I have to defend philosophy against you. I hope you can excuse the impropriety. ;)
If I follow you, your problem with some varieties of philosophy is that they are "unpractical," as you put it. It isn't exactly clear which sorts of philosophy you are fingering here, so I'm going to consider two possible readings of what you specifically said. Before that though, I need to give everyone else a quick sketch of what doing philosophy in the 21st century means. It's my personal belief that a lot of the frustration that you and I both face when we're talking to people without a philosophy background is the fact that the discipline is shrouded in mystery. More than that, though, I need it to make my response to you make sense.
Now, very roughly speaking, at the very highest level of abstraction there are three ways of "doing philosophy" in academia. You can be a historical scholar, a member of the Anglo-American (aka Analytic) School, or a member of the Continental School. The work of historical scholars are pretty straight forward: they take texts written by (frequently long) dead philosophers and they try to interpret them, or they try to demonstrate the relationships between different thinkers, or things like that. What they do is quite a bit like art historians or literature experts, only in a philosophical mode. Conversely, the Analytic School and the Continental School are concerned with the production of new thought: they are the two sides of what it sometimes refered to as the Split, because, starting around, oh, 1900, they stopped talking to each other. There are many differences between the two sides of the Split, but the ones that concern us here are just these: the Analytics are primarily interested in logic, rationality, and the physical sciences plus psychology and linguistics, while writting in a clear manner akin to scientific journals, and having their power in the UK and most US schools, while the Continentals are primarily interested in art and literary criticism, the social sciences, and what might be called "The Big Questions", while frequently writting in poetic if obscure manners, and having their power in France, Germany, and select schools in the US. Russell is the most commonly known analytic, while Sartre is the most commonly known continental. (And, IMHO, these are both tragedies.)
There were huge generalizations made above I would want to fix in a formal setting (historians tend to either have continetnal or analytic tendencies, for instance), but it's good enough for the purpose at hand. To get back to your comment, then, there are two things you could be saying. Either (A) that history of philosophy, and subjecting colleges students to it is pointless because its unpractical, or (B) you could be taking a very hard analytic position against continental philosophy, that talking about the Being of Being or the Other or Deconstruction is pointless because it never matters in the real world, like, say Cognitive Science or Decision Theory does (One might imagine this argument ending with "Get a job, hippy!").
Against (A) I'd say, okay, if you really want to be that hard-headed about the singular importance of science in human education, there's nothing really I can say, but, you are also saying that the humanities in general are without practical significance. Does learning history _really_ help us avoid repeating it? Maybe occasionally, but not enough to warrent the amount of money we spend on teaching it. And the other humanities, art history, the study of dead languages, literature, even many forms of abstract mathematics: there really can't be a good way to justify them. In my mind, however, learning these things just lead to better, fuller lives, not just because of the skills you get when you do it, but because it demonstrates to you that the world is something which can give forth wonder.
Against (B), on the other hand, I want to say this: I'm really, honestly skeptical of the long-term correctness of any "discovery" within philosophy. Aristotle was a poor physist, William James was a loasy psychologist, Adam Smith was only a passable economist, and Levi-Strauss is a forgotten linguist. Hell, Fodor might be on to something with Mentalese, but I wouldn't put a fiver on it. But all of this is okay, because philosophy is not trying to be practical, nor is the criteria of practicality appropriate to it. When you're saying this you are treating philosophy as a science, and, I just firmly hold that it isn't one. Not every exists in order to be a means; somethings are just ends in themselves, and for them, they can be nothing but "unpractical." I believe philosophy to be one of these things.
If I follow you, your problem with some varieties of philosophy is that they are "unpractical," as you put it. It isn't exactly clear which sorts of philosophy you are fingering here, so I'm going to consider two possible readings of what you specifically said. Before that though, I need to give everyone else a quick sketch of what doing philosophy in the 21st century means. It's my personal belief that a lot of the frustration that you and I both face when we're talking to people without a philosophy background is the fact that the discipline is shrouded in mystery. More than that, though, I need it to make my response to you make sense.
Now, very roughly speaking, at the very highest level of abstraction there are three ways of "doing philosophy" in academia. You can be a historical scholar, a member of the Anglo-American (aka Analytic) School, or a member of the Continental School. The work of historical scholars are pretty straight forward: they take texts written by (frequently long) dead philosophers and they try to interpret them, or they try to demonstrate the relationships between different thinkers, or things like that. What they do is quite a bit like art historians or literature experts, only in a philosophical mode. Conversely, the Analytic School and the Continental School are concerned with the production of new thought: they are the two sides of what it sometimes refered to as the Split, because, starting around, oh, 1900, they stopped talking to each other. There are many differences between the two sides of the Split, but the ones that concern us here are just these: the Analytics are primarily interested in logic, rationality, and the physical sciences plus psychology and linguistics, while writting in a clear manner akin to scientific journals, and having their power in the UK and most US schools, while the Continentals are primarily interested in art and literary criticism, the social sciences, and what might be called "The Big Questions", while frequently writting in poetic if obscure manners, and having their power in France, Germany, and select schools in the US. Russell is the most commonly known analytic, while Sartre is the most commonly known continental. (And, IMHO, these are both tragedies.)
There were huge generalizations made above I would want to fix in a formal setting (historians tend to either have continetnal or analytic tendencies, for instance), but it's good enough for the purpose at hand. To get back to your comment, then, there are two things you could be saying. Either (A) that history of philosophy, and subjecting colleges students to it is pointless because its unpractical, or (B) you could be taking a very hard analytic position against continental philosophy, that talking about the Being of Being or the Other or Deconstruction is pointless because it never matters in the real world, like, say Cognitive Science or Decision Theory does (One might imagine this argument ending with "Get a job, hippy!").
Against (A) I'd say, okay, if you really want to be that hard-headed about the singular importance of science in human education, there's nothing really I can say, but, you are also saying that the humanities in general are without practical significance. Does learning history _really_ help us avoid repeating it? Maybe occasionally, but not enough to warrent the amount of money we spend on teaching it. And the other humanities, art history, the study of dead languages, literature, even many forms of abstract mathematics: there really can't be a good way to justify them. In my mind, however, learning these things just lead to better, fuller lives, not just because of the skills you get when you do it, but because it demonstrates to you that the world is something which can give forth wonder.
Against (B), on the other hand, I want to say this: I'm really, honestly skeptical of the long-term correctness of any "discovery" within philosophy. Aristotle was a poor physist, William James was a loasy psychologist, Adam Smith was only a passable economist, and Levi-Strauss is a forgotten linguist. Hell, Fodor might be on to something with Mentalese, but I wouldn't put a fiver on it. But all of this is okay, because philosophy is not trying to be practical, nor is the criteria of practicality appropriate to it. When you're saying this you are treating philosophy as a science, and, I just firmly hold that it isn't one. Not every exists in order to be a means; somethings are just ends in themselves, and for them, they can be nothing but "unpractical." I believe philosophy to be one of these things.
