In Quest of Other Ofs
When asked to think about the future of philosophy,
I, as a historian, turned immediately to the past to see how philosophy has
changed in the last 100 years. The
question for me was whether the essence of philosophy has changed over the
years or if it is only that some of the topics have changed.
I looked at three journals: Journal of Philosophy, American
Philosophical Quarterly, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. The years ranged from 1924 to 2004. Over the years, the articles became much more
technical and more self-referential within the discipline. (And, interestingly enough, the titles became
much more witty.)
Certainly the articles were of less relevance to other disciplines. One would have to be an expert in various
areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of
science to understand the articles.
This is both a good thing and a not
so good thing.
From a technical perspective, it’s a good thing. The articles are better. They are more sophisticated, more demanding,
more focused, and more likely to be making progress in dealing with the
issues. And if that weren’t happening,
then what the hell are we doing? So this
is all good.
But here’s the bad thing: Fewer and fewer individuals can read and
understand the articles. Even if we are
getting somewhere, I’m not sure anyone (besides us) will ever know. And…(and this is the
really bad part)…the rest of the academic world is not waiting around
for our obscure (however brilliant) pearls of wisdom. They don’t know what we are talking about
most of the time. And, the bad thing,
what we are doing is having no impact on what they are doing.
As long as the physicists understand each other, it doesn’t
matter that the rest of the academy doesn’t understand what they are
doing. The proof of their pudding is in
how their theories get applied to the workings of the world. Even the purely theoretical parts of those
disciplines ultimately tie back into the applied and the applied is what has to
work.
But is this true for philosophy? Does it matter if no one other than other
philosophers understands what we are doing these days? I don’t know how to answer this question yet
I think it is a crucial one. With
apologies to
My concern is not that we, the philosophers, are being left
out. My concern is that all our hard
work at figuring out how to think through all sorts of important concepts is
being ignored because we have gotten too technical and too insular to be of
use. All these other disciplines are
ignoring us, at their own peril but with a certain amount of justification.
And then, of course, the ignorance goes the other way as
well. Just as they don’t know what we
are doing, we don’t know what they are doing.
The problems the philosophers are dealing with do not seem to be what
anyone else in the Academy is dealing with, except, as Bernie noted in his
paper, in the area of philosophy of science and applied ethics. But Humanities, Fine Arts, Social Sciences,
Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies, Feminist Epistemology, Race and Gender
Studies, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, English, History, Religious Studies,
etc., all seem to be talking about the same issues, sharing the same mind-set,
the same concepts, the same theories, the same texts…and then there is Analytic
Philosophy. I don’t know if there has
ever been a time in the entire history of Western Civilization when philosophy
has been so out of step with the majority of the intellectual activity going on
in the Academy.
Philosophy is often a second-order discipline and this
requires that we have a deep, rich, fully competent understanding of other
disciplines. You can’t have philosophy
of science without an understanding of science, or philosophy of law without an
understanding of law. If there is to be
a philosophy of (for example) cultural studies, then analytic philosophers are
going to have to understand cultural studies.
And if we need philosophy of science, then we need philosophy of
cultural studies at least as much, if not more.
New academic disciplines are fragile creatures,
riddled with missteps and dead-ends.
Helping practitioners of a discipline find their way through new
concepts and theories and to think about their own discipline from a
philosophical perspective is a unique benefit that philosophy should be able to
offer, but lately, no one seems to want our help and I am not sure that we can
provide this help for these new disciplines anyway.
Philosophers have spent lifetimes figuring out how to think
about language, truth, logic, and thinking itself. And we make progress on these topics. And it seems as if no one but us knows about
it or makes use of the progress we’ve made.
The practitioners of other disciplines simply don’t know much of what
philosophy has figured out about how to think.
There is little to no knowledge or understanding of the history of
philosophy, of what epistemology means and what the issues are, or even a
strong grasp of basic logical reasoning.
Errors get made. We see them but
too often we don’t understand the other disciplines well enough to take part in
their discussions. We have philosophy of
science down quite well, but what about the other areas?
Why don’t we have Philosophy of Diversity, Philosophy of
Interdisciplinarity, or Philosophy of Culture?
Richard Rorty got it right (as much as it pains me to admit it) that
philosophy has become so specialized that it isn’t of use any more. (Actually, what I think Rorty said is that
analytic philosophy says nothing of interest.)
Our usefulness lies in getting things right. And if the Academy is going to insist in
talking about all these “new fangled” issues, they need to talk about them
correctly and that means we need to be involved.
I realize this seems incredibly arrogant of me, as if all
these analytic philosophers are off on the side, calling out: “Look, we have no idea what all of you are
doing over there but we’re quite sure that you’re doing it all wrong.” But this is how I see things. The academic world is marching on and we
don’t seem to be a part of the dialogue any more. This is bad for us. And it is bad for them.
Yes, we do philosophy of science and we do applied
ethics. But is that all that is left for
the world to know about the grand old discipline of philosophy? Is that all anyone will turn to philosophy
for: remedial scientific understanding
and a watered down version of ethics for quick and easy consumption? This isn’t the ride I signed up for.
So perhaps a change is needed. Certainly not a change in
method, God forbid. Our use of
logic and our critical thinking skills are our heart and soul, as well as our
bread and butter. Our method is our
glory and our shield against crap, of which there is much.
But we need new areas, new ‘ofs’ for philosophy to be the
philosophy of. This will require that
we know the other areas well. And we
don’t. We just dismiss them as confused
messes. But they need us and we need
them. Think of it as our duty as
philosophers. We may not want to go back
into a dank, dark smelly cave of that is Cultural Studies, Crit Lit, or
Postmodernism, but Plato tells us to go.
They don’t want us. We don’t want
to go. Yet off we go. It’s the whole duty thing.
Bernie Rollins said in his paper, “[I]n short, one major future role for
philosophy is to inaugurate and orchestrate the rational, ethical dialogue
attendant on scientific activity. Scientists
will not do it themselves as long as scientific ideology is regnant. But it needs to be done.” My point is that we need to “inaugurate and
orchestrate rational dialogue” attendant on all areas of intellectual activity,
including the humanities, the social sciences and the interdisciplinary
areas. For, as Bernie also said,
“…philosophy can puncture ideologies as they emerge, as rest assured they
will.” Since those ideologies will arise
in areas other than science and applied ethics, philosophers need to make sure
they are part of the dialogue for these other disciplines.