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What is a Pluralistic Philosophy Department? (J. Stanley)

Some philosophers are proud to belong to philosophy
departments they call “pluralistic”. Often, this term is used in opposition to
philosophy departments that are exemplars of “mainstream analytic philosophy”. But
I have a great deal of difficulty understanding what is meant by “pluralistic”,
and how it is supposed to be opposed to mainstream analytic philosophy. It
cannot refer to the narrowness of the conclusions argued for in contemporary
analytic philosophy, which after all include (just to give a very small random sampling in the
non-historical areas) the theses that the problem of consciousness shows that
materialism is false; that there is just one thing; that the only existing
things are presently existing things; that speech-act theory shows that
pornography violates freedom of speech; that infallible access to one’s own
mental states is not possible; that the source of all vagueness is ignorance;
that there is vagueness in the world; that vagueness shows that no claim has a
determinate truth-value; that the content of one’s mental states is determined
in part by one’s community; that knowledge is a mental state; that embodied
action is a key to understanding the nature of perception; that mathematics/modality/morality/middle-sized
physical objects are elaborate fictions; that there is no property of truth; that
there is a property of truth; that there are no moral properties; that there
are moral properties; that there are no character traits; that the aim of
action is self-knowledge; that we know many things; that we know few things; that
there are many knowledge relations; that whether we know something can depend
upon such recherché issues as whether we have just been offered insurance; that
truth and reference are the keys to linguistic meaning; that use is the key to
linguistic meaning; that use together with what we ought to do is the key to
linguistic meaning; that linguistic understanding is at bottom practical
knowledge rather than propositional knowledge; that consciousness is fundamentally
a matter of practical knowledge rather than propositional knowledge; that practical
knowledge is in fact a species of propositional knowledge; that conditionals
have no truth-value; that claims about what might be the case have no truth-value
(it’s worth mentioning that a not-insubstantial group of mainstream analytic
philosophers under the age of 45 believe that the truth of most claims is
relative to a perspective, and this is a key to seeing why e.g. conditionals
and claims about what might be the case do after all have truth-values). Mainstream
analytic philosophy clearly does not place any limits upon the conclusions that
can be defended in its journals.

In any discipline, there will always be a distinction
between those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is more widely valued in the
discipline, and those whose work (rightly or wrongly) is less widely valued. As
a rebel in spirit if not in action, I am very attracted to plausible
explanations of the bankruptcy of my discipline’s status quo. But the divide
between “pluralistic” and “non-pluralistic” approaches is a particularly poor
attempt to provide one.

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20 responses to “What is a Pluralistic Philosophy Department? (J. Stanley)”

  1. Eric Schwitzgebel

    I think of U.C. Riverside's department as unusually pluralistic. Here are two tests of pluralism, as I see it:

    (1.) How wide or narrow is one's view of what is "really philosophy"? Of course some things must be excluded from the discipline (say, simply finding as precisely as possible the electronegativity of a chemical element), but one may have have a narrower or broader vision of what philosophy includes: Freudian psychoanalysis? Technical linguistics? Experimental psychology? How close can one get to doing those sorts of things before one is seen as having crossed over the line?

    (2.) How wide or narrow is one's view of the historical figures and eras worth covering in philosophy? Of course Aristotle, Kant, and Hume. How about Chinese or Indian philosophers? 20th century French philosophers? Dewey? Whitehead? Erasmus? One might of course dismiss the value of such less mainstream figures (in some cases rightly so), but to do so is to be less pluralistic in one's approach.

    Although I myself value a relatively high degree of pluralism, I don't think either of these tests assumes that more pluralism is better than less; nor does it measure pluralism simply by appeal to including both "analytic" and "Continental" traditions.

  2. My department self-describes as pluralistic. We say this at our departmental web page:

    "The Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame is unique in its conscious adoption of a standpoint of philosophical pluralism that recognizes analytic philosophy, the history of philosophy, Catholic and Christian philosophy, and recent Continental philosophy all as important foci of its program."

    I'm not completely happy with this statement. In particular I don't like the uniqueness claim (which I think is probably false) and I think we could do better by emphasizing that the categories we list certainly overlap in important ways.

    But we obviously aren't a program that uses "pluralist" in a way that excludes or is in obvious opposition to "mainstream analytic philosophy", and that's a good thing since if we did half or more of the members of the faculty would be in a rather odd position.

    I share some of your puzzlement about what exactly a pluralism would be like that was in some way in opposition to analytic philosophy. In outline, I suppose, a department like the following might be such a department:

    1/3 classical Thomists; 1/3 "continental" of the sort more commonly found in non-philosophy departments than in philosophy departments; 1/3 traditional Eastern philosophy. Combine this departmental composition with a departmental statement that proclaims a distaste for the contemporary anglo-american philosophy scene and maybe we'd have a pluralistic department where the form of pluralism was genuinely opposed to "mainstream analytic".

    I suspect that the departments you have in mind aren't much like this hypothetcial department. They are more likely to be focused on some contemporary and some historical continental work and think that this narrowness constitues pluralism. I'm reminded of an ESPN announcer who described the 4 member all african-american coaching staff of a basketball team as "a very diverse coaching staff".

  3. Eric,

    By the standards you described, all mainstream analytic philosophy departments are maximally pluralistic (consistent with department size, of course). For example, David Velleman's work has drawn on Freudian pyschoanalysis; at Michigan, Rutgers, and Princeton, many people draw on technical linguistics, experimental psychology, statistics, computer science, art history, and physics in their work. In fact, I can't think of a single "mainstream analytic philosophy department" that isn't at least as pluralistic (in your sense) in non-historical areas as UC Riverside.

    I don't want to get into an extended discussion of history, since my area of expertise is just early analytic philosophy. But in that area, the work done in "mainstream analytic departments" on that period is as diverse as one can get (e.g. look at Jamie Tappenden's recent work, which is centrally about figures that one might of thought belong to the history of mathematics).

  4. Eric Schliesser

    First, as previous comments suggest, a department can be pluralistic and need not be opposed to analytical philosophy.
    Second, Prof. Stanley's measure of pluralism focuses on substantive conclusions. But, of course, this presupposes a conception of philosophy that is contested within the analytical tradition (e.g., Wittgenstein-ian therapy) and outside of it (e.g., consciousness raising). So, one can be pluralistic along different measures. For example, at Syrucuse, we have become (by accident) very pluralistic in the conceptions of philosophy, and this can be quite apparent (and make life difficult), say, at hiring time. Yet, for all our differences, all folks working in 'core' areas at Syracuse are rather adamantly 'opposed' to paraconsistent logic. So, in some ways we're not pluralistic at all. (We are certainly not diverse when it comes to gender!)
    This is connected to a third point: Prof. Stanley's unwillingness to 'get' into 'history' is itself a sign of lack of understanding of (for lack of a better word) the 'culture' that surrounds some work in Continental philosophy or even 'history of philosophy' in some mainstream departments, that is, a kind of self-aware historicism or contextualism about the concepts and tools one uses. (Of course, one can be self-aware about historicism, and reject it.)
    Finally, a pluralistic department can exist without anybody being committed to (or particularly pleased by) its pluralism.

  5. john schwenkler

    If a psychology department were made up entirely of cognitive psychologists who nevertheless disagreed with one another in many ways on a variety of substantive theses (whether cognitition is best understood in computational terms, whether connectionism provides a plausible story of language acquisition, whether attentional control is top-down or bottom-up, etc.), it seems clear that it would be a mistake to call such a department genuinely "pluralistic". The discipline of psychology, after all, traditionally counts clinical, developmental, and social psychology among its subfields, and a failure to represent such forms and areas of inquiry certainly counts against the pluralism of a department.

    The same point would hold for any number of other disciplines outside of philosophy (psychology just happens to be the one I am closest to), so why doesn't it apply to philosophy itself? There is a huge range of historical figures, problem areas, and "styles" of philosophical inquiry that can lay claim to inclusion under the heading "philosophy", so why doesn't the extent to which a philosophy department's faculty represents such "subfields", rather than the extent to which there is disagreement WITHIN the fields it DOES represent, determine the extent to which the department is "pluralistic"?

    (To say this is not to disagree at all with Fritz's point, that a department that represents only Continental philosophy, or Thomism, or Eastern philosophy, or Modern philosophy, etc., at the expense of Analytic philosophy, thereby fails to be pluralistic to the maximum extent. It also leaves open the question of whether pluralism is always a good thing: perhaps Medieval philosophy, or the philosophy of religion, or phenomenology, or maybe even Analytic philosophy, is not really a valuable area of inquiry. It is simply to say that the criteria Prof. Stanley was using to argue for the presence of "pluralism" within departments that identify themselves with "mainstream analytic philosophy" are ultimately not quite right.)

  6. Eric,

    My unwillingness to discuss history of philosophy is due to the fact that I only count myself as an expert in only certain areas of history. I am sufficiently well-versed in a number of non-historical areas to be able to rattle off much discussed positions. I could have done the same thing about widely divergent veiws about Frege. If I was an expert in Aristotle, I could have made the same points I did about pluralism in conclusions with respect to different views of Aristotle represented in different departments. My unwillingness to do so reflects my respect for the difficulty of history.

    John,

    The conclusions I rattled off were in very diverse areas of philosophy: metaphysics, metaethics, the theory of action, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, and Sartre all worked in these areas, and many of the conclusions they were sympathetic to are defended by philosophers in the "contemporary analytic tradition".

  7. George M. Felis

    Jason,

    I think you miss the point of John's post, which is much along the lines of what I would say in response to your question. One very common meaning of pluralism doesn't have much to do with whether and how the members of a given philosophy faculty fit within the over-broad category "contemporary analytic tradition." Rather, it simply indicates that the faculty is engaged in active, focused research in a wide variety of sub-disciplines within philosophy, i.e. ethical theory, epistemology, political philosophy, metaphysics, metaethics, logic, philosophy of mind, etc. There are many faculties out there which aren't very diverse even by such minimal standards, where roughly 50% of the faculty is focused within one sub-discipline (however diverse their views of that sub-discipline) and the rest of the faculty is scattered around other fields as necessary to have core classes and topics covered. Often, a faculty will develop two such fields at the expense of pretty much all others (quite possibly a consequence of hiring procedures).

    In contrast, it requires deliberate choice and careful faculty selection to create a department where no two faculty members are in the same discipline. (I'm not sure anyone ever reaches that level of pluralism, actually. But some come close, such that if two faculty are in the same sub-discipline, their approaches are so divergent that they might as well not be – such as a contemporary Rawlsian political philosopher and a Hegelian.) Perhaps the better word for such a faculty would be "diverse," but that word has been more or less co-opted to always and only mean diversity in ethnicity, gender, etc., so "pluralism" will have to do.

  8. Is this post another instance of pluralist baiting as a form of self-validation? The pattern was established a few years ago when the Gourmet Report declared the Continental/Analytic divide dead because, now, mainstrean analytic philosophers do Continental Philosophy and History (and they do it better). Since then, the rhetorical move has been repeated in various forms and in various fora. The general pattern is that one first implies that pluralists, continentalists, or historians are opposed to “mainstrean analytic philosophy,” then one states that this opposition is misplaced because, in fact, mainstrean analytic philosophy does embrace a variety of views, deals with continental figures, and is concerned with the history of philosophy. The coup de grace, not always included, but present in your post, is the implication that these philosophers who call themselves pluralists, continentalists, or historians and resent the hegemony of mainstrean analytic philosophy are merely expressing sour grapes and that they are unable to accept their marginalized status. But, as Eric Schliesser points out, any pluralist worthy of the title is not opposed to mainstrean analytic philosophy. Quite the contrary, a pluralist would argue for its inclusion in every undergraduate and graduate curriculum. As Eric and John Schwenker also point out, pluralism (and the argument for pluralism in philosophy) has more to do with diversity of methodologies, areas, and styles studied than it has to do with diversity of philosophical positions (these seem to have been exhausted in the 4th century b.c.e.) As someone who has had work in the History of Political Philosophy rejected because its style was too analytic, I can tell you that prejudices run in multiple directions. The sooner that we can start reading each other’s work for what it says and judging it on the basis of the insights that it gives rather than by its method or style, the better will we become as a profession and the richer philosophic knowledge will become. Maybe then can we can start validating ourselves by appeal to this general enrichment rather than by appeal to a sentiment of superiority in relation to certain sub-sets of our colleagues.

  9. John Schwenkler

    Jason,

    Point taken. But my point is that the mere presence of intra-departmental disagreement on issues of this sort doesn't make for genuine pluralism, or at least doesn't make for the sort of pluralism that comes with having a variety of philosophical figures and traditions taken seriously within your department. To the extent that Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, and Sartre — to use your examples — fail to be in a philosophy faculty — and this is surely the case at many mainstream departments! — that faculty fails to be "pluralistic" in the sense I was driving at. It is THIS sort of pluralism that the philosophers you began by referring to are — perhaps mistakenly — proud to be a part of, and it is hard to deny that this sort of pluralism is lacking at many departments that identify themselves with the analytic mainstream. If one does want to deny this, then one can't just point to the presence of "intra-topical" disagreements, which was what your post originally did.

    I suspect, though, that we're ultimately in agreement on most of this, and that this is really just a dispute about how best to express a common point.

  10. At the 1995 Eastern division meeting of the APA there was a "Topics in the Profession" session on Jason Stanley's question. John Lachs introduced the papers and Phil Quinn, John Stuhr, and Kathleen Wright all spoke about what it means to be a pluralistic department. The discussion was published in the Nov. 1996 Proceedings and can be easily acessed through JSTOR for those interested in the history of the question.

  11. Some readers of "The Leiter Reports" may remember Kieran Healey's statistical analysis of ranking-data from the PGR, which was discussed here a year or more ago. It seems to me that his findings could support the notion that mainline analytic philosophy is characterized by a narrow-enough conception of "good philosophy" to qualify it as exclusive rather than pluralistic.

    What he found was that the consensus among the PGR’s staff of evaluators concerning what merited high over-all ranking was extremely high, so high that he declared philosophy ‘a very high-consensus discipline’. Specifically, he found that: (1) strengths in metaphysics and the philosophy of language make the greatest contribution to a department’s overall ranking; (2) strengths in the philosophy of mind, of science, epistemology, ethics, as well as certain historical areas (ancient, 17th century, 18th century and Kant/German Idealism) make significant contributions, but not so much as metaphysics and language; and (3) strengths in Continental philosophy, Medieval philosophy, or the philosophy of religion contribute little.

    It seems to me that the high valuation of some fields over others bespeaks a narrow-enough conception of "good philosophy" to justify (prima facie, at least) the idea that analytic philosophy is highly exclusive, and that, therefore, a meaningful distinction can be made between analytic and pluralist departments.

  12. Eric Schwitzgebel

    Jason, I think you may be overstating your position in your response to my earlier comment. I don't see how a department can be "maximally pluralistic" and still be a philosophy department — that is, I'm not sure the idea of a maximum here is coherent. Part of the idea of a discipline is that there are some activities that don't fall within the purview of the discipline, no? And surely departments differ somewhat in their sense of these boundaries.

    I'm not unhappy with the thought that many mainstream analytic departments are fairly pluralistic by my two suggested measures, if you count any academic work by any member of the department in considering the department's overall pluralism. To add nuance to the idea, though, one might also think about the extent to which that work is valued by the department as a whole. This may be a little harder to assess from the outside.

  13. Jonathan Weinberg

    I wonder whether what Jason is up to is something like this: there is no notion of "pluralism" such that yields both
    (i) more pluralism is pro tanto better than less, in a department (or across the profession), and
    (ii) there is no evaluation of philosophical quality packaged into the notion of which figures, problems, methods, etc. count in evaluating how pluralistic a department (or the profession) is.

    If "pluralism" means valuing philosophical diversity independent of philosophical value, then why on earth should we want it? But if "pluralism" is just a matter of representing as much as possible of _good_ philosophy, then who's to argue against that?

    I'm sympathetic to a lot that goes under the banner of "pluralism" — I wish that there were more and closer connections between the pragmatist tradition and standard analytic philosophy; and for that matter, I myself am part of the group that would broaden what counts as doing philosophy in order to let empirical, experimental methods so count. But I suspect that talk of pluralism is, at the end of the day, something of a red herring. Pluralism _sounds_ good, because of its associations with political messages of inclusion, tolerance, multiculturalism, and the like — messages that I'd guess the vast majority of philosophers would agree with, in at least some formulations. (The slide from "plural" to "diverse" is, in this way, telling.) But philosophies aren't ethnicities, and even if we ought try very hard to reserve comparative judgments about the latter, it's part of our professional responsibility to make such judgments about the former. If the top Leiter-ranked departments don't sufficiently represent some philosophy that is good & important philosophy, then _that_ is the charge to level at them. But making them out as charges against the virtue of pluralism are just, as it were, an unnecessary shuffle.

  14. Professor Lewis writes: "Is this post another instance of pluralist baiting as a form of self-validation? The pattern was established a few years ago when the Gourmet Report declared the Continental/Analytic divide dead because, now, mainstrean analytic philosophers do Continental Philosophy and History (and they do it better). Since then, the rhetorical move has been repeated in various forms and in various fora."

    This careless misstatement of my view should not go uncorrected. I have said in the PGR, and written at greater length in the Introduction to The Future for Philosophy volume, that the Continental/Analytic divide is "dead" because "analytic" philosophy doesn't exist (as Jason's post makes clear, you sure can't individuate "analytic" philosophers by their substantive views!), and because a richer appreciation of post-Kantian German and French philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries has made clear that there are multiple, partly overlapping traditions of philosophy at work, some of which have substantial continuities with philosophical developments in the Anglophone world, some of which are philosophically moribund, even in Europe, and so on.

    I have also written that the interest of Anglophone philosophers in the Continental traditions has resulted in a marked improvement (in many, not all, cases) in the quality of scholarship about these traditions.

    None of this was said for any imagined rhetorical effect. It was said because I take it to be true.

  15. My apologies to Professor Leiter for being sloppy in my attribution of the argument that I paraphrased at the beginnning of my original post. The conversational nature of blogging led me to be a bit sloppy and it was not right for me to say that the Gourmet Report made the argument. Rather, Professer Leiter made the argument in response to David Hoekema's review of a book by Bruce Wilshire in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review (2002:10:8). In the context of an argument against the type of pluralism advocated by Wilshire and Hoekema, Leiter wrote that: "We are now living in a 'golden age' of scholarship on Continental philosophy, almost all of which is produced by philosophers who are – again, in the stylistic sense – 'analytic'.” Strictly speaking, then, the Gourmet Report did not make this argument. However, given that the argument was made by Leiter in defense of the Gourmet Report, I hope that he and the readers of this blog will understand and forgive the conflation. It should also be noted that the point made in the NDPR was made more than four years ago and does not appear to inform the most recent edition of the Gourmet Report's editorial on the analytic/continental distinction.

    That said, I would stand by the general point of my original post, which was that good philosophy can be done using many different methods, can be promulgated in many different styles, can discuss many different figures, and can inquire into many different areas of our experience (or possible experience). Please note, I am not saying that all philosophical arguments are equally good! However, the criteria for goodness I have in mind and that I think most philosophers share (clarity, coherency, originality, comprehensiveness of scholarship, etc.) have nothing essential to do with style, figure, area, and method.

  16. I was not objecting to the attribution of the argument, but to the mischaracterization of why I have said that "analytic" philosophy is dead. To describe me as responding to the type of "pluralism" advocated by Hoekema and Wilshire is also rather misleading as to what that particular exchange was about. Anyone who is interested can find the final installment of the debate here,
    http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/bleiter/hoekemawilshire.html

    with links to the earlier stages. But let me suggest that this somewhat tangential discussion end here.

  17. Whether or not, at the end of the day, there's a good argument to be made for pluralism, I'm not sure we should dismiss it as a red herring. As Prof. Leiter notes in his thread, if we can understand pluralism in some other way than that suggested in this thread, it might have some value. In particular, if the difference is one of style (see my comment on Leiter's post here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/on_pluralism_in.html#comment-62179912 ), and if different styles achieve different ends, then having more than one style of philosophy might be valuable. It would be like valuing both jazz and polkas: polkas simply can't capture the freedom expressed in jazz; so if we value the musical expression of freedom, we shouldn't exclude jazz, even if we also are centrally concerned with something uniquely valuable about polkas.

    I have in mind a pro-pluralism view that might go something like this. The (primary) aim of analytic-style philosophy is to get an unobscured window onto the truth (or correct belief, or some such). To get that unobscured window, the best style of writing is to have total clarity in concept and transparency in argumentation. By contrast, the primary aim of SPEP-style philosophy is to directly speak, to the ordinary reader, to other values, such as political causes or the meaning of life. To get that, the best style (so the account goes) is to use rhetorical liberties that can obscure details of concept and argumentation.

    Now more needs to be said to make such a case stick: I think that analytic-style philosophy can definitely speak to those other values (although it might not be unreasonable to think that many undergraduates find that SPEP-style philosophy speaks to them in a uniquely appealing manner), and I'm sure some SPEP-style philosophers would want to defend their clarity and transparency. But the point is that there might be a case to be made here, about how we speak to undergraduates and therefore how we train graduate students, and that, therefore, it's not a red herring. Defenders of pluralism (about style, anyway) would, I take it, argue exactly that "the top Leiter-ranked departments don't sufficiently represent some philosophy that is good & important philosophy" (as Jonathan Weinberg suggests). Now I'm not a SPEP-style philosopher, and maybe they have other arguments to make. But, if there's something to this, then any answer to the question of pluralism's value depends on how one values the potentially unique ends of SPEP-style and analytic-style philosophy and whether one thinks that their ways of achieving those ends are uniquely effective.

  18. Great topic and discussion. Basically I want to say two things.

    Re the analytic v. continental, I think Prof. Leiter's thoughtful essay does a great job: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp

    My other point is this. At the end of an interview (PROBLEMS OF RATIONALITY, p. 264) Donald Davidson says: "I begin most of my papers with either a problem or a question." Now, as long as philosophers in general adhere to this practice, what comes out will be motivated and hence a welcome addition to the literature. While I am for analytic philosophy I will read with interest anything written by a non-analytic philosopher as long as it (vaguely) follows (what I would like to call) Davidson's advice.

  19. I must say I find this debate highly confusing. Jason's original post states that there are departments that claim 'pluralism' and then moves on to demonstrate (convincingly) that analytic philosophy is a diverse camp (indeed, if it exists—and I take Brian's point well here). The way that the opposition is characterized seems like a straw man. What departments claim the 'pluralist' charge falsely? What exactly is this claim? Once we know the position, only then can we move to a consideration of the arguments' merits and demerits, surely. One sentence re: the opposing view is not enough.

  20. One possible way of looking at the notion of pluralism comes from a point Michael Walzer once made about "toleration" – you can only "tolerate" something if you think it is somehow clearly wrong. Perhaps, then, in evaluating the pluralism of your department, you should consider how many people there are of whom you would say "What they do is clearly just missing the point" – but you nonetheless see value in having them in the department because enough people you respect (possibly including the individual him/herself) see value in that work that you don't. To use an example, without meaning to be impolite, I have difficulty seeing real value in Brian's naturalistic inclinations in legal theory. Nonetheless, I would always include it in any jurisprudence course I was teaching – enough reputable people think there is something to it, even if I have trouble seeing what it is. It is perhaps in that sense that many departments fail to be really pluralist. There may be a diversity of subject matter addressed, but no real need for toleration. In response to Thom's post, then, that is one standard I'd advance for use in the pluralism discussion.

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