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Is aesthetics “underrepresented” in leading philosophy departments?

Brian Leiter

Anna Christina Ribeiro (Texas Tech) argues that it is.   (Thanks to Miguel Dos Santos for the pointer.)  Lots of areas of philosophy are under-represented in the leading departments, of course, in the sense that many departments have no specialists.  Examples woudl include philosophy of law, mathematical logic, medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and 19th-century European philsophy.  The latter neglect strikes me as particularly appalling:  this is a century that includes Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, all major figures by almost anyone's accounting.  Of the top ten departments (for 2011), Rutgers, MIT, and North Carolina have no one specializing in any of these figures; only NYU, Stanford, and perhaps Pittsburgh have specialists in at least two of these major 19th-century figures.  Is that not as serious an omission?  What do readers think?  How do we evaluate the areas good philosophy departments must cover?  Signed comments will be strongly preferred:  full name and valid e-mail address.

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12 responses to “Is aesthetics “underrepresented” in leading philosophy departments?”

  1. Pitt grad student

    I don't have answers, but I do have a comment and question. First, I have my own sense of which areas here are essential to a department I'd like to study at, because I have my own (inchoate, unwarranted) sense of how philosophy as a whole hangs together. But, there are numerous plausible senses of how philosophy as a whole hangs together. Why not think that we can have a healthy pluralism about the essential parts of philosophy even amongst top departments? I fear a blanching out of interesting intellectual differences otherwise.

    Second, it seems to me that there is more to simply covering these figures in a department. Brandom and McDowell both teach courses on Hegel here at Pitt. But, what really makes a difference is that Hegel and, of course, Aristotle and Kant, alongside many other figures, are in the air always. This strikes me as perhaps an even more important question to ask: to what extent should certain parts of the history of philosophy — or any subdsicipline for that matter — drive the intellectual culture of a department? Are we better off without the group-think that this sometimes produces? Or is a more or less fractured group of top scholars without much in common worse? (But, of course, this thread should not devolve into another debate about how seriously history is integrated into top departments.)

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  2. Filippo Contesi

    I'm not sure how one should go about deciding distribution of specialties in philosophy departments. If however it is the case—as some of the data reported by Ribeiro may seem to suggest—that there are _a lot_ more faculty members in Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology, than in Aesthetics, then a greater diversity would obviously seem to be the way to go. I can't imagine it would hurt to reduce a bit the huge disparity between discipline concentration that seems to transpire from Ribeiro's data. Here it might be interesting to have a think about the ratio of discussions between LME vs A in the (pre-analytic) philosophical tradition.

    How should one choose where to diversify? Well, I'm certainly biased, but aesthetics is an obvious choice. The list of reasons is very long, and Ribeiro covers a good part of it already in her post. Against some of the other "under-represented areas" that you mention (and assuming for the sake of argument that these actually have a poor presence in US departments), aesthetics arguably has been a longer-standing philosophical concern of momentum (vs mathematical logic and the historical disciplines), is a theoretical enterprise (vs the historical disciplines), and is of a more ecumenical/universal concern (vs philosophy of religion and perhaps philosophy of law).

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  3. JR

    Is it not surprising that when 19th century philosophy is underrepresented, so is Aesthetics?

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  4. Michel X.

    It's worth noting that the concern being expressed isn't just that aesthetics is underrepresented in tippy-top departments, but rather that it's under-represented across the board, and potentially disappearing from graduate education in the US (though not, curiously, the UK) altogether.

    JR – I'm not sure I understand the connection between the under-representation of 19th century German philosophy and that of aesthetics. Contemporary philosophy of art (or "analytic aesthetics," which was Dr. Ribeiro's topic of discussion) is not a historical area of philosophy, and it isn't figure-driven. Like LEM (for example), it's thematic and problem-driven.

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  5. Nathan

    Is aesthetics underrepresented because departments are not hiring aestheticians or because fewer grad students are focusing on aesthetics? Same question goes for any other underrepresented field. Of course, if the answer is the former, then that could have a spiraling effect of decreasing the number of grad students who study aesthetics out of concern about whether or not they can find a job.

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  6. Landon Schurtz

    I agree with Ribeiro that aesthetics is underrepresented at least partially because many people view it as "trivial" (though I think that even people who are not convinced that aesthetic judgments are subjective fall prey to this). I was once told, after giving a paper at a conference, "From the title, I thought your paper was about ethics; I would have never shown up for this session if I'd known it was about aesthetics." Mind you, the person in question then expressed pleasant surprise, but the sentiment was there, and it is not, in my admittedly limited experience, uncommon. The question of why a certain work of art is (aesthetically) good is often regarded as not nearly so interesting or important as why a certain act, say, is (morally) good. Mind you, I think this perception is borne of the fact that many otherwise-broadly-competent philosophers have no substantial familiarity with aesthetics, as Ribeiro notes, so the vicious cycle that Nathan notes (above) not only negatively affects the number of people specializing in aesthetics, but also the number of people who see a need for specialists in aesthetics. But, as with my colleague above, I, too, am biased.

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  7. Christy Mag Uidhir

    As I footnoted in Anna's post, the numbers according to my admittedly rough calculations paint an even bleaker picture: I put the number of Aestheticians (faculty with Aesthetics as their primary research speciality) amongst faculty within the Leiter Top 10 US programs at 1 in 65 and within the Leiter Top 50 US programs at 1 in 70.

    Anyone interested in the numbers and other relevant breakdowns (junior vs. senior faculty, US vs. UK programs, etc.) should take a look at the following posts (and their comment sections) over at Aesthetics for Birds:

    http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2013/07/the-status-of-aesthetics-in-leiter-top.html

    http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2013/07/aesthetics-in-uk.html

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  8. JR

    You are right that analytic aesthetics need not and often does not engage 19th century European philosophy. But it seems that substantial and enduring philosophical work on aesthetics in the US was done by people with backgrounds in 19th century European philosophy and often Ancient Philosophy. To pick three: Monroe Beardsley, George Dickie, and Arthur Danto. I'm not claiming that these people were dual specialists in 19th Century European philosophy and aesthetics, but that they likely had exposure to graduate professors in both fields. In the cases of Beardsley (Yale in the 30's) and Danto (Columbia in the 40s) we know their graduate studies involved both fields. These were also authors who engaged and had influence on audiences outside of philosophy in part, I think, because they could appeal to Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and other figures that non-philosophers had greater familiarity with; Kant, Nietzsche, et al. informed discussions in history, theater, literature, etc in a way largely absent from analytic traditions. This is not to dismiss ahistoric and/or analytical approaches but to suggest why a 19th century European philosophy-contemporary aesthetics connection may be relevant to understand the underrepresentation issue: people working in aesthetics are (1) working in other disciplines (likely not pursuing analytic aesthetics), (2) working in departments not dominated by "analytical" interests or (3) they are taking traditional analytic subjects and narrowing the focus to aesthetics (e.g. the ontology of visual art) which many of their peers (and other disciplines or the public at large) aren't especially interested in. If (1) and (2) they are probably connected with 19th century European philosophy. If (3) there is no such connection, but given the narrowness of focus it's harder for a department to justify a hire. In that respect that analytic aesthetician may be in the same boat with the mathematical logician.

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  9. Robert McGarvey

    Leiter published a poll question on what areas of philosophy were most important for a strong PhD program about 20 months ago.

    The results are here: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_0176acd76a7cc5b9

    Philosophy of art came in 24 (out of a possible 27).

    19th century philosophy, for the record, came in 17th

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  10. Alex

    In response to Nathan's question about grad students I'd like to complicate the issue with a personal anecdote. When I applied for PhD programs I knew I wanted to study aesthetics. Along with philosophy departments I also considered art history and comp lit programs. I committed to philosophy but I know many bright philosophically-inclined students who are seduced to other corners of academia. In addition to the issues internal to the discipline raised by Ribeiro philosophy needs to argue for itself against other disciplines which often engage art and artists more directly.

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  11. Roy T Cook

    Two things:

    First, it is worth noting that Christy's data – suggestive as it is – is just that. Measuring the amount of aesthetics in a department based on the number of AOS claims on CV's is a bit too rough – note that it equates CUNY (Noel Carroll, Jesse Prinz, Nick Pappas) with Minnesota (myself, Geoffrey Hellman, and Michelle Mason). I don't mean to belittle either my own or my colleagues' work in the philosophy of art, but neither Hellman nor Mason has done much work in the area in recent years, and my own contributions are a bit eclectic (mostly on comics, serial art, and popular culture). Equating our contributions to this area, as a group, with that of Carroll, Prinz, and Pappas would be absurd. Also, the current Gourmet Report ranks two departments in philosophy of art (Penn in group 2, USC in group 4) that get zeros on Christy's methodology. So while there is certainly a serious lack of philosophy of art in top-fifty departments, when compared to other, arguably no more central specializations, we probably need a more sophisticated measure to see exactly what the situation is.

    Second, I can honestly say that, for exactly the sorts of reasons discussed, I would never have specialized in philosophy of art as a graduate student (I am not saying that graduate students shouldn't specialize in this area – merely that it seemed like too much of a risk to me at the time). Instead, I specialized in philosophy of mathematics and logic.

    Let me repeat that point: To me, while I was in graduate school, the job prospects in philosophy of math and logic seemed objectively better than they would have been had I worked in philosophy of art (and I went to a school relatively well-ranked in phil of art – Ohio State).

    So even fifteen years ago, as a graduate student, I was at least somewhat aware of the sad, underrepresented state of philosophy of art in the profession. And this may have had an impact on what I decided to study (but maybe not – I do love me some theorem-proving!) This strikes me now as being very, very, sad.

    BL COMMENT: The discrepancies in the case of Penn and USC are due to changes in the interim: Guyer moved to Brown from Penn, and G. Wilson retired from USC.

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  12. Eric Rasmusen

    Perhaps what this says is that philosophers in other areas should look to aesthetics for interesting topics that aren't being addressed.

    Reply

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