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MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 24–see esp. comment #25 by Paul Weithman (Notre Dame). More discussion welcome.
So with not quite 1400 votes cast in our poll prompted by Frankfurt's comments, here are the results:
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Is philosophy in the doldrums?
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Discuss. In particular, those who voted in the poll might explain why they voted as they did, how they understood "doldrums" etc.
I would say that no philosopher alive comes close to Kant or Nietzsche.
This is distressing since the massive increase in professional philosophers should have lead to a golden age (as happened for mathematics for instance).
I’m not sure why philosophy failed, here are some possible explanations :
– the most brilliants minds are taken by the sciences
– the sciences are taking the most interesting questions for themselves
– the only successful philosophy is anti-philosophy, condemning each generation to be smaller than the precedent
– the consciousness problem is too hard, making it impossible to say anything true and non-trivial
– almost no one has worked seriously on moral relativism/nihilism. Those who pretend to do always end up advocating some form of christian morality expressed in leftist jargon
– the great philosophers of old used to have a deep knowledge of the mathematics and physics of their time (Aristotle, Pythagoras, Leibniz, Descartes…). Unfortunately, math and physics have become so hard that it’s almost impossible to truly master mathematics, physics and philosophy at the same time.
Just three areas that seem un-doldrumatic to me: Causal modeling in phil science (and metaphysics); Experimental philosophy (and empirical moral psychology); debates about moral responsibility.
That was meant to imply three examples among others, not only three.
One partial explanation is that too many analytic philosophers today lose the forest for the trees. We spend too much time nit-picking over details, quibbling over how exactly to word a given premise-conclusion set, coming up with 15 different versions of the same thesis, altered here or there by one or two words. There is a tendency (perhaps a fear?) to avoid the big picture, to be precise rather than bold or imaginative. For example, while it's not realistic to try to measure oneself to a giant like Kant, consider how sloppy his formulations of the categorical imperative are in the Groundwork. He was not concerned with getting the wording *just* right — he wanted to convey an idea, and he spent his time and energy on that endeavor. It would help the profession, I think, if we take a step back from the super-fine-grained nit-picking we do in the majority of our articles (read: stop fixating on the technical details of Frege-Geach or how *exactly* to come up with a logically compelling formulation of quasi-realism) and instead try to be a little more creative or courageous with our ideas themselves.
The decline or stagnation in philosophy can be traced to June of 2014. Peter Unger's 'Empty Ideas' did some pretty heavy damage with all his talk on the non-concreteness of philosophical questions and the concreteness of its nemesis, natural science and its questions. But in all seriousness, the likes of Wittgenstein, the Logical Postivists (e.g. Carnap or Schlick), Quine, Mach, Rorty, et cetera all made way for the view that philosophy and its theories should be, but not limited to being:
(1): Kept to a continuum with natural science
(2): Used to aid societal changes
or
(3) Used to analyze meanings in natural language
I think I would agree with Unger: Philosophy doesn't give concrete substance to the world as physics or natural science does generally. We rely on the findings in the fields without – most of us anyway – knowing a whole lot to contribute to the philosophical fields if such fields 'should' exist. In fact, Bertrand Russell once stated that once a philosophy gets precision going as with maths or a number of individuals get analyzing concepts and finding new data, this philosophy no longer remains so and gets called a science.
Are the sciences in significantly better shape?
Incidentally, Mirowski's book ties into Professor Leiter's posts about neoliberalism in higher education.
Beyond this, a number of papers have recently been published that raise concerns about the overall health of scientific research (particularly in the fields of biomedicine and ecology):
http://www.nature.com/news/policy-nih-plans-to-enhance-reproducibility-1.14586
http://iai.asm.org/content/early/2015/01/14/IAI.02939-14.full.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/16/5773.full
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214753515000030
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/128/
http://imed.pub/ojs/index.php/iam/article/view/1084
http://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/31198/5/how_peer_review_reproduces_ignorance_gaudet.pdf
http://www.todroberts.com/USF/gibberish-science-papers.pdf
I apologize if these links are overkill, but it would be interesting to see if scholars/researchers in other fields of academic study reach similar conclusions.
I'm not sure why an explosion of specialized work should be considered as constituting a lull or doldrums. It would be paradoxical to take philosophical progress to consist in constantly having new people proposing entirely new systems or paradigms, as this is only necessary if the old system/paradigm was wrongheaded. It leads to a sort of pessimistic meta-induction about philosophical theories. It's like you're saying: "well, everything we do is inevitably wrong, but we'd like our wrong theories to be new and exciting".
That being said, we do need people to unify results so that they are presentable as a big picture. We need to work on both the trees and the forest, so to speak. Williamson tends to do this sort of thing pretty well. People just don't consider him on the same level as the others because he is a careful and meticulous thinker who avoids making grandiose claims that he knows he can't back up.
That there are no great or creative figures anymore may simply be a matter of perspective. What facilitates perceiving someone as a great figure is being young and new to a field of study oneself. Then these people, one's heroes, die off and one is left mostly with one's contemporaries – people who one more or less knows and perceives as being on the same level. That already makes it harder to regard them as towering figures who do seminal work. And then, as one ages further and younger people start to take over the field, it becomes even more difficult to recognize them as great figures relative to oneself. What I mean to say is that Frankfurt's perception that there are no great figures anymore — that may well be due to a quite natural agist bias. I at least perceive some of the older philosophers as great and inspirational.
I voted 'undecided' because I have some epistemological worries with this debate. If we were not in the doldrums, would we know it? Did the contemporaries of un-doldrumatic philosophers (e.g. Hume, Kant, Nietszche) know that these guys were doing un-doldrumatic work? I strongly suspect that the "We-are-in-the-doldrums-and-everything-sucks-now-and-everything-was-so-much-better-before" worry was raised in many generations, including in generations that were not actually in the doldrums. After all, what do we even mean by a field or subfield or research programme being in the doldrums? Is the un-duldromatic character of a research programme determined by how lasting and widespread an influence it has? If it is, then we can't really know that what we're doing won't turn out to be un-duldromatic. For all we know, people in 200 years will rediscover the work of Derek Parfit and consider him as important as e.g. Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche.
I don't really see that philosophy is in the doldrums. There has been a lot of specialization, and there are not that many philosophers today that could say of themselves that they have made contributions to all fields of the discipline, like Kant et al.. But this does not seem to be a good argument for the stagnation or even decline of academic philosophy. To the contrary, specialization leads to better results in each field. In addition a greater diversity of viewpoints opens new ways to resolve old problems. Of course this also has the effect that no one philosopher is great in the entire field, but this is not a consequence of the people being less smart or anything, but a consequence of the field being much bigger and more detailed.
As an aside: The impression that the great philosophers of the past were somehow intellectual giants or anything like that seems to be slightly misconceived. Sure, they did do great work, work that changed the discipline forever, but they did not do that in a vacuum or on their own: a whole intellectual community was working on the same problems. They were just the ones who picked the fruit when it was ripe, who had the great idea to look at things differently. The same happens today, when a paper changes the way a whole group of philosophers conceives of a problem. This may be on a smaller scale than the big names of philosophy, but let us see whether some of these philosophers are not judged to be the great ones of our generation by future generations. After all, it is quite common that the perception future generations have of the past is quite different from that of the people who actually lived through it.
A second issue that gets mentioned in the comments, which should be kept separate, is what it is that philosophy is doing as a discipline. This metaphilosophical question has apparently gained momentum, and it seems to me to be a good thing that questions about philosophical methodology and the aims of philosophical inquiry are discussed. But just because we do not (yet) have a clear, uncontroversial or unified idea of what we are all doing, doesn't mean that we are not doing any substantive or concrete work (whatever that may mean, and whatever normative force over methodology concreteness or substantiveness should have).
To take seriously the insight of philosophers of science like Kuhn or Feyerabend, would also mean to take seriously the idea that we often should not too strictly adhere to a fixed view of how inquiry is supposed to proceed. Rather, great discoveries are often made, when a consensus is broken. So we should not be too depressed that we do not have a uniform philosophical methodology, or cannot even clearly distinguish the discipline from the sciences, for this is not necessary for philosophical progress, to the contrary, it could be a hinderance.
Nostalgia for a lost Golden Age is a ubiquitous phenomenon. I suspect that similar results would have been obtained at almost any point in the past.
I wonder what the results of similar polls for other humanities subjects would be? Are philosophers particular gloomy? Or are colleagues in other disciplines — as their institutional worlds rapidly change in deeply unwelcome ways — also feeling rather battered, and perhaps also projecting their understandable discontent into equally glum verdicts on the intellectual state of their chosen subjects?
I was one who voted "yes" on the doldrums question. My remarks are limited to analytic philosophy in the US, as I am not qualified to speak to the relative standing of continental philosophy in Europe. My casual perception is that it is in better shape.
I think that philosophy is in the doldrums for precisely the reason that everyone outside philosophy is telling us. It has become largely irrelevant to the concerns of (a) the college going population; (b) the broader public.
This is partly philosophy's fault and partly the result of the changing nature of higher education and the relevant portion of the "broader public."
First: re philosophy's fault. The discipline has chosen to focus on highly technical issues in the philosophy of language, science, mind, and logic. Political philosophy has been very weak, compared to early centuries — surprising and disturbing, given the political uphevals of the 20th century – in this regard, I agree entirely with Alan Bloom's devastating critique of Rawls — and moral philosophy, while stronger, has also tended to stray into esoterica, with the exception of applied ethics, which has come on strong. It is worth noting that applied ethics is one of the few areas of philosophy that is *not* in trouble at the run-of-the-mill American university.
On the subject of run-of-the-mill universities, I *do* think that the disciplines somewhat…feudal…structure has not helped. That so many of the top philosophers are concentrated in a handful of uber, high-ranking institutions, while the rest are spread out among the great mass of universities has partly contributed to the hyper-techincal, esoteric quality of so much contemporary analytic philosophy. The cloistered mentality comes easily when one is in an echo chamber, when one is congratulated and lauded for producing work that virtually no one reads, and when one barely has to teach students. Philosophers at schools like mine teach the overwhelming majority of philosophy taught in this country, and mostly at the introductory and undergraduate-survey level, and yet, the *profile* of philosophy, is determined by what goes on at a half-dozen or so institutions.
Second: Re the changing nature of things. Philosophy of *any* kind is bound to be less relevant in a university that has become part of a system of mass education. When universities existed, primarily, to educate the ruling classes, a robust humanities education made sense. Now that universities essentially serve the function of training middle and upper-class Americans for white-collar professional work, not so much. As for the broader public, with the coarsening of public taste in reading, film, etc., and given the ubiquity of entertainment and communication, its not surprising that highly thoughtful, contemplative work, such as is found in philosophy is not much to the public taste.
I should mention, in closing, that I see no solutions to these problems whatsoever. Partly, because they are not necessarily problems, but simply, developments in what is a very complex society. And partly, because I don't see the discipline of philosophy changing its stripes. Those enjoying the fancy gigs and disciplinary prestige that comes with them are not going to let it all go, in order to democratize and thereby "normalize" the subject.
Daniel A. Kaufman (Missouri State)
Sorry for the delayed appearance of #6–the spam filter tends to eat comments with a lot of embedded links, unfortunately.
I am a solipsist myself, and I think the discipline would be in a much better place if more philosophers shared my view.
I do not think that this is an answerable question. I think that some responses betray one of the problems with certain areas of philosophy – A lack of historical perspective. To take the first comment, simply because it is the first, how would we know whether any philosopher alive comes close to Nietzsche? It's not as though his genius was recognised as such during the years in which he was writing. On the other hand, I doubt many would have argued that philosophy was in the doldrums when logical positivism was in the ascendance, but where exactly did it get the discipline in the long run?
For what it's worth, I think the major problem with academic philosophy is a tendency for it's practitioners to shout past each other rather than seriously engaging with opposed points of view. I have no idea whether this state of affairs is any better in other disciplines.
Frankfurt has a strange view of what it takes for philosophy to be flourishing. There have to be a few "great figures" dominating the field, with most everyone else "preoccupied with responding to them." It's true that philosophy isn't like that now, but why is that a bad thing?
Take experimental philosophy. Its merits aside — and I'm probably a skeptic — it's a movement that doesn't have a single leader or guru. It's instead a group of people working together to advance a program they all believe in. That's seems to me more developed and more mature than the fixation on single figures Frankfurt prefers. I was a grad student in Oxford in the 1970s when a huge amount of the discussion was focused on Davidson. When I look back on that now I find it embarrassing.
The model provided by experimental philosophy, and mirrored in many other parts of the discipline, is more democratic and egalitarian than Frankfurt's, with more people engaging on a roughly equal plane and no one figure's work elevated far above the rest in influence or status. As I say, why is that a bad thing?
Professor Leiter,
That's what I assumed. Readers can also find a preview of Mirowski's book, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=wBGw2Z8bnAgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Additionally, a few additional selections are available at UCSB's website: http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Mirowski.pdf
'with the coarsening of public taste in reading, film, etc.'
Surely you can't just refer to this as if we all take it as read that such a 'coarsening' exists. Haven't most intellectuals always thought that the mass culture of their day involved especially low standards of taste?
If you want to suggest that today's popular culture is encouraging of contemplative, thoughtful entertainment, that's fine. I think my points stand strongly on the other grounds I gave.
With respect to some of the other points, I took the question to be regarding philosophy's general condition, in the university and in the broader culture. I didn't take it to be about philosophy "internal" condition. (Although I would make the same point regarding the feudal system if that *was* what we were talking about.)
Kaufman's criticism of the over-specialization of the discipline seems to have become rather ubiquitous. I find this troubling since it seems to pose such an obviously false dilemma: abandon the attempt to rigorously approach philosophical questions or become irrelevant. The problem with the philosophical systems of the greats is that they were utterly full of holes. Kant's practical philosophy sounds great… until you start trying to arrive at a schematic way to tell if something is universalizable. Specialization itself is not the problem. Indeed, we need specialization. There is no getting around meticulous questions. Every time someone poses some new system it simply generates a bunch of specialists who are dedicated to working out the details. The only difference is that now philosophers don't get to call themselves things like "Kantians". (Well, they still do in ethics.) But given the vast diversity of the views that fall under such labels I fail to see how this is relevantly different from saying that one works on possible world semantics, etc. As I said above, the problem is that we need to get better at synthesizing specialized work into a general picture that we could then present to the public.
If anything, I think many of the problems facing philosophical research can be alleviated if we did a better job at drawing distinctions between original research and review articles like the sciences do. The sciences realize that technical specialized work needs to be accompanied by work that is dedicated to reviewing results and putting things in a broader perspective. Indeed, I think under-specialization is actually the biggest problem. The idea that someone who has a specific argument about a very specific topic needs to somehow spend the first half of his/her paper trying to put this argument into a broader philosophical context is otiose. Remember that another major issue facing academic philosophy is under-citation of relevant articles. If we could just allow people to get to the damn point and have more concise and readable articles then maybe this would not be such a problem. Indeed, I think the requirement that things be put into a broader philosophical context also often serves to obscure the argument of the paper with dialectical irrelevancies. Presumably anyone interested in the specific argument will not need to hear this.
To summarize: what we need is a sharper division between specialized original research and reviews of the literature so that we can get a better handle on the general picture that is arising from specialized research.
Anon grad student wrote:
"I find this troubling since it seems to pose such an obviously false dilemma: abandon the attempt to rigorously approach philosophical questions or become irrelevant. The problem with the philosophical systems of the greats is that they were utterly full of holes."
_______
As someone who has been teaching philosophy at the university level for over 20 years, I would *hate* to pose an "obviously false dilemma." So, let me elaborate a little on a few points:
1. It could be the case that while you are correct on the merits of the issue, it might still be true that the reason why philosophy is in the doldrums is because of a widespread association of overspecialization with irrelevance. Lamentable, perhaps, but true. And it could also be true that there's no talking the public out of it, no matter how hard you try.
2. Your answer presumes that philosophical systems are generally a good thing, at least once the holes are plugged. There is a pretty substantial "coutercultural" tradition in philosophy that denies this. (Wittgenstein being one of the most notable examples, but far from the only one.)
3. Your answer also presumes that like the sciences and mathematics, philosophical inquiry benefits from cutting up problems into smaller and smaller pieces and subjecting them to ever more "meticulous" analysis. I think there is good reason to think this is false — at least with regard to a lot of the questions typically taken up by philosophy. Remember Aristotle's dictum regarding appropriate degrees of rigor and precision. A person learns an awful lot about how to think productively about moral questions, when presented with well-drawn sketches of deontological, utilitarian, and other approaches. I think he learns a lot less from the "meticulous" — and mostly endless — decompositional analyses that follow, in the specialized ethics literature. This is because said analyses misunderstand just how much precision and "correctness" anyone is ever going to get, re: morals, via this sort of investigation. So while we *can* teach people how to think about morals in a productive and critical way, there is no theory that we can construct that will guarantee them the right answers to moral questions or even come within a galaxy's distance of such a guarantee.
So, I am sorry that you are troubled. But if you are aware of the situation facing the majority of philosophy programs across the country, then you know that there is good reason to be troubled. Especially if we don't do anything about it. And I doubt that more of the same, redoubled, even with your permutations, will help.
I very heartily concur with your answer about the lack of serious work on relativism/nihilism. I am going to do what I can to fix that.
The fact that you think that nobody alive comes close to Nietzsche and that you think serious work in the area of relativism/nihilism is part of a general failure of philosophy makes me want to talk to you. I will be working on a large project on this topic for the foreseeable future (it will take a broadly Nietzschean approach). I'd be more than happy to talk to you (or anyone else who's interested) about it. Please feel free to email me (ec948@georgetown.edu).
If you're interested, here's my academia page: https://georgetown.academia.edu/EricCampbell
Prof. Kaufman,
So, first of all, the public doesn't care about the vast majority of technical results in the sciences either. Moreover, it is equally doubtful whether the vast majority of research in zoology, ecology, or even particle physics has stupendous applications. The very specific nature of one specific particle decay is both uninteresting to the public in and of itself and is unlikely to lead to any technological breakthroughs on its own. We need to emphasize this fact more when scientistic minded people wish to dismiss philosophy.
Second, if the philosophical counterculture is right then there simply should not be philosophy journals. Indeed, if they are correct then it is hard to see why philosophers should have any place in academia except perhaps for pedagogy. This means that we will need to radically change our hiring practices. Saying that philosophers are incapable of collectively building up a body of knowledge seems tantamount to an invitation to cut our funding. To save philosophy by giving up on the idea of philosophical progress seems a lot like throwing the baby put with the bath water. The people you're hinting at, Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc. make odd saviors considering they would likely scoff at the very idea of a philosophy department.
Third, your example from ethics is exceptionally odd. Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are at odds with one another. So what exactly does one learn by considering them? For at least two of them studying them is like studying alchemy. I suppose you could learn something… I'm just not sure what it is. Unless moral anti-realism is true… in which case you can't really learn anything from studying any of them.
I do agree with your sociological analysis. I expect philosophy departments to eventually become defunct at public universities. As you say, there is very little we can do about that considering these universities have essentially taken on the role of trade schools for the middle class. But your point that there's nothing we can do about it seems to be totally at odds with your demand to change things.
Finally, I'd like the alternative to be cashed out in a bit more depth. The tacit idea seems to just be that we need to be flashier and worry more about style than substance. I said it was a false dilemma because I think it's perfectly possible to both have specialized research and to have simplified and general ideas that can be presented to the public. It requires extra effort, not abandonment of the effort already made. It seems to me that many of the philosophers who complain about this do so because they have a sort of Wittgensteinian metaphilosophical axe to grind, rather than because they have some real alternative in mind.
I am not widely enough read in philosophy to say with any confidence that the whole of our discipline is in the doldrums. Whether or not it is, I believe there are trends that threaten the quality of work in our field and that are therefore worthy of our attention and concern. They are, I think, serious issues facing our profession, though ours may not be the only academic discipline to face them.
For one thing, I wonder whether too many members of our profession think contributing to philosophy is just a matter of mastering and responding to recent literature in their sub-field. That is certainly one way to do philosophy and valuable contributions can be made that way. But it should not crowd out other, very different ways to contribute that depend upon tracking the long trajectory of philosophical problems. Frankfurt cites Rawls as one of the philosophers whose projects inspired him earlier in his own career. Think of how much poorer ethics and political philosophy would be if Rawls had just responded to the versions of utilitarianism that were in the air when he worked, instead of mastering the historical sources of the doctrine and thinking through the deep sources of its appeal.
The previous issue goes hand in hand with another concern: that there may be too much pressure to publish too early and too often. It is at least worth asking whether some members of our profession would do better work if there were less encouragement than there now seems to be to publish in graduate school, and if tenure and promotion were awarded on the basis of fewer – but longer, deeper and more searching — articles (and books) than now seems to be the norm. If the answer to the question is ‘yes’, then it is up to our profession to alter the incentives which are now in place so that a greater variety of approaches to philosophy is encouraged.
Still another issue is one that faces, not just the profession of philosophy, but the academy as a whole. That is the volume of human talent that follows the money. A depressingly high percentage of the graduates of America’s best universities go to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley rather than into metaphysics, particle physics, molecular biology, history or literature. This is not a trend that we will be able to reverse as long as the academic job market remains risky and the remunerations of finance and software development remain outsize. But it is a trend that should worry us all – as should the reward-structure that has encouraged it. If we DO think philosophy is in the doldrums and are trying to understand why, perhaps part of the answer is that some of the young women and men who could have helped lift us out of them have chosen paths that are more lucrative and secure.
Finally, an even more troubling phenomenon is one that lies at least as far beyond our control as the last one: the amount of philosophical talent that remains undeveloped for want of opportunity. When students ask me where the next Immanuel Kant is, I tell them that she may well be assembling I-pads at an Apple factory in Shenzhen. The global distribution of opportunities, like the global distribution of rewards, is not something philosophers are in a position to affect. But whether or not we agree with Frankfurt’s lament, it has the merit of inviting us to ask where philosophical genius comes from. That question, in turn, leads us to think about the tragedy and waste of gifts that remain unused, and about how much greater our understanding of philosophy might be in a more just world.
Anon grad student (@24) writes: "it is equally doubtful whether the vast majority of research in zoology, ecology, or even particle physics has stupendous applications. The very specific nature of one specific particle decay is both uninteresting to the public in and of itself and is unlikely to lead to any technological breakthroughs on its own. We need to emphasize this fact more when scientistic minded people wish to dismiss philosophy."
Let's be a bit cautious emphasizing it! There's seldom if ever a one-one or direct mapping between bits of pure science and particular applications, and it's often hard to see what applications some piece of science is going to have further down the line, but in aggregate the strategy of doing pure science and letting the technological applications follow behind has been stunningly effective at generating breakthroughs over the last century or so. Just in physics, look at electromagnetism (underpinning the whole of modern electrical power transmission and radio communication), or quantum mechanics (the whole of the information-technology revolution), or radioactivity (nuclear power and nuclear weapons, for good or ill). On a smaller scale, something as apparently esoteric as anti-matter is the basis for positron emission tomography. As it happens in the particular sphere of particle physics I think there is a cautious case that could be made to expect little technological payback (the energy levels are way above anything realistically accessible, unless there's a trick we're missing), but most of physics isn't like that (I'd be unsurprised if we don't get commercially viable superconductors before long, and practical quantum computation before *too* long), and there are important cross-fertilisations between ideas in particle physics and in condensed-matter physics.
The point is, insofar as academic pursuits need to be defended purely on the grounds of their practical contributions (something I wouldn't in fact want to concede), the natural sciences have a very good defence indeed provided that society is willing to think on a reasonably long timescale. I don't think philosophy is so well positioned here.
The work being done at my own graduate school institution while I was there, by Pen Maddy, Bryan Skyrms, and David Malament most obviously, by the people I worked most closely with (Aldo Antonelli, Kai Wehmeier, Jeff Barrett), and by our colleagues Kent Johnson, Robert May and Kyle Stanford, still strikes me as being as good as the work of the figures Frankfurt lists. And it is surely as culturally relevant, connected with other themes in the academy and general human interest — I would say more so. For these reasons I am perplexed by the doldrums remark.
It's nice to be able to have this kind of conversaton. One doesn't often have it, so I can only thank Brian for the opportunity.
I may surprise you by agreeing with many of the things that you are inclined to find outrageous and absurd. While I don't think there should be *no* philosophy journals, I do think there are far too many philosophy journals. I also think there are far too many philosophy articles and books. In general, I think there is far too much philosophical research being done, period. Or at least, I think there is far too much of all of the above, *as philosophy is done, in its current mode.*
The ugly reality is that the only reason this much work is being done is because it is necessary for professional advancement. I'm not suggesting that the people doing all this work are doing so in bad faith. We all have been throughly bred into this disciplinary, professionalized brand of philosophy, and it is very difficult to see from outside of it. I, myself, have spent a good portion of my career convinced that this is the way things should be done, although, coming to philosophy from history and literature, I have always had a bit more of an outside perspective than many of my peers. Nonetheless, I am increasingly dubious: partly because of public attitudes; partly because I increasingly find most of the professional work being done to be petty — in the descriptive sense — indeed, almost Scholastic, in character; and partly because I am more and more convinced that philosophical questions are not like scientific ones and do not benefit from ever closer attention to smaller and smaller details.
I find it striking that Hume's entire corpus would fit into just a few years of a contemporary top-shelf philosophers output. As would Hobbes's. As would Descartes'. As would Leibniz's. Certainly, one could suggest–as you have done–that this is justified, because these fellows painted in big, broad strokes, and we have to fill in all the wholes, but that assumes a certain conception of philosophy and philosophical problems that I no longer accept.
Re: my remarks on Ethics that you find "exceptionally odd," there is nothing odd about them at all, once you recognize that our fundamental ethical intuitions are conflicted and inconsistent. Since all ethical theorizing is ultimately arbitrated against the ethical intuitions of the ordinary person, it is not surprising,then, that we get a mess of conflicting ethical theories. Each of them tells us something about a *piece* of our moral picture, but only a piece. And there is no theory that can give us the whole picture.
You quite reasonably ask what philosophy should look like, given my view on things. The short answer is: motley. Certainly, there is room for *some* of what is done, in the current vein. But a lot more of it should look how it used to look when Montaigne was doing it. When Plato was doing it. When Iris Murdoch was doing it — when she wasn't being a philospher. Or when someone like Richard Kelly does it, in a film like "Donnie Darko." Philosophers should work in a number of different modalities, because the subject matter of philosophy does not admit of only one kind of treatment. Unfortunately, this is something that our profession simply does not permit any more, and it is the reason, I think –well, one significant reason — that its future is in jeopardy.
While I don't expect this to render you untroubled, I hope it is at least clarifying.
You obviously have not seen the complete works of Hobbes. The English works run 11 volumes.
As are those of Descartes (11 volumes: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-works/#PriSou) and Leibniz (14 volumes of math and philosophy alone! http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#Bib). In general, the famous philosophers of the old days produced an OBSCENE amount of work – though not all of it was on philosophy. So don't take their writings' brevity as a premise.
I would copy the CVs of top philosophers, but it would be dull. Suffice it to say that publications in the hundreds are not unusual.
Two fun questions for those of you who actually know a lot of the history of philosophy:
1. Which philosopher published the most philosophy?
2. Which philosopher wrote the most philosophy?
I have no idea what the answers are. I know that Husserl has about eight billion pages of unpublished material.
I have to say that I don't find it surprising at all that people would rather not address the inflationary effects of publish or perish, but instead, soothe themselves by counting Hobbes' works, in search of a "Gotcha!" moment. Suffice it to say, my point stands. No, actually, it jumps up and down.
Jerry Fodor: 93 articles, a dozen or so forthcoming and 14 books IN PHILOSOPHY. (not translations of Homer, correspondence, histories of New Jersey, musings on Opera, or the like). I also think it may be old.
Hilary Putnam: Too long to count. Here is a link for you counters out there. http://www.pragmatism.org/putnam/ (same point as above)
Daniel Dennett: Too long to count. Here is a link. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/cv.html (same point as above)
I certainly don't expect everyone — or anyone — to agree with my take on philosophy's doldrums, but this type of answer is cheap and makes the point, rather than refuting it.
Prof. Wallace,
So you are talking largely about very broad theories in physics. I was talking about specific technical research articles about specific particle decays used to confirm or disconfirm very finely-grained versions of the standard model, which are published out of CERN by experimentalists. Note that this is the work that eats up a huge amount of resources, not abstract theoretical physics. It's certainly true that the big-picture theories in physics that emerge from thousands of experiments tend to be useful.
But that is really the exact analogy I was trying to draw in the first place. One generally doesn't know what effects a very specific experiment is going to have down the line, but if one gives up on the specific and technical projects then the larger theories will inevitably suffer as well. The same goes for philosophy. Philosophers have helped produce things through their insights. It is just that the influence of philosophy even more indirect than it is in the sciences. Look at the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead on logic. I would also point out that your point doesn't really extend to things like ecology, zoology or paleontology. I have no idea what technologies those fields help produce. Yet we still fund those things. I would also point out that medical biology is in the business of burning large piles of money trying to cure diseases by randomly injecting people with chemicals that are observed to have vague correlations with specific physiological effects, without any real understanding of the underlying causal mechanisms that lead to these effects. In general it is far better to fund pure research and let the technology come after than to blindly throw money at things we don't understand. You're right that the sciences are generally in a better position than philosophy in terms of practical effects. What I am emphasizing is that we shouldn't commit a compositional fallacy and infer from this that the specific technical research projects are also produce practical benefits. For both philosophy and the sciences one has to look at the overall output of the field. I suspect you might agree with me on this.
Prof. Kaufman,
So you just keep saying that you're not convinced that specialized work in philosophy accomplishes anything. I guess you are withholding your reasons for thinking this, because I can't find any in what you wrote. I certainly don't see any evidence that the moderns, etc. were any better at getting at the truth than we are now. So it seems to me that what you want to say is that philosophy doesn't get at the truth at all, and that it is instead about some achieving some sort of amorphous Understanding (with a capital "U"). I've heard people make this claim before and I can't make any sense of it. I'm reminded of Williamson's reply to Martin (http://philpapers.org/rec/WILRTI). What can understanding be other than some form of knowledge?
Your point about our intuitions conflicting about moral concerns seems to me to make the most sense as a straightforward undercutting argument against moral realism that can be backed by some further psychological theory. To make the argument work one will likely have to say some things about the link between psychology and epistemology, the nature of concepts, the nature of the epistemic basing relation, etc. Yet to treat it in that specialized way is apparently anathema to you. You could refuse to think about it in any greater detail, but then how are you going to argue against moral realists who claim that some of those intuitions are simply confused or illegitimate? I guess you will just have to flatfootedly insist on your interpretation of the data, lest you be pulled down into the sort of technical arguments I just outlined above. If I am disturbed by this it is because I smell obscurantism. Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but you haven't given me any argument that your metaphilosophical view is correct. Surely if you want other philosophers to change their ways you must provide some sort of argument to convince them that they are wrong.
As an ex-philosophy student having switched to the sciences I can only say this: The amount of specialisation of philosophers to certain topics is not so much the problem as I think that the labels "intedisciplinary" "cross-boundary" are mostly terms used to sway administrators. The real reason is this: Where philosophy is continouus with the sciences I think it still is largely incredibly interesting, it is the core subjects of philosophy that are lacking.
And the core subjects of philosophy are still ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics and the metaphysics of mind (I see the rest of the philosophy of mind even less independent of scientific thought). It is in these subjects that most of the damage is done. The prime example is metaphysics which due to its esoteric flavour and grandiose selfdescription (the study of everything at its most basic level, swallow that physicists with your boring calculations) draws quite a lot of students. Given the prominence of metaphysics within analytic philosophy, it has surprisingly little influence outside of it. Moreover, the agenda – largely set by a couple of East-coast philosophers – changes every 5 years depending on which new young Eastcoast-philosopher has come up with an idea others try to milk till it is as dry as rusk.
A couple of years ago it was all about 3D vs 4D (rarely really engaging with what physics has to say about "matter", but hey, we work at a level even more basic than physics!), everyone wanted to say something or at least publish something about it. Now it is the rather mystic notion of grounding. I tell you, if Kit Fine publishes tomorrow a paper on X, everyone will be writing on X. Of course, it is not Kit Fine's fault, I do not know him nor do I want to insinuate that he is intolerant of other topics nor that he is fond of this development. But for a discipline that continouusly praises itself and its practitioners for its/their autonomy of thought, it surely is rather fickle. The same goes for the philosophy of mind and epistemology. A debate is rarely settled (as much as a debate can be settled in philosophy) rather the topics change and those who produced "great" work but refused to switch to the new one are now forgotten. So many people publish, yet so little of real substance is said, it is almost comical. A lot of publishing philosophers would do the public and the environment a better service if they just focused on teaching the ideas of the really great thinkers.
Lastly, philosophers should ask themselves why they advertise their subject so misleadingly to undergraduates. There are courses entitled "Life and Death", "The Good Life" and "Free Will". Surely these great questions are what draws a lot of people to philosophy. But postgraduate study almost never touches on these topics. You won't get the same in a physics department. Everthing taught at undergraduate level is still highly relevant, either to the research practice or to the understanding of more advanced topics.
Taking Free Will as an example as it surely is of interest to many people outside academic philosophy, it might be that the debate has stalled or that no interesting thoughts have come up for a while, but then the question arises whether the newer topics have lead to more interesting or illuminating results.
Even a debate thought to be largely understood still produces philosophers talking past each other for more than an hour:
Anon grad student:
I was simply replying to Brian's invitation to those who thought philosophy was in the doldrums to explain why. Whether philosophers change their ways is going to have little to nothing to do with anything I say. (I highly doubt they will, largely for the professional reasons I've already laid out.) As for the rest, I have gone into as much detail about my views on this as is reasonable in a comments-section on a blog posting. That doesn't mean I am "flatfootedly insisting" on anything. (Can't we have a *nice* conversation?) As for the relationship between ordinary language and common intuitions and philosophical theorizing, the best that I can do is recommend to you Stanley Rosen's "Philosophy and Ordinary Experience," his 1996 Bradley Lecture, which is reprinted in his book Metaphysics in Ordinary Language. (I would point to the same for any moral realist who think that moral theories can escape arbitration by common moral intuition.) You can read a substantial excerpt on Google books. (It's Chapter 13)
If it helps with your understanding of my positions on these things, more generally, let me just say this — epistemologically, I essentially agree with the view expressed by Wittgenstein in "On Certainty" as well as with a certain kind of naturalistic readings of Hume (the view is nicely summarized in the first section of P.F. Strawson's "Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties") — and metaphysically, I vacillate between a common sense realism and a Goodman-esque anti-realism, depending on my mood.
Oh, one other thing. If you read what I actually wrote I explicitly said that I think that *some* specialized work in philosophy is warranted, but that we have far too much of it. Not quite the view you seem to be ascribing to me.
Prof. Kaufman,
I apologize if I've been overly aggressive. I was just trying to draw out your argument. Also, I also didn't mean to imply that you have been flatfootedly insisting things. (As I said, I suspected that you have a specific metaphilosophical position that you simply haven't gone into.) Rather, when I said that you would have to "flatfootedly insist" on a certain interpretation of the data regarding moral intuitions I was trying to illustrate that once one starts with a broad philosophical claim that seems meaningful and important one will inevitably get drawn down into more and more technical and nuanced disputes in order to justify that claim. The point being that specialization is pretty much inevitable. It was no doubt Jacobi's review that made Kant publish the second addition of the Critique of Pure Reason where he removed most references to the "transcendental object" and added the Refutation of Idealism. Technical considerations also play out in Descartes' correspondence with other philosophers. The Greats did not operate in a philosophical vacuum. At any rate, I would be curious as to exactly what sort of specialization you think is productive and what is not.
Philosophy is in the doldrums insofar as contemporary philosophers have stopped being relevant to society. For example, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, etc. are all writing about contemporary issues of their day. They are engaged in rapidly changing times. Their writings helped shape the era of their lives, or the era after. Whereas, today contemporary 'philosophers' are wrapped up in hyperspecialized disciplines (relevantly disengaged from the world around them) or are historians of thought. When we think of "the golden age" of philosophy (is there really one?), we see men who for all intents and purposes were not full-time professors, but jurisprudes and priests – men engaged with the people and issue of their day. It seems to be the case that economics built on a strong philosophical foundation is where philosophy gets out of the doldrums, e.g. Thomas Piketty's Capital (a once in a decade book). Perhaps this isn't the fault of contemporary philosophers. With the diversity of media, and the short attention span of man, if there was going to be a Dostoevsky today, who would read him? How much of an influence would a great mind have on today's world?
On a narrow issue: my point "doesn't really extend to things like ecology, zoology or palaeontology" just because I was using examples from a field where I'm confident I know what I'm talking about. I'd be willing to bet heavily that you can find pretty important applications here too; if I had to look, I'd start in epidemiology, climate science and agriculture.
I don't think it's impossible to make a case for the long-run applicability of contemporary philosophy along the lines you suggest ( I too would start in logic, although this was interdisciplinary work from the get-go) but. I would be nervous in the extreme if philosophy – especially the interdisciplinary bits of philosophy- tried to rely in that case. The parallel case in science is overwhelming, not that I 'd actually want to rest the case for supporting science just on its technological spinoffs.
If the Kuhnian picture of the development of science applies to philosophy as well, then it may be unsurprising that philosophy is in the doldrums, because that is how it is most likely to be at any particular time, and there is simply no avoiding this; it is impossible that there be a Kant for every generation. Certainly there have been plenty of other times when philosophy appeared to be (at least from the perspective of the present day) largely uncreative, e.g. the mid-nineteenth century (and I get the impression that the thinkers of this time, too, were voluminous writers: Dilthey's collected works, for instance, run to 26 volumes). But beyond this, I suggest that a lot of philosophy has become irrelevant to the rest of the academy (one of the cited reasons for being in the doldrums) because much of what goes on in other academic fields (except for some areas of the hard sciences) is at present ignored and unread by most philosophers. If philosophy is human thinking in its self-reflectiveness (I believe that Wittgenstein said somewhere that philosophy is 'thinking about thinking') then neglect of the larger part of what goes on in other academic disciplines makes no sense, not the least because these areas are also products of human thought, and not simply repositories of data. So today there are no replacements for philosophers such as Cassirer (especially for his work 'The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms') or Lucien Levy-Bruhl (trained as a philosopher and taught philosophy, but today remembered for his work on anthropological topics) — both are admittedly somewhat obscure today, but both have been enormously influential — because at present philosophers only read other philosophers, perhaps only turning to a few select areas of science largely only to the extent that these areas are able to supply empirical confirmation. Also, it tends to be forgotten that many of these other disciplines have roots in contemporary philosophical developments (eg. Weberian sociology and Neo-Kantianism. Weber was a student of Heinrich Rickert, who also taught Heidegger). And so influences have run both ways. So I don't think that philosophy will have much of anything to say to sociology, anymore, for example, if sociologists don't find anything of use in philosophy — and it just might find itself being replaced or displaced by sociologists (or sociological techniques), as is increasingly happening in certain areas such as HPS (History and Philosophy of Science).
Not at all! I appreciate the conversation. As for what sort of specialization I think is productive and what is not, I don't know that I could produce any principle or rule. I'm pretty sure that there's far too much of it, though. I'd be happy to discuss it — talk around the issue, so to speak — but this really isn't the place for it. Please feel free to email me at Missouri State, if you want to chat about it. Maybe we could even do a Platonic dialogue style essay on the subject!
I presume the praise of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau's contemporary engagement refers to their political work; but, I think that contemporary political philosophy is more engaged than ever in practical issues. Take the five most recent articles published Online First on the Journal of Political Philosophy (not linking to avoid comment getting spammed): One on immigration, one on political apologies, one on civic education – very practically relevant topics. The two others (on democratic agency and sufficientarianism) are admittedly of more theoretical interest, but even there not clearly moreso than much of Hobbes' work (which conjured up a fanciful 'state of nature' to justify itself). And this is to say nothing of historical work in metaphysics and epistemology – Kant's non-political work, while incredibly ambitious and far-reaching, was nevertheless quite divorced from practical concerns (and, in my experience, quite inaccessible without years of careful study). Indeed, most historical works would only be read in their time by a tiny literate, classically-educated crowd – widespread engagement was only 'trickle-down'.
By contrast, I would actually suggest we are living in a golden age of philosophical public engagement. The explosion of literacy and higher education in the 20th century led to massively more people being exposed to philosophy, both historical and contemporary. Many more philosophers are researching topics of practical import – in political philosophy, as I note above, as well as applied ethics, and beyond to the wave of popular academic works (All Things Shining, On Bullshit, etc. Possible Girls, a fun, top-notch PPQ publication discussing Lewisian metaphysics, gets featured on Vox.com for Valentine's day). Blogs such as this allow and encourage free and open discussion with non-philosophers such as yourself. Podcasts like Philosophy Bites are very popular. Free, widely-available resources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy abound. And the much-loathed 'interdisciplinarity' move pushed by admins has, to my mind, actually produced meaningful shifts – especially in the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of physics, and experimental philosophy.
To be sure, support for academic philosophy (like the humanities more generally) is declining. That AAUP chart on humanities-wide jobs decline that's been circulating (again, not linking to avoid spam-can) is disconcerting. But this is not because engagement has declined – on the contrary, it is in spite of recent, massive improvements in public engagement.
Max: I recognize a lot of your description, but if you're this sceptical about philosophy (not necessarily wrongly!) why the confidence in the value of teaching 'the great thinkers'. Surely not because they produced so much settled knowledge that philosophers now agree on! (Frege, yes, but most of that caan be taught from a logic textbook.) But then, why be less sceptical about their work, relative to the current scene, if your worry is that people aren't coming to agreement?
Honestly, there seems to be a simple answer here to why the discipline is in the doldrums. It's because it is too much a discipline with hyper specialization and journal-writing instead of bigger ideas and a bigger audience. How many journal articles are ever read by anyone other than a few dozens philosophers also specializing in such a small subset of x, y, or z? This amounts to chattering among ourselves and that gets tiring.
Sorry, for not giving props to Daniel Kaufman above here. I think that is a pretty good assessment.
I agree with Tom Hurka. A lot of the 'philosophy is in the doldrums' talk seems to really about the fact that there aren't a few great men (Frankfurt's list contains only men) dominating the field any more. In political philosophy, for instance, we've moved beyond the situation where you could only make an argument by showing that it was implicitly somewhere in Rawls. I think Rawls is extremely important, but I don't think this is such a bad thing. People are working on a lot of different topics, exploring different kinds of theories, and this is all cool, I think.
I've seen what I'll roughly sketch elsewhere on the blogosphere, but I can't remember where. It's not original though, and it's much better explained elsewhere. Some here are saying similar things, too.
My concern with the discipline is that it is very focused on adjudicating (non-legal, obviously) various little issues and trying to knock down other views. This is fine, but there seems to me a neglect of new approaches to old problems. If someone tries to develop a view, it's attacked before the community (or original author) has a change to build it into the best version it can be. To be successful, it's best to play it safe and move onto something else, unless you are tenured at the right university perhaps.
Obviously, very original views are going to have problems, but that shouldn't mean dismissing them after pointing out a few minor flaws or even flaws which can excised without trouble. But philosophers are dismissive and the journals are filled with (many times, uninteresting) well argued, but small points. This is unfortunate since what makes the history of philosophy so interesting and important were the new approaches to old problems, as imperfectly (even poorly) spelled out they were. (Another possible worry is that this mode of doing philosophy–the one focused on adjudication–is good for those who are good at playing the games needed to be successful, but don't have much to say. And it's good for sycophants I suppose.)
There's a place for dispute/counter-argument and creative new approaches, but I don't think the journals have hit a good balance, nor do I suspect philosophers themselves care. The creative who aren't interested in constant adjudication may leave philosophy behind before they get a chance to develop their philosophical skills. If so, perhaps that could explain some people's intuition that we are in the 'doldrums'. Those who could get us out of it leave or otherwise avoid philosophy.
(I'm not saying that one cannot be very creative when evaluating someone's work. They can! The evaluative work may be or become a really important piece of work. But that's obviously tangential to my worry.)
I think the case for physics, chemistry, and certain fields of biology is overwhelming. I'm not so sure about paleontology. I'm not sure what the long-term benefits of paleontology could even be. I'm pretty sure we spend money on paleontology because we want to know more about dinosaurs. At any rate, the question is a matter of degree. Compare the technological contributions of philosophers transitively through their contribution to logic to the contributions of ecology or zoology to medicine and agriculture, or even geology to the oil industry. Neither field can claim complete responsibility as both contributions required cooperation with other fields. Moreover, for many of these fields the applications are very specific and limited in comparison to the potential application of physics, chemistry, or genetics. I wasn't trying to argue that we should try to justify philosophy by its applications. Rather, part of my point was that it is somewhat questionable whether many scientific fields are more justifiable than philosophy in this regard. The other part of my point was that the practical benefits of a field are collective and so it is just as inappropriate to point to a specific philosophy article and say "What are the benefits of that?!" as it is to point to a specific CERN experiment (example: https://inspirehep.net/record/1353393) and say "What are the benefits of that?!"
Fair enough. For what it's worth, I think that there is a problem with the way philosophy has become specialized. But I think the real problem isn't specialization itself but rather that the specialization is inappropriately carried out. The entire point of specialization in the first place is to break problems down into tiny bits that many people can work on individually, such that a clear general picture will emerge from their collective efforts. The problem is that there are insufficiently clear boundaries between different levels of questions in philosophy, such that we have trouble publishing articles that have clear results. A lot of philosophy papers will argue simultaneously for both a first-order position and for a higher-order position, or relies upon a tacit presupposition concerning a more general distinction (e.g. semantics vs. pragmatics) that has an indirect bearing on the first-order results. This makes it hard to distinguish what exactly is doing the argumentative work, and thus harder to use these articles to form a broader picture of how the philosophical debate is taking shape. As it stands now it is virtually impossible to get a clear picture of what is going on just by surveying the literature. This, in turn, leads to the entire field losing the forest through the trees. This sort of halfhearted specialization ends up being the worst of both worlds. Of course, everything is far more integrated in philosophy so one can’t pursue first-order topics in abstraction from more general theories either. But at the same time we can’t afford to avoid technical considerations. So what to do?
I think part of the answer is that we need to be a bit more discriminating about how we publish things. In particular, we should try to keep to a stricter division between 'original research' articles and 'review' articles. An original research paper should just present one or two arguments: leave speculation about the broader dialectical role of those arguments for a review article. We also need to get better at using consistent terminology and using more banal and straightforward titles and abstracts for our papers so that people can more easily find relevant research. We should also try to emulate the sciences by attempting to formulate our theories in precise ways so that it will be easier to tell what sort of bearing original research (e.g. specific arguments by analogy, thought experiments, etc.) has on them. This would significantly cut down on the need to spend half of one's paper setting aside presuppositions. The fact that everyone has to do this is a major contributing factor to our inability to draw generalizations from research, as one can easily get lost as to how all these presuppositions interact and which ones are important. Things would be a lot more clear if we started with specific formulations of general theories and then worked our way down.
One of the benefits of greater specialization is that–if it is done properly–it will lead to shorter and more readable articles that make concrete intellectual contributions that are limited in scope. This in turn will make it easier to produce review articles, and this will help us understand the Big Picture that is arising out of our research. We could then find a way to de-technicalize and present the Big Picture to other fields and the general public.
Anon Grad Student wrote:
This in turn will make it easier to produce review articles, and this will help us understand the Big Picture that is arising out of our research. We could then find a way to de-technicalize and present the Big Picture to other fields and the general public.
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If you could convince the profession to make this sort of thing count towards professional advancement, then it might work, insofar as it would balance the disciplinary minutiae with what I take to be much more interesting work. The problem is, I see zero chance that this will happen, because of the way the profession is currently structured and the way in which advancement works. This is, in part, tied to the feudal system I described.
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