Topics Profession

Question Do you think that more philosophy departments in the future will either continue to have their budgets cut or be completely eliminated at both public and private institutions? If so, is this more because of administrative politics or because philosophers are unpersuasive in their arguments? Isn't this pressure a good thing, since forcing philosophers to justify the existence of their field is something philosophers ought already to be able to do ever since Socrates (who seemed to be a bad pro se lawyer)?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013

Comments

When it comes to what will happen, I'll have to plead lack of a crystal ball. I can't even say what might happen. I'm not sure what sort of administrative politics you have in mind, but at least at my institution, I haven't noticed that administrators have any special animus against philosophy. I suppose at some institutions, someone might argue (whether soundly or not is another matter) that studying philosophy leads to poor employment prospects, or that in general, philosophy is in some way or another "impractical"; more on that in a moment. As for philosophers being unpersuasive in their arguments, I gravely doubt that most administrators either have an opinion or are qualified to. (That's not a criticism of administrators. It's just the usual situation for people outside a discipline; they tend not to be familiar with its workings.)

Would it be a good thing to force philosophers to justify the existence of their field? Only if it would be an equally good thing for people in other disciplines to do the same, and only if the acceptable sorts of "justifications" didn't simply reduce to some notion of "practicality" or to financial bottom lines. To think that those sorts of justifications are the only good ones is to succumb to a horrid confusion that shows the need for philosophers rather than condemns their discipline.

What I sense (perhaps mistakenly) behind your question is that idea that philosophers never solve the problems they set themselves, and so their discipline is hopeless. That, however, strikes me as a philosophical confusion.

Let me offer an analogy. I think it would be a deep shame if literature departments disappeared. This is too short a post for a disquisition on the value of studying literature, but that value isn't a matter of practicality nor is it a matter of coming to definitive conclusions. There will never be a "definitive" interpretation of Hamlet or Middlemarch or any other work of literature. There will always be disagreements, and there will always be multiple perspectives that we can take on these works. Being aware of this makes our understanding richer, not poorer. And something similar goes for philosophy.

I'm not big on definitions of philosophy, but I have a soft spot for Wilfrid Sellars' idea that the aim of philosophy "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Philosophy tries to make as much sense of the world as we can manage to make. There's more than one way to do that, there are different ways to think about what matters most, and as we learn more about the world form other sources, we'll need to keep revisiting the questions philosophy asks afresh. Woe betide the world if we end up with a University -- or a citizenry -- that doesn't think this is worth trying to do.