A Splinter in Philosophy or just some departments in flux?

In one of the comments threads, Brian Leiter gives voice to a view he has been promulgating for a while about the philosophical community in the United States. As he writes:

 

“there is "agreement over methodology and approach" within particular sub-communities of English-speaking philosophers (e.g., the Princeton-MIT-Rutgers-Arizona-ANU nexus, or the Berkeley-Chicago-Pittsburgh-Harvard nexus, etc.).”

 

“I have it on rather good authority that when members of the Rutgers Department voted several years ago on the philosopher who had had the worst influence on the field, every member of the faculty but one voted for Wittgenstein (one voted for Kant, for rather oddball reasons). Obviously the vote would have been different at Pittsburgh or Berkeley. This might suggest that precisely what there is NOT is "agreement on methodology and approach" among English-speaking philosophers.”

 

I take it Brian is claiming that there are divisions between kinds of philosophy emerging in the United States. I used to think that Brian’s claim was right, and even moderated a discussion about it last time I blogged here. There is, after all, some evidence for Brian’s claim. In areas outside of ethics, the universities that Rutgers competes for graduate students with are Princeton, NYU, MIT, and occasionally Michigan. We don’t compete with Berkeley, Chicago, Pittsburgh (except in phil science), or Harvard (or at least we certainly don’t lose prospective students to them). At an APA last year, I talked with a Harvard-related person who denounced “Rutgers-NYU mainstream metaphysics and epistemology” as shallow for hours. Late at night at APA parties, Pittsburgh graduates will tell MIT graduates that they’re not really deep, and ugly besides.

 

However, in past year, I have changed my mind (essentially coming around to the view that Alva Noe was urging last year). There is a lot of evidence against Brian’s claim. Try as you might, you’re not going to find any differences whatsoever in the kind of work done by Pittsburgh graduates in M&E such as John MacFarlane, Doug Patterson, and Ram Neta, Harvard graduates such as Michael Glanzberg and Stephen Gross, MIT graduates such as Delia Graff, myself, or Zoltan Szabo, and Chicago graduates such as Robin Jeshion. Harvard graduates such as Alva Noe and Chicago graduates such as Jesse Prinz are as naturalistic as Rutgers graduates. MIT graduates such as Richard Heck are as distinguished contributors to the literature on history of analytic philosophy as Ian Proops, the best and most successful of the Harvard history of analytic students. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find even Harvard professors maintaining that the most prominent Rutgers graduates, such as Michael Strevens, are shallow. There is a difference in the kind of personal connections we have to older senior figures, but that’s about it.

[Update: I've been convinced by the comments I've received that my speculations about the source of complaints of the shallowness of "mainstream" M&E were too speculative. So I've replaced them with the following paragraph, since the central purpose of my post was actually supposed to be that I don't see the big difference between two "nexuses" of philosophy among my peers in other departments.]

So what is the source of the so-called "splinter" idea? Well, I suspect it is because Berkeley and Harvard have suffered serious declines after losing so many distinguished faculty to retirement and death. That fact alone is bound to cause some ill-will towards departments that now occupy the status they once did. After all, once upon a time, "mainstream" meant Berkeley and Harvard, and now it doesn't.

Whatever grumbling there is about the evils of mainstream philosophy among certain faculty at those institutions, Berkeley and Harvard’s younger faculty are uniformly excellent mainstream philosophers, who are friends and regular interlocutors with their peers at the leading departments. The most likely scenario is therefore that the two departments will slowly recover past glory, and all this talk about different kinds of philosophy will be forgotten.

The comment thread on this post should be fun...

   
                                                                                        -Jason

Comments

[Bob]

I'll add to the growing chorus of voices objecting to your characterization of Berkeley as an undesirable location (and the same goes for Cambridge, but I have less personal experience there).

[Dom Eggert]

Upfront, I should admit that I come from one of the schools way "out of the mainstream." I'm doing graduate work at Vanderbilt after coming from Penn State. Penn State, you may not realize, actually has undergone a major collapse, so even in "Continental" circles, they're seen as virtually dead in the water. Stony Brook has had similar problems. Vandy has benefited from this immensely; within a year the department had hired the chairs of both PSU and Stony Brook.

Anyway, that's probably not interesting to most of you, but let me get to my real point. Since when has philosophy been about being in the mainstream? That's something I don't quite understand about a number of Anglo-American philosophers. I've done a decent amount of work in analytic philosophy--more than many of my colleagues--but I find that the paradigms--or whatever you want to call them--that a number of analytics rely on is really quite constraining.

I particularly dislike the non-pluralistic strains, these One Truth theories, that in my mind are the philosophical equivalent of imperialism: my way or the highway. In practice, though, philosophy--if done well--is never done that way; we have ongoing conversations hopefully for the sake of expanding our narrow worldviews and so forth.

I see a lot of promising strains of analytic thought, though, happening upon conclusions that are old hat for Continentalists, and there does seem to be some convergence and conversation. More of us, at least, are willing to go half-way, but I find my friends in analytic programs can be rather dismissive. (Really, I'm making this sound more confrontational than it needs to be. Continental philosophers are by no means an organized "we" and the classic analytic-Continental divide is overplayed.)

Now, it's easy to label what I do as not being "rigorous," but if you were to sit in on a Vandy seminar--in a charitable mood--you would see that we're rigorous in a different way. Not all of us; there is a lot of bad Continental philosophy. However, you can see a difference in the level of thought by looking at most of the grad students who come in from other departments to take our seminars; some of them are bright, but many are not thinking at the same level.

The mainstream is the last thing we try to aim for (I'm overstating this, there are still professional circles you have to enter to make progress), because there are enough people defending the status quo. I still look to Socrates as a model, but also as someone, who like the Buddha walking on the road in the proverb, aspiring philosophers need to kill. There's already been a Socrates, a Spinoza, a Nietzsche, a Wittgenstein--do we need more of them?

[Jason Stanley]

Bob,

There are plenty of very desirable places that are nevertheless considerably less desirable than New York and Los Angeles. I count Berkeley and Cambridge among them.

Dom,

Thanks for your comment -- very instructive. I hadn't known about Penn State and Stony Brook's descent (I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook, and quite familiar with the Stony Brook-Penn State nexus of the early 1990s).

[Dean C. Rowan]

Full disclosure: I'm not a philosopher, not even close, if it isn't about to become perfectly obvious. And I work at Berkeley. That aside, what are academic (as opposed to armchair) philosophers anywhere doing voting on "the philosopher who had had the worst influence on the field"? What does this mean (Wittgenstein might have asked)?

[Manuel Cabrera]

Continuing on a strand in the comments and in one of your previous posts, I wonder what you and any others think about the impact of the narrowing of the analytic-continental divide on questions concerning methodology and approach. When I started as an undergrad, I came into philosophy from an initial interest in what I was learning about the critical canon in the English and Comparative Literature departments: much of which included the most continental of continental thinkers--Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze. I maintained my interest in some of this material even as in the philosophy department my main preoccupations were in formal semantics and the metaphysics of linguistic reference. As time has gone by, I find that analytic folks seem to be more and more open to continental philosophy. Maybe this has had to do with the influence of solid work by analytically trained philosophers like Brandom, Haugeland, Richard Moran, McDowell, and others.

The point is: is it fair to judge that this transition is important enough to make it the case--that is, along with the death of many of the most important English-language philosophers of the post-WWII period--that the current period is one in which American philosophy is undergoing a significant shift? If so, in what does this shift consist? What effect is it having on how philosophy is being done and what questions are at the forefront of discussion? I don't feel I have a good enough feel for the shape of American philosophy right now to say much about these questions. I know, for my part, that I feel it a much less professionally dangerous thing to do to incorporate continentally-inspired questions and approaches in my own work than when I started studying philosophy, just under ten years ago. But then again, my perceptions of and aspirations in the field are shaped by the specific department in which I find myself.

[Bryan Frances]

I'm sorry, but am I the only one who loves this kind of discussion but is also embarrassed by my interest in it? I really enjoy reading Jason's thoughts on these matters; same for Leiter's and Weatherson's. For the most part, I agree with their claims about the profession. But isn't this some kind of character fault of mine? And presumably yours, as you're so far gone you're actually reading the comments section for God's sake? :)

If it is some kind of fault, what is it? Why exactly should I be embarrassed?

[Hank]

I'd like to try and shed some light on Bryan's comment regarding feeling embarrassed about enjoying these sorts of comments. I'm a graduate student in philosophy at a, well, let's say "modest" Ph.D. program (first year, trying to transfer actually). I remember during my sophomore year as an undergraduate when I first decided that I wanted to become a philosophy professor. I took a great joy in philosophy, more than anything else in my life, and I thought: "I'd love to teach this for a living. And I think I understand the material well, and I think I can teach it well." All I wanted (and all I still want) was to earn my Ph.D., settle down in a nice four-year liberal arts college, inspire college students to take an interest in philosophy by teaching it in accordance with excellence, publish however much I have to in order to get tenure, and live happily ever after. Perhaps this makes me a lesser specimen since I have no dreams of becoming the next Quine, Ayer, MacIntyre, Rawls, Fodor, etc... That's ok, I can live with that.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the philosophical atmosphere would be as competetive, cut-throat, judgmental, and sometimes - well - mean as it appears to be. The good news is that while this has at times had an enervating effect on me, it ultimately has not in any way made me not want to pursue my original goals. But in any event, it's threads like this that lie at the source of the enervation.

All this talk about deparments feeling spite toward other departments because they have fell 3 or 4 spots in the rankings, graduate students calling each other's work shallow, etc. ad nauseum, just seems to me to be bizzare. Maybe some of it is legitimate. Hell, I'm sure some of it is. I know there is plenty of philosophy I don't care for, and there are plenty of philosophers whose work I dont like. But I feel like the situation is sort of out of control. Maybe this question should be seriously considered: Do philosophers take themselves too seriously?

So about being embarrassed that one enjoys hearing about all this conflict and strife - maybe, Bryan, it comes from thinking that all this quibbling, fighting, lashing out, etc., is simply a ridiculous practice for philosophers to engage in? Almost humorous even, in a dark way? Perhaps you meant something entirely different, perhaps not.

Now I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not saying that philosophers should stop arguing with each other, stop disagreeing, stop trying to become the greatest philosopher... I feel weird saying any of these things in this post because I'm actually a very competetive person, and I value meritocracy. But I feel like there's a real tendancy to create a sort of class system among philosophers as far as, well, how smart they are goes. For example, I was looking at the old Leiter Report from 2001, which gave some more detailed information about how many 5s, 4s, 3s, 2s, 1s, 0s a department received. I was shocked to see that some departments actually got 0s - that philosophers actually thought that other philosophers were so pathetic that their department was not worthy to offer a Ph.D. program. How anyone could give below a 2.5 baffles me. It seems to me that either the person who gives such a rating is absurdly mistaken, or the members of the department that gets that rating never should have been given Ph.D.s in the first place. But I'm inlined to think that the former disjunct is more the case than the latter.

I don't know if I made any sense at all. Back to Kant paper...

[Dean C. Rowan]

Bryan Frances asks, "If it is some kind of fault, what is it? Why exactly should I be embarrassed?"

Yeah, I'm embarrassed, too, in a way. I think it's simply a consequence of telling tales out of school. If gossip manifests a character fault, then there you are, even though we love it nonetheless.

My question regarding the significance of a survey of opinions of the philosopher most influential in a bad way cuts two ways. One is dull, going to something like: How do you even assess what would seem to be almost paradoxical, namely, bad influence? (The "wrong sort" of kids pose a risk of bad influence on our own gullible offspring. But haven't the protocols of academia excluded the r-e-a-l-l-y wrong sort?) The other has to do with Bryan Frances' concern: Isn't the investigation itself kind of embarrassing? To suggest that the world of academic philosophy would be so much better off had Wittgenstein earlier pursued and stuck to gardening...seems kind of dorky, a little shameful. This has nothing to do with the validity of LW's work.

[Jason Stanley]

Bryan,

There is a lot of recent literature on the useful social function of gossip in a community. If it's anything close to being correct, enjoying gossip isn't a character flaw.

Hank,

I think you're taking this incorrectly. I was trying to respond to the concern that Brian L. has raised at several points that the philosophical world has splintered into distinct sub-communities, with very different conceptions of the field. I believe that there is an alternative explanation of the rumble of discord. Part of my evidence was precisely that I don't see evidence for such a split among my peer-group. Sure, we do philosophy in different ways, and are tackling different problems. But we engage with each other's ideas intensely, in an incredibly pleasurable and enlightening way. The fact that we enjoy gossip about the profession is in fact the strongest kind of evidence that philosophy is a harmonious and healthy discipline. We have a mutual concern for the well-being of field.

My friends in other humanities disciplines don't have a similar conception of themselves; they are often ignorant of the character and nature of other departments. They don't show their work to their peer-groups in other departments for critique. Philosophy is different than that. Maybe this shows that we're less creative, less free, or what-have-you. But I think it is also a strong point about the field. All of us are generally excited by similar questions, and we can communicate. And that's why we gossip, because we're a social and intellectual community.

[Matt]

I'm a graduate student, not at any of the departments so far mentioned, and I must admit that I'm a bit confused. Last year I remember Prof. Leiter posting a statistical analysis of the Gourmet Report that showed which areas of philosophy mattered more in the overall evaluation; and to nobody's surprise it showed that M and E were clearly the most important factors. Well, it makes perfect sense then that a place, like Chicago (a dept. I happen to know, but am not connected to in any way) would only rank 20th. They simply have fewer faculty members working on these core areas and the ones they do have are not at the same level as those at the top schools. However, the faculty they do have, outside of M an E, are among the most distinguished in their particular sub-fields, thus their still relatively high overall ranking. My confusion lies in why Chicago (or any school for that matter) should hire some bright young stars in M and E just so they can up their overall ranking. Sure, Chicago could take a radical step and gently nudge someone like Jonathan Lear, whose work is far from core M and E, out the door and hire a superstar epistemologist in his place, and watch their rankings improve, but why.

The subtle hints I keep reading here lead me to believe that a majority of philosophers conclude that work like Lear's and many others is simply not important enough. Does every school need to aspire to be a clone of Rutgers? I'm also confused with Prof. Stanley's reply to Frank. I didn't see the deleted comment so maybe he deserved such a trite answer, but is it being implied that if I wanted to work in something like Nietzsche’s moral theory and Rutger's really wasn't on my radar screen and I chose Texas, would I be shunned by those at Rutgers because I chose a non-core analytic area to work on?

The hints I'm getting is yes that I would be shunned because I chose to work on something outside of the "mainstream" of current philosophy. What it also appears like is that work done by distinguished historians of philosophy like Paul Guyer, Allen Wood, Fred Beiser, and many, many others is simply not that important at top ranked philosophy departments and thus they and their students are looked down upon by these same departments. Now this may not be the case at all and I, and at least some others, seem to be misunderstanding. I guess I am asking for clarification: is there a general belief that work done outside of the mainstream, which I take to be core M and E broadly construed, is not worth doing and people interested in it should be doing something besides philosophy. If this is indeed the general belief then I think Prof. Letier's original point has some validity that you may have missed. If this is not the general belief then I may have simply misunderstood. Note: I agree that people who work in the same sub-disciplines use a common methodology, so people at Chicago who work in the philosophy of science have a similar methodology to people who work in the philosophy of science at Rutger’s. I believe Prof. Leiter’s point though is concerned with the overall focus and direction of a department across sub-fields. Also, I have never heard anyone at Chicago, grad student or faculty member, bitterly complain about top ranked departments stronger focus on core analytic philosophy.

I noticed many have posted since I began writing this. I hope my post is not irrelevant or redundant.

[anon]

The most obvious test for your hypothesis is: were Sellars and Davidson (he was at Berkeley, right?) and whoever else was on the "other side" more integrated into the mainstream during their day than are the current representatives of Harvard and Berkeley? If so, the "splintering" could perhaps be explained by the non-mainstreamers coming to terms with their loss (although I'm not sure how your theory explains Pitt's staying out of the mainstream in spite of not declining precipitously). But if the splintering was there in the days of Sellars and Davidson (say, 60s-90s), then presumably departments' losses of these figures and a resulting resentment wouldn't explain the splintering.

(I'm kind of inclined to think the split goes back further than the "fall" of Harvard and Berkeley, but I'm not sure.)

I'm also not sure what you're claim is about Pitt/Harvard/Berkeley grads. There are some who do stuff that's pretty compatible with what's done at NYU/Rutgers/MIT. But there still may be a difference by and large. And they may also be doing compatible stuff with a difference in style. In general, I would say that, say, Pitt grads are more historically informed than, say, Rutgers grads and that this is reflected in the work of each. They're usually still able to engage with each other, of course.

[Jason Stanley]

Matt,

I'm sympathetic with much of what you say. Certainly, I would never denigrate the philosophers you mention -- I learned a tremendous amount from Allen Wood when he was my colleague at Cornell (my first seminar there was on Kantian themes in metaphysics). Lear, Guyer, and Beiser are all outstanding philosophers that any department would want on its faculty. I am certainly not suggesting that areas outside of M&E are any less important (whatever that means) than areas inside M&E. A department should seek balance between all areas --certainly Rutgers has worked hard to acquire significant strength in ethics. But if you want to work on Nietzsche, obviously we're not the place to come, and that's totally fine (certainly, that was not the point of the deleted post by "Frank"-- he was more informing me of my personal shortcomings as a "technical problem solver"). There is certainly not a general belief that work outside M&E is not worth doing. I took myself to be defending the thesis that work inside M&E *is* worth doing, against the charge that it is mere "shallow technical problem solving" (whatever that means).

Anon,

I can't speak for Sellars, just because of ignorance (but everyone I know has read *Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind*, and I've taught it several times). But Davidson was extremely mainstream. When I was in graduate school at MIT in the early 1990s, everyone read his latest papers. Of course, he was deeply involved in a number of different "shallow technical problem solver" communities, such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. We read his papers in numerous seminars, e.g. his papers on event individuation of events in Judy Thomson's metaphysics seminar, his papers on philosophy of language in a number of different seminars, his papers on philosophy of mind in philosophy of mind classes. Throughout his life, Davidson's main community was the mainstream M&E community. The foremost scholar of Davidson's work is my colleague Ernie Lepore (at Rutgers!), who has just published (with Kirk Ludwig) a two-volume work on Davidson.

I also don't get your comparison between Pitt and Rutgers students; some Rutgers students are historically informed, others aren't. I'm sure the same is true of Pitt students.

[patrick]

I don't want to misunderstand. Was this paragraph:

"Berkeley and Harvard’s younger faculty are uniformly excellent mainstream philosophers, who are friends and regular interlocutors with their peers at the leading departments. The most likely scenario is therefore that the two departments will slowly recover past glory, and all this talk about different kinds of philosophy will be forgotten."

supposed to be read as saying that it is because the older generation of philosophers at Harvard and Berkeley don't do stuff like the leading departments do that they have lost that past glory, and that these schools will regain that glory because time coupled with the fact that the younger faculty do the same stuff as the leading departments will make those departments like the current leading departments in terms of work done?

I ask this because read this way the paragraph seems at odds with the rest of your post, and just wrong. I would think that the reason why those programs took a downard turn is that in the last few years they had 5 of the top minds in analytic philosophy (Davidson, Williams, Quine, Rawls, Nozick) pass away.

I also would disagree very much with the idea that a department becomes good by becoming more like Rutgers in style of work done, but again I am not at all sure that is what you meant. While I don't go in for any stupid things like calling M&E shallow or the people who do M&E shallow(is there anything more to this charge than the moronic inference that just because Dr. B publishes only on topics X, Y, and Z, Dr. B must only be able to talk intelligently about X, Y, and Z?), I do think there might be a slight problem in how good an education you can get from places that seem pretty specialized (there are only a handful of profs at Chicago that self identify as working on M&E and some of them seem to mean a different thing by that than is usually meant. the same goes for history at Rutgers). I flatter myself in thinking that I have gotten better at philosophy since coming to grad school (at Cornell). I think alot of that has come from fellow grad students. What I wonder is if, as you admit somewhere in the comments, people who do certain kinds of history have good reason not to go to Rutgers, how your grad students are going to get the oppurtunity to learn alot of that stuff at all. At Cornell there are several grad students who do some really really technical stuff. I have learned lots and lots of really interesting useful stuff from them. Can Rutgers grads get that same kind of help on history? Can Chicago grads get that kind of help with hard technical stuff? These questions are not meant to be rhetorical. While I think that I have had a great deal of good fortune in coming to what I take to be a fairly balanced program, I am perfectly willing to admit that I don't know squat about the intellectual life at Rutgers, Chicago or other places.

[BL]

A few quick thoughts:

1. Your evidence for the non-splintering of the field consists of younger folks from rather different programs doing similar kinds of work. If the evidence is apt, then it may suggest that the splintering is a generational phenomenon, soon to be overcome. I take it you don't dispute that, say, Fodor & Stich on one side, and Brandom & McDowell, on the other, are doing rather different kinds of work, and have rather different views about the kind of work worth doing. And I take it you don't dispute that the fact that when Rutgers votes for Wittgenstein as "worst influence on philosophy," they are reflecting some very deep disagreements about the field with departments like Pittsburgh which would never vote for Wittgenstein on that score.

2. Even on the generational point, I'm worried your evidence may be rather too cherry-picked. Prinz is rather anomalous among Chicago graduates, and Jeshion, I believe, entered the program there well before its transformation into a bastion of Stanley Cavell studies (I'm exaggerating the transformation, I know, I know...). You mention 3 recent Pitt grads, but there are many others doing rather different kinds of work that might be less warmly received in New Brunswick. Some of the evidence for a "nexus" comes not only in which schools prospective students are considering, but also in hiring patterns. (Think of all the Pitt grads hired by Harvard, but not NYU; and all the MIT grads hired by NYU, but not Pitt; and so on.)

3. The other aspect of splintering, less discussed so far in this thread (though alluded to), does have to do with the relative importance of history of philosophy. History is taken, quite plainly (let's just look, again, at hiring), to be more important at Harvard and Pitt and Berkeley (not to mention Chicago), say, than at MIT and Rutgers and USC. Even at departments with longstanding commitments to covering the major periods of the history of philosophy, there are rather different views about the centrality of history to the discipline, though I think I shall avoid mentioning names and departments in this connection, though I'm sure you know what I mean.

[anon]

I'm sure there are some historically-informed Rutgers students and some Pitt students who aren't. My claim, remember, was that _in general_ Pitt (and no doubt Berkeley and Harvard) students have a different attitude towards the history of philosophy than do Rutgers and NYU students. The schools indoctrinate their students differently. To say some escape the indoctrination is true, but not to the point. My guess is that differences in these kinds of attitudes (towards history, towards "technicality") across departments give the appearance of methodological differences with those who are more partisan _perhaps_ more likely to make the mistake.

Anyway, I agree re: Davidson and probably Sellars. And of course, the same would have gone for Harvard's late (or retired) stars. So that's some kind of evidence the loss of those people may have something to do with the current appearance of splintering; though the mechanism through which it does this is somewhat a mystery (I'm not very persuaded by your initial suggestion--the one you've deleted).

[Luka Yovetich]

To focus for a second on probably the least important or serious thread here, I agree with Jason that New York and Los Angeles are more desirable places to live than either Berkeley or Cambridge. And I certainly DO think that Berekely and Cambridge are desirable places to live (especially Berkeley). But the REAL question is, between NYC and LA, which is the most desirable place to live? I love them both. It's close. And a reasonable person can go back and forth about this. But my current vote is for Los Angeles. Lots of urban delights AND good weather/easy access to nature. (Those pluses outweigh the minus that LA closes ridiculously early.)

(By the way, I have no strong opinion about the level of objectivity about claims of desirability. I just think such conversations are fun!)

[Matt]

In one of the earlier posts by Jason Stanley (on tenure) there was some question raised about the rationality of the members of our profession. When I see people defending a giant strip-mall/parking lot (and by the last part I mean the roads!) as better than the bay area to live, I think we may well have confirmation of that fear!

[Jason Stanley]

Btw: I never heard the Rutgers story, and find it somewhat dubious. Certainly, Colin McGinn couldn't have been at that faculty meeting. McGinn just co-taught our first year proseminar, and his half was all on the later Wittgenstein. So, in other words, our required first year seminar (required for all first year students) was half devoted to the later Wittgenstein.

I myself must confess not to finding Brandom and McDowell that difficult or opaque, just sort of excessively wordy. I also don't radically disagree with McDowell on most issues he writes about, and I teach his papers fairly regularly. Brandom is another story, as far as agreement goes. But in fact I regularly engage his work. It isn't at all that Brandom is doing something radically different than I do -- he's doing the same thing, trying to give a theory of linguistic meaning. It's just that he wants to give a theory of meaning without appeal to genuinely semantic notions such as reference and correspondence truth. And I very strongly believe that he has not succeeded in showing that project to be viable. But he is clearly engaged in the same kind of projects I am. Furthermore, Fodor and Lepore are currently involved in a lengthy exchange with him about meaning, whereas I don't think they would be if they were in radically different fields (e.g. Fodor doesn't write about Judith Butler).

[Ken Taylor]

In my view, philosophy has always been and will always be something of a fragmented discipline. Philosophy is what people who call themselves philosophers do. And people who call themselves philosophers do all sorts of things. Some see philosophy as very much continuous with the sciences, some don't. Some see philosophy as deeply and properly concerned with its own history; others don't. Some see philosophy as a largely a priori discipline; others disagree. Some see philosophy as being in the basically conservative business of analyzing (and perhaps tidying up at the margins) our ordinary conceptions of things. Otheres see themselves as being in the business of exerting pressure on our ordinary concepts and offering up radical reconfigurations of them. Some want to reconnect philosophy with broader humanistic inquiry; others recoil from the broader humanities. Some see philosophy as exhortation. Some see it as explanation.

At certain moments in history of philosophy, different conceptions of philosophy dominate various institutions. Some conceptions of philosophy, especially when conjoined with institutional structures like tenure and the power to grant phd's are more or less successful at reproducing themselves in subsequent generations of thinkers. But sometimes younger generations pull off paradigm shifts and declare the death of philosophy as previously practiced.

Though philosophy is perhaps the oldest (academic) profession, it has died a thousand deaths and has been reborn and reshaped a thousand times. It strikes me that it will ever be so. Focussing too narrowly on local equilibrium points in this vastly exended dynamic landscape doesn't seem likely to reveal anything deep.

[BL]

Jason: the point about Brandom and McDowell wasn't, here, about difficulty or opacity, but about profound differences in "methodology and approach," to use the phrase that Neil introduced. I am happy to agree that McDowell has more in common with Fodor than either has with Judith Butler, but that can't be sufficient to show the coherence of the field. In that regard, Ken Taylor's observations seem apt.

As to the Wittgenstein story, check with a few senior colleagues. I imagine you're right that McGinn missed that meeting. Probably Bruce Wilshire did too!

[Gary Kemp]

Of course, the best philosopher could have the worst influence.

[Jamie]

This page of Pitt's placements

http://www.pitt.edu/~philosop/graduate/placement.html

does seem to me to support Jason's position (that is, the topics of the dissertations don't seem any more 'historical' than you'd find at Brown, where I teach, or even MIT).

I'm also wondering whether Harvard is really in one nexus more than the other. Maybe that's because of my ethics perspective: Korsgaard, Scanlon, Parfit, Kamm, Sen. Sure, Korsgaard writes distingujished stuff on Kant, but I think it's obvious that most of her important work fits comfortably in the 'problem solving' category. (I'm not including Moran because my impression is that the nexus are defined by somewhat older faculty members.)

[BL]

Here's the list of MIT dissertatons:
http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/dissertation.html

There are almost none on historical figures or topics (and those there are are on history of early analytic philosophy).

The issue wasn't just over history/no history, it was over approaches and methodology, and in that regard, we'd need to know more about the content of the dissertations. I think you're right, though, that these fault lines are less prominent in ethics than they are in, broadly, M&E.

[Jamie]

Right, it is mainly a matter of methodology and approach, so the list of titles of the dissertations isn't all that helpful. Even so I think the list suggests that there isn't a 'fault line' but at most a 'tendency'.

I would also now like to retract my sentence above in which I say that Korsgaard has done distinguijeshed work. If there were such a thing as being distinguijeshed, my typo would be a freudian slip, if there were such things as freudian slips.

Finally, I would like to point out that Derek Parfit is listed on the faculty list web pages of (i) All Souls, (ii) Rutgers, (iii) NYU, and (iv) Harvard. This must be some kind of record. Commenters, please submit suggestions for what that record is. Best answer wins the prize consisting of my mentioning your accomplishment in the comments of some other blog.

[anon]

Just to reiterate (now in response to BL) a point I tried to make earlier: Brandom and McDowell surely do things differently in some respect than, say, Fodor and Stich. But I think Jason's right: the respect in which they're different isn't methodological or such as to undermine "coherence" in the field. I think there is a difference in "approach", but I understand this to be a difference in presentation and attitudes towards the history of philosophy. Brandom and McDowell surely engage with historical philosophers much more than the philosophers of language at Rutgers/NYU/MIT that I've read.

There seems to me to be a temptation in philosophy to characterize all kinds of things as "methodological" differences. (See Williamson's essay "Must Do Better".) I just don't think "methodology" should be thrown around loosely (that would be bad methodology!). Methodology, as I understand it, is how a claim is established. Bad methodology in economics isn't bad writing or neglecting to talk about Smith and Ricardo; it's neglecting to, say, control for other factors in your regression. And I think the burden of proof is on those who think McDowell and Brandom try to establish their claims differently than do Fodor and Stich.

[Margaret Atherton]

As someone working within the history of philosophy subdiscipline (more particularly in history of early modern) I am somewhat bemused by the history/no history split being described. It seems to me that some but not all of the departments on both sides of the divide have distinguished historians within their ranks, but that the presence or absence of people with such a specialty couldn't be used to create the lists. So what are we talking about? The regard with which historians are regarded within the departments, how friendly their colleague are? Or are we actually talking about something which has nothing to do with the subdiscipline of history of philosophy?

[LS]

This point may be slightly orthogonal to the discussion, but it does strike me as one that usually goes missing. The most striking difference in department in the past decade strikes me as one of losing breadth. When I started grad school, and while I was in grad school, the top departments all had very strong philosophers across a range of subdisciplines. Pitt (where I was) had real strength in m&e, ethics, logic, phil of science, phil mind (of a certain sort, etc). I think the same was true of other departments. Retirements and untimely deaths put pressure on those departments at the same time that others were building a real strength in a specialty (I am here thinking Rutgers and NYU), though there were always some departments known for their specialized strength (MIT, for instance). The response seemed to me to involve building on strength -- ensuring that there was seniority in what a department was historically strong in -- and hoping that junior hires could fill in gaps. This seems like a natural cycle, tied to the exigencies of human mortality and university finances.
Unfortunately, it also has consequences for graduate education. There is going to be a generation or two of students who earn their PhDs in narrow departments, and so might not have a range of philosophical knowledge. And I think that breadth serves the interests of philosophy (both of the 'meaning of life' and scientific kind -- just think about Descartes tying the two together). That is not to say this crop might not gain breadth later in their careers. But I look forward to the day when departments have breadth as well as depth again. (Think of how NYU is hiring for an example) The work of philosophy is bound to be more interesting!

[matt]

As a recent Chicago PhD who began at Pitt (I transferred to work with Haugeland on Heidegger, but I almost ended up working on Locke with Garber and Stein), and who arrived at Chicago in the midst of a pretty profound shift, I'd like to add my two or three cents. (None of what follows speaks to how other departments might differ. And sorry, this is also a bit long, but some of it might be of interest to current undergraduates who, as I did, are finding themselves choosing a graduate program in part based on an interest in continental philosophy and the history of philosophy.)

First, I think it's right to stress the importance of the history of philosophy at both these places. I think all of the Chicago students I know who have gone out in the last, say, three years (these are largely students from after the departure or retirement of most of the philsophers of science there) had dissertations that were entirely or significantly historical in nature (mostly dealing with early modern philosophy, Kant, or German idealism), but also with greater or lesser systematic (i.e., non-historical, problem-oriented) components to their work (i.e., they weren’t just doing philosophical philology, and several appealed to historical figures in the service of an ahistorical topic). And many have done quite well by any reasonable standard (e.g., Syracuse, William and Mary, UNLV, UIC). And from what I know of the current grad students there, this general pattern of grad student interest is unlikely to change. Likewise at Pitt, most students and recent grads I know do work that is, if not exclusively historical, deeply shaped by the history of philosophy (including, especially, Kant and Aristotle). Obviously at Pitt, but perhaps less obviously at Chicago, there is an equally deep interest in contemporary analytic work, but naturally it often tends to be work that itself takes the history of philosophy seriously: thus figures like Sellars, Brandom and McDowell represent a kind of philosophical ideal for many of the students at both places (two of which three are, of course, alive and well at Pitt). But there is, for instance, a very active philosophy of mind workshop at Chicago which considers lots of approaches to the topic. There are of course obvious differences between the two programs: one could write a Foucault dissertation at Chicago or a possible-worlds dissertation at Pitt, but probably not the reverse (at least if one is concerned about job prospects). Dissertations on Frege, Kant, Aristotle, and many topics in philosophy of mind and language – to say nothing of ethics – would, however, be equally possible at both places. (Technically oriented philosophers interested in these topics would perhaps, simply by self-selection, more like end up applying to Pitt. I don’t know the current, younger students at either place well enough to know this for certain, however.)

From these observations comes a related point about how Pitt and Chicago form (in terms of ideology or general outlook) a kind of philosophical nexus (and perhaps with Harvard and Berkeley as well; note in this regard that in the last five years, the majority and maybe all of Chicago’s M&E hires have been people who were either trained or taught at (or both) Harvard, Pitt and Berkeley). And what seems to me crucial is that (at least as I see it) at both places there are certain forms of philosophical naturalism (i.e., not what McDowell means when he calls himself a naturalist) that are more likely to be targets than starting points. This is of a piece with the prominence of people like Sellars and McDowell, and, of course, Wittgenstein. (And, yes, at Chicago many students find Cavell interesting; but the general influence of Cavell is hard to detect, in part because his former students who teach there are all rather different, and none suggest that their students write like Cavell.) I think this issue of naturalism shapes much of what’s at stake in lots of these disciplinary divisions that have been under discussion, both within analytic philosophy and – to tie this in to other threads – between analytic and continental (others have pointed to some of the key dimensions of this, but, unless I’m forgetting some posts, the emphasis has been more on science-inspired methodology than ontology; I have in mind principally views about how to think of rationality and normativity). In regard to the latter distinction I think it’s no accident that programs like Pitt and Chicago (and perhaps Harvard and Berkeley) are more likely to be friendlier to, obvious non-naturalists like Heidegger and Hegel than places where more austere forms of naturalism tend to be prominent. But it’s important to note in this regard that even at Chicago (I say ‘even’ because it seems that it has something of a reputation in this regard) one will be encouraged to seriously engage with philsophers like Quine and the Churchlands. And certainly at both places there are very smart students with quite catholic interests and leanings. (Thus for any general claim I’ve made there are bound to be some, and maybe some significant, exceptions.)

A final point about Pitt: one of the things I think shapes its graduates considerably and positively is the relatively greater amount of teaching one has to do there. This may seem like a detractor for potential applicants (and I understand that very recently things have been rearranged so less teaching is required), and it does slow down the dissertation writing process, but you can’t help but come out of the program with a fairly good general background in the history of philosophy simply from the necessity of having had to explain Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume and Berkeley to lots of undergraduates, several times. Others in quicker, less teaching-intensive programs may get this sort of historical training later as they teach intro courses after earning their doctorate, but I think this kind of training affects how one thinks of the project of doing philosophy when it happens in grad school. (Chicago is, I believe, somewhere in the middle as far teaching goes.) Perhaps this is less defining of Pitt than it seems to me; I’d be interested to hear about others’ experiences with teaching in graduate school and how this affects them as philosophers.

Anyway, I hope none of this is taken as implying negative things about programs other than Pitt and Chicago (or those programs themselves; I certainly enjoyed my time at each immensely). It’s only meant to be a small window (and one person’s at that) into one of the ‘nexuses’ under discussion.

[Jason Stanley]

I have to say something about why I get bothered by this topic (and I think Prof. Atherton's comment is apropos here). There is an assumption, usually made by people trained at Chicago and Pitt, that people trained at MIT, Rutgers, NYU, or Princeton are not historically inclined. Let me say once and for all that that is absurd. As Prof. Atherton points out, there are distinguished historians at these insitutions. Rutgers, after all, has the Boltons. If you think that John Hawthorne doesn't know a ton about history, you simply don't know anything about Hawthorne -- he's published a book on Leibniz, after all (and he has good range in medieval philosophy). Zoltan Szabo, trained at MIT, regularly publishes and teaches history of modern (and published on Berkeley in graduate school). If you look at the syllabi of my seminars, you will see that most of them are on history of analytic. Both Stephen Neale and I regularly teach and publish in history of analytic (read Stephen's recent paper, "On A Milestone of Empiricism").

The fact that a sub-group of scholars in the history of analytic (mostly Dreben students) regards Richard Heck and me and others of our ilk as wrong in our judgments about that history doesn't mean that we don't know just as much as they do about the history of analytic philosophy.

So every time someone says that the issue between the two alleged "nexuses" is one of *historical competence*, either they are simply ignorant of the facts, or they are insulting the research and teaching done in history by a lot of people. They are, for example, insulting George Boolos, by denigrating his incredibly important work on Frege. And they are insulting Richard Cartwright, who not only has a number of classic papers on Moore and Russell, but taught a wide range of history classes at MIT (including his regular Aquinas course). To do so is either ignorant or somewhat offensive.

[Richard Zach]

Jason, I sympathize. But my feeling is that the same thing happens the other way round as well: if you're mainly known for doing historically-inclined work (or formal work, for that matter), some people will tend to think that that's the only thing you're good at. All it needs is some evidence that someone somewhere has a prejudice against historically-inclined work, and confirmation bias will do the rest. That evidence can be as unreliable as, say, an offhand comment from some member of a search committee to a placement director late night at the Eastern APA smoker that your candidate was judged to be "really good in what they do [history/logic/phenomenology/etc] , but the department was looking for someone doing more mainstream philosophy of science/m&e/mind/whatever". Philosophy just doesn't seem to be a "live and let live" discipline. One of your current colleagues once, when I was a wee grad student, warned me that philosophy is a really tough discipline: you can make a name for yourself, even reach the top, and lots of other people in the discipline will still think you're an idiot despite (because of?) that.

It is striking to me that this kind of dismissive attitude is prevalent in philosophy. I've hung out a fair bit with logicians and computer scientists. I don't think I've ever heard a computer scientist diss another computer scientist's work, and the only times I've heard it from logicians is when the logicians in question were employed in philosophy departments. Mathematicians are another story, though--there seems to be a lot of the same kind of competitive gossip going on there ("department X has really gone down the tubes over the last 5 years", "what has so-and-so done since that 1975 paper?", and especially the divide between "all math should be done in categorical terms" and "category theory is completely useless and whoever uses it is not a real mathematician", etc.)

Perhaps a partial explanation can be found in the relative difficulty in various disciples to get good jobs, i.e., sour grapes.

[Richard Zach]

PS: a. What Matt said in his second to last comment. b. Berkeley grad students typically teach every term except the first two, and most of the teaching is in large intro/history classes and Phil 100, an intensive writing seminar, which is very often historically oriented. I don't know about the teaching requirements at Rutgers etc., but Matt's explanation for the relative emphasis on history in Berkeley's graduate training, such as it is, strikes me as plausible.

[Zach]

Matt, I think your tentative characterization of the differences here is much more relevant than the "history" issue: "I think this issue of naturalism shapes much of what’s at stake in lots of these disciplinary divisions that have been under discussion...I have in mind principally views about how to think of rationality and normativity)." But there's something funny about this image: don't Princeton/Rutgers philosophers sometimes think about whether naturalism is true or how to think about normativity?

It seems to me like right now the situation is like this: Princeton/Rutgers philosophers seem, as far as they can tell, to be having conversations among themselves about all the possible issues and with all the possible positions on the table. You want to talk about relativism or context-sensitivity? Well, those are issues on the table (cf Jason's post on Brian Weatherson). Pittsburgh philosophy? Of course we engage with that (cf Jason's comment about McDowell and Brandom). Now, presumably the Chicago/Pitt/Berkeley nexus thinks that the space of issues and positions in P/R work isn't adequate for some reason (otherwise they'd join that space as it is, right?). So there are two good options for C/P/B-minded types: 1) join these conversations and try to add their own distinctive questions and positions. I tend to think of Michael Williams, Barry Stroud and Brandom as doing this. If every C/P/B person did this, needless to say, P/R philosophers would be right in thinking that the space of issues was as rich as possible, and the division would be settled.

Option 2) is if C/P/B philosophers think there is something wrong with the space of issues as is: it is to criticize the way philosophy is being done in a way that can't be done through normal conversation within the existing space. This is the thing that gets called "quietism," maybe including recent Putnam. The trouble with trying to do this is that you tend to be perceived as wrong, useless, and sourly dismissive of other people's work. Now, these people could potentially present their views in a better way: there's no reason why dismissiveness is a necessary accompaniment, and it's conceivable that there would still be interesting work to do in their world (ie it's not really "the end of philosophy." So then we could just evaluate whether they were right or wrong. But personally I am still waiting for an adequate articulation of just what is wrong with the current space of "mainstream" philosophy such that (1) is not an option: an argument, or at least reasonable considerations, presented in a way that neither writes off all of naturalism nor suggests that the discipline of philosophy should shrivel up and die, that gives reasonable people pause to think about whether philosophy should be done as it is at Princeton and Rutgers.

[patrick]

I might not be talking about the same thing as everyone else (since I don't at all think that the philosophy done at the top departments is not historically informed), but isn't there a gap between being knowledgable and interested in history, and being a person who would draw students interested in history there? So Zoltan Szabo knows lots and lots about history of modern (more than I would know even if I made it my central area of study), but the people Zoltan Szabo attracts to Cornell are people who do logic and language, right? If he was our only person who could teach modern philosophy then we might not get as many grad students specializing in that. This would in no way reflect on Zoltan's knowledge of history, but it would have an effect on the educational oppurtunities at Cornell (because of the importance of the graduate community), right?

Also, I don't think many people believe that the top few departments don't have people who know history, that would be silly. How would one know anything about the problems being currently debated if one didn't know about Frege, Brentano, Kant, Hume and Leibniz? Being good at problem solving requires understanding the problem and understanding the problem requires knowing the history of the problem, how it is has been framed before, what answers have been given. Everyone should appreciate that problem solving involves that knowledge, and that problem solvers, on the whole, have that knowledge. I think the criticism would more usually be that some of the top departments leave certain areas of history uncovered, not that no one has any thoughts about history. I realize that sometimes the criticism is put in terms of history vs. non-history, but I think this is just careless presentation. I can see how this criticism would be a little unfair, because to cover all or even most areas of history is probably something no department does, but I think there are differences of degree. Again though I am not talking about the philosophy done, but the educational oppurtunities available, since I don't see why the work you do would vary by school. What I just wrote might be irrelevant because of that.

[anon]

Jason,
you start out by saying "There is an assumption, usually made by people trained at Chicago and Pitt, that people trained at MIT, Rutgers, NYU, or Princeton are not historically inclined". If "people trained at" is supposed to mean "everyone trained at" and if "are not historically inclined" is supposed to mean "are not at all historically inclined", then I doubt there's any such assumption. But that would have to be the assumption in order for it to be "personally insulting". If the assumption is that there's a _general tendency_ for students and professors at NYU/Rutgers to devote less time and energy to pre-analytic philosophy, then I don't think it's insulting to anyone. For one thing, you can devote less attention to history and still do good work in it. For another, that most people there devote less time and energy to history doesn't mean everyone does. I don't know, the way you've framed it seems to me really disingenuous.

I would bet the less insulting assumption would be borne out by the number of references, _found in work on contemporary problems_, to pre-analytic philosophers per professor at those schools. Sure, just referencing Kant more often isn't in itself a deep difference. But maybe the difference just isn't a deep one (it might be, I have no idea). I'm just saying there is a difference.

I suspect also that McDowell and Brandom (and, for that matter, Michael Thompson) think Kant is more useful and relevant to contemporary problems than do Fodor and Stich and most people at Rutgers; and I would bet this contributes a lot to the atmospheres at each department. Rutgers people might still like Kant, but for different reasons, I would bet. Nothing in this is saying that all Rutgers people are incompetent historians.

There is a real issue here and clearly one can take either side without being insulting. To accuse people of making personal insults seems to me just a rhetorical way of cutting off reasonable debate. Maybe some people make the bad assumption you're talking about. But you make it sound like everyone who thinks there's a difference in approach to history makes this assumption. That's at least as insulting as the insulting assumption.

[anon]

I'll admit to being a student at one of the Pitt-Harvard-Berkeley-nexus schools (guess which) and I'll admit further that many students here make something like the bad assumption you describe. But plenty of us are annoyed by this (I think the prevalence of the assumption ends up hurting my interests as a developing philosopher). From what I've seen of other places, there's a difference in atmosphere with regards to history, but only in the more harmless sense I tried to outline above.

[John Fischer]

Jason, I make this comment to add a bit of humor (I hope). I certainly have found the discussion lively and interesting, and I hope the following is not inappropriate. I swear it is true: when I first saw the title of the post, "A Splinter in Philosophy or just some departments in flux?" I thought it said, "A Sphincter in Philosophy or just some departments in flux?" !!
Immediately, my mind raced to certain possibilities--but then I saw the correct title....

[Aidan]

Quoting anon:

'I think the burden of proof is on those who think McDowell and Brandom try to establish their claims differently than do Fodor and Stich'

The biggest proponent of the notion that McDowell has a very different approach to philosophy is surely McDowell himself. In the preface to 'Mind and World' he contrasts his approach with that of those philosophers he takes to be doing 'constructive philosophy', and it's an explicit theme throughout the book. In his response to Wright's critical notice of M&W in Smith's 'Reading McDowell' volume, McDowell accuses Wright of 'point-missing' in trying to find such philosophy in the book. (In the preface to M&W, it is true that McDowell says that his project is constructive philosophy of a sort. But that remark clearly isn't meant to blur the contrast he wants to make.)

So why doesn't the burden of proof fall on those who want to suggest, against McDowell's explicit avowals of a different, Wittgensteinian methodology, that he has adopted no such thing?

[David Sobel]

Jamie,

Parfit's record is for most branching without losing identity. Pay up.

[Duck]

I was all set to agree with Prof. Leiter that “Fodor & Stich on one side, and Brandom & McDowell, on the other, are doing rather different kinds of work, and have rather different views about the kind of work worth doing”; but then Prof. Stanley reminded us that “[i]t isn't at all that Brandom is doing something radically different than I do -- he's doing the same thing, trying to give a theory of linguistic meaning.” What this shows, however, is not that there is no real methodological split in contemporary philosophy, but more that Brandom is a bit of a fence-sitter, or even just another problem-solver with an unusually Hegelian theory (that is, a theory with unusually Hegelian content). Indeed, his differences with McDowell seem to center on what we have been calling “methodology”: see McDowell’s somewhat testily titled article “How not to interpret Wittgenstein” (or something; I forget the exact title, but it’s directed at Brandom, and along these lines).

One problem here is that while “problem-solving” (perhaps modified by “technical”) seems like a good enough word for one side, we don’t really have a good word for the other (McDowell’s suggestion, “quietism,” doesn’t do it for me; I’ve been using that to denote a Rorty-ish methodological skepticism to be avoided). That’s if there really is a unified “other side.” One of the difficulties for us non-problem-solvers is getting all our teammates to work together, or at least refrain from getting in each other’s way, be they Wittgensteinians, pragmatists, hermeneuts, Hegelians, phenomenologists, or whatever (and never mind Judith Butler et al!). In this sense, I think that the pressures of professional specialization can be inimical to our project(s) – carving out one’s own niche can make it hard to distinguish differences in strategy from more substantial differences. Of course if you’re concerned to give up the scheme/content dualism that problem kind of comes with the territory! It’s going to take some time to get it all straight, and I hope that people don’t lose heart in the current climate.

I thank Matt (the one from Chicago) for his helpful comment, and I agree that the acceptability of philosophical naturalism (again, in the sense in which McDowell rejects it as “scientism”) is a central issue - especially, as Matt puts it, as it concerns “how to think of rationality and normativity.” Ultimately, though, I think naturalism in this sense is as much a symptom as a cause, so while it can serve as a point of attack, it doesn’t quite get at the real issue, which concerns the (Platonic/Cartesian) conceptual ground (or fertilizer?) which makes naturalism grow. Next century it’ll be something else, you watch.

As for the historical angle, I don’t think anyone was, or at least should have been, impugning Prof. Stanley’s credentials in the history of analytic philosophy, or claiming that Rutgers doesn’t have historians, or Wittgenstein interpreters for that matter (although the idea of Colin McGinn, as committed a Cartesian as anyone by my lights, teaching Wittgenstein makes my head spin). Studying the history of philosophy can indeed be a healthy corrective to excessively narrow conceptions of our tasks, but it need not be, as some conceptions of the history of philosophy themselves suffer from the same problem. And surely every program, whatever its focus, has historians!

To answer Matt’s question, I certainly found that as a Columbia grad student required to teach four semesters of Intro to Contemporary Civ (i.e. “Plato to NATO”), this helped me immensely in fitting the questions I’m working on (what is knowledge and do we have any, what is it for a word to mean something, what is it to be an agent subject to norms) into the larger historical context (as well as understanding McDowell’s attraction to Aristotle!). So as Prof. Leiter points out, it’s not so much what the dissertation is about – mine deals just as much with metaphysics and epistemology as anyone’s from Rutgers or NYU – as what it actually says about it. On the other hand I did indeed find it necessary to bring in Kant, Peirce, Nietzsche, and the ancient Skeptics (plus of course Wittgenstein).

Finally, I was struck by Prof. Stanley’s remark, at the end of his post, that since “Berkeley and Harvard’s younger faculty are uniformly excellent mainstream philosophers [… t]he most likely scenario is therefore that the two departments will slowly recover past glory, and all this talk about different kinds of philosophy will be forgotten.” Perhaps this was not intended, but I got a bit of a chill when I read this, as if it meant “yes, there were some pockets of resistance there for a while, but soon orthodoxy will prevail completely, and those non-problem-solving weirdos will just be a bad memory.” There’s glory for you!

Now as I am teaching Plotinus tomorrow, I have to get back to work. Thanks to all for their contributions to this discussion.

[Stephen Neale]

Dear Aunt Jason,

I feel like a complete failure. I haven't solved any problems. My wife is very worried about this as I spend sixteen to eighteen hours every day trying. This is depriving us the possibility of eating together and being intimate (except, occasionally, when we are able to combine the activities in a very understanding restaurant in Chelsea). Should I change problems? Change departments? Change wives? I simply cannot go on like this. My wife reads your blog every day (she was the one who told me about it) and taunts me constantly: "When are you going to solve some problems? I'm going to go out and find a real man." It's so humiliating. I understand there are departments that contain other people who have not solved any problems. That makes me so happy. I am sure I would feel very comfortable with them. I would be grateful if you could let them know of my plight and help me save my marriage. If possible I would like to work within an hour of my apartment in NY, but I have been told that only problem-solvers are permitted to teach in that region. Are the regulations set by New York or New Jersey. Or are they jointly administered (like the Holland Tunnel)? Is it possible to get a waiver in exceptional circumstances?

P.S. I have just learned that "On A Milestone of Empiricism" was a history paper. I can't tell you how happy this makes me, as there is no philosophy in it.

[Anonymous Grad Student]

As a lowly grad student in the history of philosophy, I feel neither confident nor comfortable making the kinds of categorical statements that J. Stanley agrily criticises. I would like to make the following point about graduate student attitudes, however. In my experience with grad students from a variety of depts., I have found widely divergent attitudes toward my largely historically minded work. I even had one ABD from Rutgers, sorry to say, challenge me at a conference to justify my whole project, because he saw my largely exegetical point as being "a waste of time". I have encountered this attitude often, where grad students who happen to pursue issues in contemporary philosophy have looked down their noses at work that aims at understanding, clarifying, and analyzing what a historical figure said. After all, they sometimes say, what good is such scholarship if it does not solve some contemporary open problem? If it does not, it is merely history of ideas, they have said.

(By the way, the attitude I describe here does NOT concern the history of analytic, but only concerns those people studying figures and periods before, say, the mid 19th Century. In fact, the attitude seems to grow more prevalent as one's interests travel farther back in time, with the possible exception of Medieval philosophy, which receives a larger amount of scorn than Ancient. Perhaps these grad students cannot see common questions, assumptions, or methods at work in Aquinas in the way that they can in Russell, for example.)

Working on the assumption that most grad students pick up these attitudes toward the history of philosophy from the faculty in their depts., then, I would say that these attitudes among grad students are (admittedly anecdotal) evidence for a distinction between those departments that value the history of philosophy as a field of inherent interest and those that see it as being only a toolbox from which to draw interesting arguments relevant to contemporary philosophy.

And forgive the anonymity - there are faculty in my own department who take this antagonistic approach toward the Hist. of Phil.

[Jason Stanley]

Dear Anonymous Grad Student,

Well, all I can say about the attitude you describe having encountered is that it is reprehensible. I can't say I have ever encountered that attitude (and certainly not at Rutgers). I am especially perplexed by your comment about attitudes towards medieval philosophy. At Cornell, I was the second reader for an outstanding dissertation by Susan Brower-Toland on theories of judgment in late medieval philosophy, which was an evaluation of different accounts of judgment and its objects. It is utterly clear from her dissertation, that whereas contemporary accounts of judgment and propositions are harder to discover reflected in the works of many of the figures she was discussing, many of the same themes emerge as in contemporary philosophy -- judgment as a relation to mental sentences, as in Ockham, judgment as a relation to facts, as in Adam Wodham (as Norman Kretzmann's classic work in these areas also makes clear). Terry Parsons, the great philosopher of language at UCLA, has been working on medieval theories of supposition for years, and has a number of fascinating papers on the topic (my former colleague at Michigan, Peter Ludlow, has delved into this as well, for use in his project on natural logic). Geach's doctrine of relative identity, as applied to the problem of material constitution, derives from medieval discussions of the trinity. At Rutgers, John Hawthorne has been teaching an ongoing weekly reading group on medieval philosophy, for as long as I've been here, that is attended by all the metaphysics graduate students. And as I've mentioned, at MIT, Richard Cartwright taught a regular Aquinas seminar that virtually all of us took at one point or another.

Contemporary metaphysics is very much intertwined with historical themes. Aristotle is very much alive and well in this literature, not just in the obvious Aristotelian metaphysical themes, but also in the historical work done (e.g. Kit Fine, perhaps the world's leading figure in metaphysics, has recent papers on Aristotle on mixtures). In work closer to my own heart in metaphysics,
Kantian themes are alive and well (this tradition descends from Strawson's descriptive metaphysics, and is embodied in work as as Cassam's *Self and
World*). And these are all just a few representative examples. So I'm just a bit bemused at who could claim to master contemporary M&E, and simultaneously disparage the study of pre-19th century history of philosophy.

[Jason Stanley]

I think one confusion people have is basically just due to straightforward ignorance of the field. People have been associating Rutgers with "Fodor and Stich", who are two of our most famous faculty. But we actually have 26 more faculty members than Fodor and Stich, including a number of metaphysicians and philosophers of science, and a huge group of people under 50. Just using for a moment the Leiter specialty rankings as a guide to the areas represented at Rutgers, you will see that Rutgers is well represented in many other categories besides "Philosophy of Mind" and "Cognitive Science". Indeed, just as many recent graduate students are there for each of philosophy of science or metaphysics or the philosophy of language or epistemology, as are there for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. So no argument of the form "Fodor and Stich aren't influenced by history, so the Rutgers graduate program isn't historical" carries any weight at all.

[Gregory Wheeler]

A quick comment to second Richard Zach's observations above about many logic communities, particularly those situated in or around theoretical computer science and AI. One of the norms of these communities is to draw a distinction between a piece of work and its author, where vigorous criticism is welcome and encouraged w.r.t. the former but tacitly discouraged when directed against the latter.

This actually is a nice convention to work under, for all the general social reasons that favor professional courtesy, and another one that might be overlooked: efficiency. With this norm in place, you don't have to waste time thinking or worrying that your comments will be perceived as an insult to the author: you are given the benefit of the doubt. It is assumed that the idea under consideration (and whether it works out as intended) is far more interesting and important than what you happen to think of the author.

[Zehou]

Jason, I'm not sure your reply to "Anonymous Grad Student" (AGS) speaks to his or her concern. After all, some or all of AGS's work is "largely exegetical," and so might not have much significance for contemporary debates at all. And presumably that is what is supposed to have gotten the Rutgers grad student all riled up.

Now, many of us spend 20%, 40%, or even 100% of our research time doing work that has few or no obvious implications for contemporary debates. And those who sneer at us for doing such work sometimes do so not because they think history of philosophy in general is "a waste of time," but because they think history of philosophy is not a waste of time only insofar as it is pretty directly related to contemporary debates.

The upshot is that I'm not sure why it should be helpful for AGS to hear that you think many folks see certain sorts of historical projects as important to contemporary debates and projects. Of course they do, as AGS knows. What bothers AGS--and me--is the inference from "not interesting to me" or "doesn't illuminate contemporary debates" to "waste of time."

[Anonymous Grad Student]

Just to clarify, my experience with Rutgers grads is limited to one or two. In my post, I was trying to pick out an attitude I sometimes find among grad students at a variety of departments, not necessarily an attitude often found just among Rutgers grad students.

Perhaps attiudes like these are not transmitted from faculties in general, but from advisors in particular.
Finally, I suspect some grad students magnify the biases of their advisors. So, if the person to whom a grad student is beholden dislikes field X, then the grad student will hate said field.

[Keith DeRose]

I'm not sure I'm getting what the controversy is. Are there people saying Rutgers philosophy has no history, or that they just don't emphasize it very much? I like the Rutgers dept. a lot. I do think it's clear that history of philosophy hasn't been one of their top priorities. At any rate, this may be relevant:

RUTGERS AREA PGR RANKINGS, M&E VS HISTORY

Metaphysics & Epistemology
Philosophy of Language 1-5
Philosophy of Mind 1
Metaphysics 1
Epistemology 1
Philosophical Logic 22-32
Philosophy of Action 11-18
Philosophy of Religion 3

History of Philosophy
Ancient Philosophy ---
Medieval Philosophy ---
Early Mod: 17th Century 7-24
Early Mod: 18th Century 15-31
Kant and German Idealism ---
19th C Continental after Hegel ---
History of Analytic (inc. Witt) ---
20th Century Continental ---

[Matt]

I think that one quite plausible reason that people suspect Rutgers to be largely non-historical is that it shows up in very few of the historical categories in the gourmet report. (It has a quite respectible showing in 17th and 18th century modern philosophy, due to the work of Bolton and Hawthorn, no doubt, but does not make any of the other rankings, including history of analytic philosophy.) Of course this doesn't mean that people at Rutgers don't have interests in some other areas or that theyi might not know lots about them. It does make the idea that people who don't think Rutgers is a department that's very historically oriented or an especially wise place to go to do very serious work on the history of philosophy are ignorant of the field of the state of philosphy a bit harder to take, since the rankings were done by many of the top people in the sub-fields. Jason- do you at least agree that, especially for graduate training and probably for scholarship, there's an important difference between having people in a department who have some interest in a field, run a reading group on it, and maybe teach it from time to time, and a department that has people who are the top scholars/practicioners in a field, who regularly teach and write in an area, and who are recognized as such by their peers? I don't mean this just for history, but also for "problem solving". Gary Hatfield, for example, knows quite a lot about contemporary philosophy of science (and science more broadly), regularly leads a reading group on it, and sometimes teaches on it. But, if you wanted to work on contemporary philosophy of science you'd almost certainly be better off going to a department with a more significant number of people actively working in the area, and it would not be a bad inference to expect, say, a typical grad student from Stanford or Columbia to be more knowledgeable about contemporary philosophy of science than one from Penn, even though this might be wrong for any particular case.

[Pitt Panther]

"Late at night at APA parties, Pittsburgh graduates will tell MIT graduates that they’re not really deep, and ugly besides."

Professor Stanley:

Yes, there is a problem? See Leiter, B., "Advice to Prospective Philosophy Graduate Students Wishing to Work Amidst At Least Halfway-Decent Looking Colleagues: Stay the Hell Away from Rutgers, Princeton and MIT", Philosophy and Physiological Research, 2005. See also, "The Streak is Alive: Ten Years Without a Date Among Faculty, Students in Philosophy Department", New Brunswick Gazette, May 11, 2005.

Pittsburgh-envy is understandable, but not constructive.

[Keith Douglas]

I wouldn't want to stop anyone from pursuing anything rationally defensible that interests them, however understood. But I do worry when endless work seems to be "What did X say about Y", which leads to lack of advance in the discipline: do endless commentaries solve the issues of the world? I enjoy philosophy because it helps us understand and change the world. Since the world changes and situations arise that were not present earlier (e.g. "globalization", resource considerations, scientific research of very profound and influential kind [evolution, neuroscience, etc.]) historical figures are likely to be irrelevant. Thus if we want to have the discipline beget the Descarteses and Aristotles we have to press forward and not spend too much time looking too far back.

My other concern, slightly less important, concerns the methodology of the historians of philosophy. What does distinguish them from historians of ideas in general? Are they a specific case? Should they learn more history in general? For example, I'm interested in (for reasons I need not explain here) the notion of computability. So I read some historical works about logic and some of the primary texts from the begining of the field (Turing's own, Goedel, Church, Post, Kleene, etc.) and so on. But here if I were interested in the history for its own sake I would not feel content that this approach is the whole story. I read Hodges' biography of Turing, for example, to understand more about Turing's intellectual context in Cambridge in 1936, and so on. In short, where does history of philosophy blend with history in general, and how does this affect how it is practiced?

No answers, just some questions ...