More on "Enduring Questions" and the NEH--and Why Philosophers Should Be "Worried"

Philosopher Mark Couch calls to my attention an interesting comment posted on IHE, which I here reprint in its entirety:

I am an assistant professor of philosophy in a PhD-granting department and was a reviewer for the NEH Enduring Questions grant this past year. I hope you will excuse this message's anonymity -- and its length. I reviewed about 20 or so of the applications, and recently received a list of the 20 award recipients, so I might be able to make some informative remarks about this program. I think the program gives philosophers two reasons to be worried.

These reasons have been mentioned here and there throughout the preceding comments but it may be helpful to draw them out explicitly. The first reason concerns philosophers' views about what constitutes legitimate inquiry into these "enduring questions." The second concerns how the NEH and other humanities fields view philosophy. I'll elaborate on these. When I first heard of this program, I, like many of the above commenters, had what I'll dub the "proprietary response." The proprietary response is that the enduring questions (such as "What is a good life?") are distinctly philosophical questions and that it is absurd and insulting to set up a grant program to induce non-philosophers to teach philosophy courses. However, many of the grant proposals from non-philosophers impressed me as speaking to these questions in valuable and pedagogically effective ways. Some of the proposals centered around the ethical dimensions of literary or historical figures.

Studying these lives is a way of gaining experience by proxy, such that students have a range of experiences to draw upon once they start doing philosophy more seriously. So one defense of non-philosophical courses on the enduring questions can be put in terms of remedying one of Aristotle's reasons for not doing moral philosophy with the young: they lack experience. If the question is "what is the good life?" one way to start answering that question, even if it isn't Socrates' preferred way, is with a list. Now of course one could include the study of historical and literary figures in a philosophical ethics course, but that is not very common. One applicant (unfortunately not a winner) proposed having her students spend the semester studying a single play (along with other texts) and then learning more about the characters and their motivations and interactions by having the class culminate with their own performance of the play. Maybe this sounds gimmicky to some of you, but plenty of serious moral philosophers are worried about the dominance of abstraction and general moral theories in philosophical ethics, and counsel engagement with the particulars.

This is one interesting way to grapple with the particulars. In any event, I don't remember hearing much about this kind of activity in the typical philosophy course. And if this doesn't appeal to you, there were other good ideas, such as in the truly excellent (yet, alas, non-winning) proposal for a course team-taught by an English professor and a biology professor on the question of what is human nature. Some of the proposals whose content fit the more traditional introductory ethics or philosophy course seemed detached and sterile by comparison. To sum up this first point, many of the enduring questions concern how to make sense of some aspect of life. One way to start this inquiry is to become familiar with said aspect. This stage of the inquiry need not be philosophically sophisticated to be valuable. To the extent that philosophers hold fast to the view that only they are qualified to teach courses centered around good lives, wisdom, human nature, war, religion, freedom, happiness, etc., I am concerned that we do not understand how ignorance about life and its varieties can render philosophical inquiry empty or baffling to the typical undergraduate, nor how other disciplines might contribute to philosophical learning.

That said--and this takes us to the second point--there is a limit to how much progress one can make on these questions without some kind of philosophical expertise. And while I reviewed some excellent proposals by philosophers who were grant winners (such as Mike Austin's, mentioned upthread), some good philosophical applications were overlooked. Even worse, there are signs that people at the NEH are indeed ignorant of what philosophers do, and dismissive of the idea of philosophical expertise. One application listed several of the classic questions of moral philosophy and then proceeded to complain that too few philosophers address these questions. The applicant is obviously highly ignorant of contemporary moral philosophy, his application flaunted this, and yet he is one of the award winners. Seeing something like that is infuriating. Even more worrisome than the NEH's carelessness about philosophy is the ignorance displayed by some of our colleagues in other departments. Many of the proposals by non-philosophers took up the more philosophical questions.

Yet in aspects of their applications, from the stating of the course's core questions and assumptions to the listing of the bibliographies, often I found myself frustrated at the absence of basic and helpful philosophical distinctions and the absence of classic and directly relevant philosophical texts. I only had a small sample size to work with, but the impression I got was that the view that "anyone can do philosophy well" is common in academia. This worries me. If our colleagues in other departments do not understand professional philosophy as requiring some kind of valuable expertise, that does not bode well for philosophy as a discipline. Both of the reasons for worry that I discussed in this message have to do with philosophy's isolation from other disciplines. The proprietary response is a sign that we don't appreciate what they do, and their lack of humility in regard to their philosophical ignorance is a sign that they do not appreciate what we do. In recent years in the profession there has been a fair amount of attention paid to philosophy's "public relations." As far as I know, this has been directed at getting those outside of academia interested in philosophy. But what might be even more important is a public relations campaign directed at our fellow academics.

Thoughts from readers?  As usual, signed comments preferred, but you must at least include a valid e-mail address.

Comments

[anonymous]

Also anonymous because I was a reviewer.

I'm from a neighbor-discipline of philosophy, one that's friendly to it not antagonistic in the way that the literary humanities can be. And I began the review process with a sense that the program was probably gratuitous.

Afterward, I shared that commentator's first reaction. The entries I rated highly included several that mixed genres of works, with canonical or contemporary western philosophy joined with literature, history, or religious texts (western or nonwestern), and several others that combined philosophical and scientific content. These courses seemed to me to have a real point beyond what one would get in a typical intro philosophy course, even when they were offered by philosophers, and to have a real chance of getting undergraduates excited about the importance of big questions. I also thought that many of them could introduce a healthy dose of a great books curriculum into colleges that might not otherwise have them-- the review criteria explicitly included a positive value on reading complete books.

The worst applications were either very standard-issue Straussian history of political thought courses (and I say that as someone without Brian's contempt for Straussianism as such), or very ordinary humanities courses on oppression of one sort or another, that mixed genres only by, say, showing a bunch of movies in class. And, yes, there were some that qualified as bad in the way the commentator's second point raises-- addressing core philosophical questions in complete ignorance of philosophy.

But standard contemporary philosophy courses typically failed to stand out. I rated a couple of them very highly. But a number of such applications failed to even express in the application essay any excitement about the importance of the questions being addressed, and certainly carried no hint of being able to excite undergraduates about them. I think that the proprietary attitude contributed to that problem; some applicants simply assumed that everything worth knowing or thinking about important questions in the liberal arts is already contained within the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy.

With respect to undergraduate liberal arts teaching, I think that the ability to excite undergraduates about enduring questions and engaging with serious intellectual works trumps the worry that "there is a limit to how much progress one can make on these questions without some kind of philosophical expertise." That's often true about research aimed at making piecemeal improvements in answers to the questions. But it's the wrong attitude toward introducing liberal arts students to the questions in the first place.

[Peter Bradley]

This is probably just a coincidence, but a position at the NEH for a 'Humanities Administrator' was just listed on the Chronicle site. The individual "advises applicants on the division's grant competitions, on the review process, and on particular proposals; reviews and analyzes grant applications, prepares them for presentation to panels and for specialist review; attends panel meetings, chairing them as requested, and ensures that applications receive a full review; helps to formulate recommendations and present them to the Chairman and to the National Council after application review; formulates provisions of grant awards in cooperation with the agency's Office of Grant Management; monitors active grants..." (http://jobview.usajobs.gov/getjob.aspx?JobID=81789723&rc=3&TabNum=1)

Maybe some Philosophers should apply? I suggest Ben Bradley. (but hurry - the deadline is 7/29!)

[Gary Gutting]

The anonymous philosopher's analysis is terrific. I'd like to pick up on the point about "the absence of basic and helpful philosophical distinctions" in non-philosophers' proposals. We philosophers tend to take for granted distinctions between, e.g., caused /compelled, fact/value, truth/justification, possible/probable, and don't realize that they constitute a substantive body of knowledge achieved by our discipline. This often becomes apparent in discussions with even very smart people outside philosophy. As philosophers, we have an advantage over non-philosophers not--as we tend to assume--because we are "more intelligent" than they are but because we know things they don't. To a great extent, this knowledge is about the basic distinctions that philosophers have reflected on and refined over the centuries. We overemphasize philosophers' disagreement about "ultimate issues" (do physicists know the ultimate nature of matter?). What's more important--and what we need to point out to the rest of the intellectual world--is that philosophers have developed a great deal of knowledge about basic distinctions that is essential for any responsible discussion of "the enduring questions" that concern everyone.

[Concerned Professor]

I, for one, am not all surprised that many non-philosophers have no idea what philosophers do. Our discipline is arguably one of the most insular and balkinized in the contemporary Anglo-American academy. We've somehow managed to distance if not completely estrange ourselves from other humanities and liberal arts fields -- yet because philosophy isn't a social or natural science, we're not exactly sympatico with those folks either. On the contrary, we're a little world unto ourselves and, with the exception of a few philosophical subdisciplines, we generally have no idea what's going on in other professions and make a point if not caring. Again, I'm not at all surprised that non-philosophers are clueless about life on Philosophy Island. What blows me away is that some of us are waxing INDIGNANT at their ignorance. Guys, if you want the other kids to pay attention to you, don't build a fifty-foot fence around your sandbox! How can they have any idea what you're doing behind that fence??

To a certain extent, this whole thing sounds like the chickens coming home to roost. Look: right, wrong, or indifferent, Anglo-American philosophy seems to have decided a long time ago that philosophy had NOTHING TO DO with asking or answering "enduring questions." With some important and notable exceptions, those just aren't the kinds of questions with which philosophical stars in the Leiter Top 20 are concerned. Philosophy journals don't publish articles on those subjects; books don't get published on those subjects; people don't land awesome TT jobs because they're exploring "the meaning of life." Such people, if the exist, would be rejected as frauds in the philosophical mainstream and YOU ALL KNOW IT.

The funny thing is, when it comes to teaching - that most undervalued of professional activities - it's precisely these so-called "enduring questions" that are taking pride of place in humanities curricula. Sure, maybe one reason that philosophers are being passed over to teach them is because our colleagues genuinely have no idea that the "enduring questions" traditionally belong to us. Or maybe it's just that they no longer trust us with them. After all, we ourselves don't care about them anymore and haven't for a long time. Why do we teach our students that this is philosophy when we ourselves don't believe that this is philosophy?

I have to keep this anonymous for the sake of my own professional safety.

[CharlieH]

I appreciate both reviewer's comments. I also wonder whether the best person to teach an introductory course about X is an expert on X. Sometimes, at the beginning, you have to make a bunch of dumb oversimplifications, and let someone else sharpen them up later. (Anyway, that's what I tell myself!) Still, the first reviewer's concern about a "public relations campaign directed at our fellow academics" is something worth considering. Other disciplines don't feel the need to do this, but other disciplines' territories aren't being auctioned off the way ours is.

[Brian Leiter]

Some thoughts prompted by the comments of "Concerned Professor":

While it is certainly true that academic philosophy is isolated from most of the rest of the humanities, one might ask whether this reflects a fault in academic philosophy or in the direction so much of the humanities has gone in recent years? Certainly that part of the humanities that still aspires to be a Wissenschaft, namely, classics, has close relations with philosophy at many universities. But philosophy has much closer connections to other disciplines than any other humanities subject--think of the amount of philosophical work that is now deeply engaged with computer science, linguistics, biology, and psychology, and that is often utilized by scholars in those fields?

As I noted in the introduction to "The Future for Philosophy," philosophy has never been primarily concerned with "the meaning of life," except to the extent that philosophical inquiries into justice, truth, knowledge, and the mind illuminate the meaning of life in various ways--but in that case, contemporary philosophy is on the same footing as most of Western philosophy going back more than two thousand years.

It would be interesting to know whether hostility to and ignorance of philosophy by those in other humanities fields carries over to Aristotle and Hume and Leibniz as well? Is it, in other words, hostility to and ignorance of philosophy as such, rather than its current professional shape?

[John Alexander]

I wonder to what extent we ourselves have contributed to the perception of philosophy/philosophers being isolated or aloof by surrendering some of the major issues, discussions, and even academically related courses to non-philosophers in areas such as business ethics, accounting ethics, management ethics, etc. When one looks at the leading journals that have emerged in these areas one often finds people whose advanced degrees are not in philosophy but in the areas that the philosophically relevant concepts and issues are being applied. I would not be surprised if a larger number of non-philosophers versus philosophers in the technical sense are being published in those journals. We should not be surprised then when non-philosophers begin to treat us as if we are not even relevant to the discussion in those areas. Historically we may have originated the original discussion via the introduction and development of key concepts and theories, but we do seem to have given up some of the field to others.

[Robert Johnson]

I suspect that NEH money is mainly meant just to help humanities disciplines sex up the offerings to undergrads.

I myself am not worried about the disdain other academics may have for how we approach our topics, nor with whether they think we've abandoned the 'big questions'. And though I can only speak about the universities I've taught in, I have found nothing like 'fence building' around my discipline--indeed, quite the opposite. A few things might be worth considering, though. For one thing, philosophers at least since Socrates have always been the target of disdain from some for how we approach the topics we take up, even made fun of for how abstruse and idle-seeming our thought is. (Indeed, are we to think that we can give Protagoras to any old academic in any discipline, and they should be able to make out what that's about?! They'd have as much luck with that as they would with 'On Denoting'.) For another, there's plenty of disdain to go around in the academy in general. I cringe when I've heard said by some academics outside of English departments about what happens in that discipline, for instance. We all could do with a bit more disciplinary humility. In any case, it strikes me as just false that because someone in some other department wants to introduce students to topics such as 'the meaning of life', 'ethics', or 'metaphysics and epistemology' for that matter, that they are thereby usurping anything of importance from my own discipline. I don't even think it matters all that much if they call what they're doing 'philosophy' (though, once I hear it, I myself will feel free to try to treat it as such). What a philosopher brings to such topics is not so much the topic itself, but our own distinctive questions about those topics and methods of answering those questions. Ours may not be as sexy as the way some other discipline operates. It may be a pursuit suited to a smallish population. But there is no reason to try to make fundamental changes in it on the grounds that other academics also address our topics and do so in a more appealing way.

[Dennis Whitcomb]

Concerned Professor - I think you are making a very instructive mistake, when you claim that Anglo-American philosophy has nothing to do with enduring questions. It is plausible that many humanities scholars also make that same mistake, so I'll try to say what that mistake is.

Journal articles in our profession (I'll leave books aside) usually don't directly try to answer "enduring questions". For example, it is not common to see a journal article trying to tell us whether reality is mind-independent. More often, articles work on sub-topics that are more manageable and that get their significance from their relation to the enduring questions. For example, someone may write an article trying to get straight on the logical form of the sentences in Fitch's knowlability paradox - and they will do so *not* as a random puzzle-solving exercise, but rather because Fitch's paradox generates a standard argument against a standard kind of anti-realism. Such an article gets its significance from its relationship to the enduring question of whether there is a mind-independent reality, but it does not directly try to answer that question. Instead it tries to make progress on a smaller relevant issue. Or, to give a similar example, it is relatively rare to see an article that attempts to directly tell us whether we have free will. But it is much more common to find articles on such topics as, say, what we should make of Van Inwagen's consequence argument.

So journal articles in fact are very importantly related to the enduring questions. Very often, the relationship is this: the articles address sub-problems related to the enduring questions. And it is because of those relationships that we philosophers are interested in those sub-problems. Perhaps Concerned Professor's mistake is that he/she in not recognizing this connection between our detailed work and the broader issues. Since articles don't tend to address the broader issues head-on, it can seem like what they do is irrelevant to those issues. But in fact, those articles are almost always deeply relevant to those issues. In fact, this relevance is what makes us do the detailed sub-issue work in the first place.

Now, it is probably our own fault that folks often fail to recognize the connections between our work on sub-issues and the enduring issues from which those sub-issues get their significance. Perhaps, then, we should make more of a habit of explaining those connections in our papers. That might be a start to the intra-humanities PR we need to be doing.

[Concerned Professor]

Professor Leiter,

Thanks for your response. I didn't mean to suggest that philosophy is wholly to blame for its marginalization. That's obviously not the case. (I have to ask though: don't you think history still aspires to be a Wissenschaft? In my experience, philosophy departments don't tend to be especially close with history departments.)

It's funny you should mention the introduction to "The Future for Philosophy." If the metaphilosophical and historical view presented there is accurate, isn't this all the more reason for philosophers to stop whining about the "Enduring Questions" program? I always took your point to be sort of deflationary - i.e., that philosophy has NEVER been concerned with the "Big Questions," thus humanist critics of "analytic philosophy," fans of Hadot and Nehemas, etc. are attacking a straw man. Did I misunderstand you on this score? Because it seems to me that you DON'T think philosophy has a monopoly on "enduring questions." In fact, you seem to think the entire concept is romantic garbage. Am I wrong?

Another question: the ignorance of other humanities fields concerning certain kinds of philosophy is well-established. But what makes you think they are "hostile" towards philosophy as such?

Lastly: as someone who keeps up with the other humanities, I can assure you that literary theorists, for example, have no problem with Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, etc. As far as more recent philosophy is concerned, they tend to dislike most non-Hegelian Anglophone philosophers from the 1830s onward. They adore all things German and French.

[Liz B]

I've been following these discussions about the NEH closely since they first transpired on the Peasoup blog and recently discovered this comic by an undergraduate philosophy student: http://www.principiacomica.com/ in which he shows philosophy separating itself from the arts and placing itself separately above both the arts and sciences. I think it'd be interesting to see a poll of both philosophers and non-philosophers to compare and contrast what both think of our discipline. From my own experience both philosophers and non-philosophers seem quite hostile towards each other and in terms of those working in interdisciplinary subjects, or even attending interdisciplinary workshops and such it's often a surprise to see another philosopher there.

[robert allen]

I don't give a damn what non-philosophers think about philosophy in general or my philosophical research in particular. Nor would I waste my precious time trying to impress them with a grant proposal. A public relations campaign run by even the most renowned philosophers wouldn't do any good with these folks. (Actually the whole idea is laughable.) The concern here is really over academic philosophy, not philosophy itself, to which the ignorant pose no threat. I actually see another danger: that we further compromise our standards in the direction of so-called experimental philosophy by pandering to outsiders.

[Anonymous]

I recently attended an NEH Institute and talked to an NEH representative about this matter. After much bobbing and weaving, what I found interesting was the representative's admission that the Enduring Questions Grant Program was inspired by Anthony T. Kronman's book, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Quote from the front inside of the book jacket: "The question of what living is for--of what one should care about and why--is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life's most important question to an honored place in higher education." And for those who do not know who the author is, from the back inside of the book jacket: "Anthony T. Kronman is Sterling Professor of law, Yale Law School. Since stepping down as Dean of the Law School in 2004, he has been teaching in the Directed Studies Program at Yale and devoting himself to the humanities." He is a trained philosopher and lawyer.

[Bob Gamboa]

Being trained as a student of literature who also is, or imagines himself to be, an amateur philosopher, I thought it might be helpful to provide—or, rather, let the English Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney provide—the view from the other side (and, perhaps, a little levity). Here below is Sidney, in his Defense of Poesie, inviting his reader to compare the respective virtues and vices, in their capacities as purveyors of wisdom, of lawyers (whom he immediately dismisses), historians (whom he judges as Aristotle does in Poetics), poets, and philosophers. Ultimately, he sees the work of the poet as an indispensable propaedeutic to the rigors of philosophy.

"Therfore compare we the Poet with the Historian, & with the morall Philosopher: and if hee goe beyond them both, no other humaine skill can match him. For as for the divine, with all reverence it is ever to be excepted, not onely for having his scope as far beyond any of these, as Eternitie exceedeth a moment: but even for passing ech of these in themselves. And for the Lawier, though Jus be the daughter of Justice, the chiefe of vertues, yet because he seeks to make men good, rather formidine poenae ["out of fear of punishment"], then virtutis amore ["for the love of virtue"]: or to say righter, doth not endevor to make men good, but that their evill hurt not others, having no care so he be a good citizen, how bad a man he might be. Therefore, as our wickednes maketh him necessarie, and necessitie maketh him honorable, so he is not in the deepest truth to stand in ranck with these, who al endevour to take naughtinesse away, and plant goodnesse even in the secretest cabinet of our soules: and these foure are all that any way deale in the consideration of mens manners, which being the supreme knowledge, they that best breed it, deserve the best commendation.

The Philosopher therefore, and the Historian, are they which would win the goale, the one by precept, the other by example: but both, not having both, doo both halt. For the Philosopher setting downe with thornie arguments, the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so mistie to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him, shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall finde suffiecient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and generall, that happie is that man who may understand him, and more happie, that can apply what he doth understand.

On the other side, the Historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a lesse fruitfull doctrine.

Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both, for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pearce, nor possesse, the sight of the soule so much, as that other doth. For as in outward things to a man that had never seene an Elephant, or a Rinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shape, cullour, bignesse, and particuler marks, or of a gorgious pallace an Architecture, who declaring the full bewties, might well make the hearer able to repeat as it were by roat all he had heard, yet should never satisfie his inward conceit, with being witnesse to it selfe of a true lively knowledge: but the same man, assoon as he might see those beasts wel painted, or that house wel in modell, shuld straightwaies grow without need of any description to a judicial comprehending of them, so no doubt the Philosopher with his learned definitions, be it of vertues or vices, matters of publike policy or privat government, replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which notwithstanding lie darke before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of Poesie."

As Stanley Cavell used to put it, whereas students of literature tend to underpraise and overvalue philosophy, philosophers tend to undervalue and overpraise literature.

[John D.]

Though this certainly does not go for all of you, I must say it is a bit disheartening to see accomplished academics relegating themselves to such fatuous positions. The "I don't give a crap" and the "who are they to tell us" attitude is precisely the problem. And probably exemplifies one of the core reasons why the NEH has structured this process the way that they have.

I love philosophy, and though I recognize that my limited experience may render me a bit artless, it still seems to me that if any discipline should be capable of embracing (and being embraced) by other disciplines it is philosophy. And yet, as it stands today this simply does not seem to be the case. I agree with the analysis provided by some here that philosophers (in general) have walled themselves in from the inside. Looking at the history of philosophy this is really kind of sad. Even though it is a bit of a cheesy analogy, I have always thought of philosophy as the trunk of the tree of all the major academic disciplines. But for various reasons what has historically been connected has become detached. It is true that part of this story has to do with the attitude of others in disciplines outside of philosophy. But I think ultimately the buck stops with the philosopher's attitudes towards the work of other academics. At the very least you might think that the onus is on the one who has been isolated from the group, should the one isolated deem it agreeable to engage the group. What has happened to the relationship between philosophy and the disciplines it helped give rise to?

What do philosophers (in general) do for people anymore? Sure conceptual analysis in and of itself is important, but the work of philosophers reaching out to other disciplines, be it the social scientist, nuroscienctist, or literary critic, these are the philosophers tackling problems that are going to change people's lives for the better; or at least give people a new perspective on which to look at life. These are the philosophers who are using there analytical skills to develop solutions and unique approaches to very, very difficult problems. If philosophers cannot embrace and participate in the very things philosophy has helped create (i.e. the humanities and sciences and the questions those disciplines are asking), then philosophers and will continue to be marginalized and sadly philosophy continue to be scoffed as some frivolous old maid instead of the intellectual force that it should be; that's the real tragedy. It certainly isn't that the NEH doesn't consider philosophers as important as they think they are. In fact, some of you sound like a bunch of little kids, with one group complaining how "nobody wants to play your game with you anymore", and another group gruffly stating how "we don't need them". I for one am thankful that the experimental philosophers (which if you look at the history of the disciple is hardly something new) are doing the work that they are doing. They are creating inroads and opportunities for future philosophers. I can only hope this trend continues in the sciences and the humanities.

[john doris]

The answer to an empirical question might help us to gauge the extent of the problem: Are philosophers really underrepresented in the recipient list of the big national humanities fellowships (ACLS, NEH, Guggenheim, NHC, Ethics Centers at Princeton and Harvard, etc.)? If not, maybe the difficulty isn't so serious as the stories suggest. Does anyone have data on this?

--doris

[Margaret Atherton]

I think the reference by Anonymous to Anthony Kronman's book is fascinating. I have passed this book up in bookstores many times, little knowing how influential it was, but I did look it up on Amazon just now. It seems that the book--from what I read about it, this may be all wrong--is an attack on the Humanities in general and a call to re-center college life on the work of Dead White Men. Since Philosophy has never really abandoned Dead White Men, maybe we are misunderstanding the nature of the NEH enterprise and it's implications for philosophy? Certainly, as I have been suspecting all along, there is every reason for our colleagues in other branches of the Humanities o feel just as irritated and just as dissed by the NEH as we have.

[Amy Lara]

Thank you to the NEH reviewers for their comments. I think the "I don't give a damn" attitude is complacent. Universities have been changing in disturbing ways for a couple of decades: reducing tenure-track jobs, moving more to adjunct lecturers, receiving less from state funds and more from external grant money, and basically embracing the business model. It is becoming more and more important for a department to show its usefulness to the university by showing how much external money it brings in. It is a serious problem that we don't have the kind of access to external funds that other disciplines have. Nobody will be able to compete with the sciences on that, but at least other humanities disciplines have the NEH and/or the NEA. Furthermore, if we don't demonstrate our intellectual usefulness to the academic community, we can easily find our programs being cut. From an administrator's perspective we bring in very little money, we don't generate a lot of credit hours, we don't do a lot of interdisciplinary work, and we don't publish at a very brisk pace. We've got to sell ourselves.

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

"It would be interesting to know whether hostility to and ignorance of philosophy by those in other humanities fields carries over to Aristotle and Hume and Leibniz as well? Is it, in other words, hostility to and ignorance of philosophy as such, rather than its current professional shape?"

As someone with a foot planted firmly in philosophical and applied ethics, but who travels in interdisciplinary circles and is familiar with humanities work and scholars from other disciplines (esp. history, disability studies, and narrative studies), my limited experience is that Aristotle and Hume are extremely popular within and across all of these disciplines. Aristotle is especially popular inasmuch as neo-Aristotelianism often coheres with an avowed feminist perspective, which has certainly enjoyed no shortage of scholarly attention in the humanities over the last several decades.

Perhaps this is my bias because I work in the medical humanities, but I think phenomenology is also fairly popular within and across these disciplines, although admittedly what philosophers mean by "phenomenology" and what other humanities scholars mean differs, sometimes by a fair margin.

As for Leibniz -- less so, IMO.

[Concerned Professor]

Thanks to Bob Gamboa and John D. for their excellent remarks.

Interestingly, the way John portrays philosophy is more or less the way that I -- and I imagine many of you, whether you care to admit it or not! -- portray philosophy to my undergraduates.

(This shouldn't come as any surprise; after all, deflationary and quietist metaphilosophies aren't especially useful for making our discipline appear exciting and worthwhile to students. Surely it's better to appeal to those old-fashioned humanistic views of philosophy, if only in our classrooms!)

But this was one of my initial points: the "Enduring Questions" project seems to presuppose, or implicitly situate itself within, a humanistic context that the "mainstream" of our profession (for lack of a better term) seems to broadly reject. It's not just that the project involves "enduring questions" (which we can legitimately argue have been the traditional province of philosophy) but that the articulation and analysis of these questions is situated within a broader axiological and teleological context. That context is a humanistic one having to do with living well, becoming a better person, and so forth (see Anon 10:09's helpful reference to Kronman).

This view of philosophy has defenders - e.g., Pierre Hadot, Stanley Rosen, Alexander Nehamas, etc. - but it is certainly not "mainstream." It is my understanding that the rejection of humanism, the rejection of philosophy-as-therapy/modus-vivendi, the rejection of "big picture/big questions" is and has long been a matter of near consensus within the Anglo-American philosophical establishment. In fact, this just seems *obvious* to me, especially in light of my undergraduate and graduate training.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, these kinds of views have long been poo-pooed by many Anglo-American philosophers as fluff, nonsense, etc. Yet the EQ project seems very much driven by them. So, one possibility -- again -- is that the NEH is generally ignorant about philosophy as such. That strikes me as rather unlikely. Another possibility is that the NEH realizes that philosophy, at least in its contemporary Anglo-American iteration, is neither capable of, nor particular interested in, addressing the "enduring questions" in view of these sentiments. This is at least plausible. And if it's true, I submit that none of us is in a position to whine about the EH project. We can't very well have our cake and eat it too, can we?

(Gentlepeople, if I am wrong about any of this, please just tell me so and explain why. There's no need to describe my view as "bizarre" or call me names or what have you.)

[Steven Hales]

You know, I'm tired of philosophers being portrayed as insular logic-choppers who care nothing about other disciplines or communicating with the public. Furthermore, we should quit flagellating ourselves over these false accusations.

1. No other discipline is as interested in what's happening in other fields as philosophy. Moral philosophers not only know the literature on moral and evolutionary psychology, but have begun working with neuroscientists; metaphysicians who work on time and persistence collaborate with physicists; epistemologists have been heavily influenced by sociology, experimental psychology, and behavioral economics; logicians keep up with the latest in mathematics.

2. Philosophers have been trying hard to communicate with the general public. Nussbaum, Dennett, Grayling, et al. write for the highbrow mags. Ken Taylor and John Perry host a philosophical radio show. Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit was a #1 New York Times bestseller. And in the past decade there has been an explosion of books relating philosophy to popular culture, published by respected presses like Blackwell and Open Court.

As far as the NEH goes--we are chumps if we can't go get some of that Enduring Questions money. (In full disclosure I submitted a proposal last go-around that was unfunded). We should quit moaning about non philosophers getting those grants and step up to the plate ourselves.

[Robert Johnson]

Dennis Whitcomb makes an excellent point above. The sort of labor a philosopher performs day in and day out is very much related to the so-called enduring questions, though it may not be immediately obvious to those outside of philosophy how. We ought to pay more attention than we do to giving explanations of how they are related. The perception that philosophers have 'walled themselves off' might well be explained by our inattention to providing this. We need more popularizers.

I say 'so-called' above because these discussions have made me even more suspicious of this very title 'enduring questions' than I was. It too easily suggests something obscurantist, something such as 'mysteries', 'unaswerable questions' or questions for which there will never be a solution. Ugh. Those kinds of questions are better answered with a refer and a bag of Oreos. Of course, the NEH could not have had that in mind, but nothing that has been said by the defenders of this grant program so far has made much sense of it. It all sounds so grand. But one has to ask oneself whether people who rant about the academy having failed to tell them about the meaning of life know what they want. It reminds me of Jack Handey's 'Deep Thought' that sometimes you just have to march in and demand your rights, even if you don't know who you're talking to or what your rights are. Then on the way out, slam the door.

I'd rather call these questions 'important' questions, or just things we haven't completely figured out yet.

By the way, one might be led to think, were one to believe what some have said here and elsewhere on this topic, that philosophy is in some sort of crisis. But things are quite otherwise, and I think this view is pretty prevalent among philosophers. Philosophy is and has been enjoying something of a golden age. Progress is being made on important questions in virtually every area of philosophy; the future looks quite bright indeed.

[robert allen]

I embrace other disciplines: mathematics, science, literature, history, linguistics; but I certainly don't expect or even want to have my work embraced by their practitioners. I want to discuss philosophy only with other philosophers or students of philosophy. If someone in another field is SERIOUS about learning philosophy, then, of course, we should accomodate him/her. But ours is not the sort of subject that lends itself to dilettantism: expert philosopher is redundant; expert scientist/historian/linguist is not. Nor do I feel the need to be useful. (At one of the many "colleges" at which I work, the motto is '_________ College, an education that works'. I tell my students there that that is true for all courses except mine, which are useless and intended to be so.) As for isolation, I have always felt that that is part of the beauty of the subject. As Wittgenstein said, "philosophy leaves everything as it is."

[jdkbrown]

"Gentlepeople, if I am wrong about any of this, please just tell me so and explain why. There's no need to describe my view as "bizarre" or call me names or what have you."

I've been kicking around a version of the following since your original comment, but your plea to be disagreed with has finally prompted me to post it!

Here is the NEH's list of representative "enduring questions": What is the good life? What is happiness? What is friendship? What is beauty? Is there a human nature, and, if so, what is it? What is the relationship between humans and the natural world? How do science and ethics relate to one another? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Good and evil? What is good government?

Off the top of my head, here are some (squarely analytic, highly distinguished) philosophers at Leiter top 20 departments who work, or have worked, on at least one of these questions: Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, David Velleman, Tim Scanlon, Peter Singer, Peter Unger, Liz Anderson, Debra Satz, Allan Gibbard, Sally Haslanger, Christine Korsgaard.

That's quite a large number of "exceptions" to your claim that "those just aren't the kinds of questions with which philosophical stars in the Leiter Top 20 are concerned. Philosophy journals don't publish articles on those subjects; books don't get published on those subjects; people don't land awesome TT jobs because they're exploring 'the meaning of life.' Such people, if the exist, would be rejected as frauds in the philosophical mainstream and YOU ALL KNOW IT."

And my list surely under-counts philosophers working on enduring questions for two reasons. (i) I've made no attempt to list everyone working on these problems. (ii) According the NEH's grant announcement, the list of questions they give "is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive but serves to illustrate."

Now, you may object to the way these philosophers approach the enduring questions, you may think their answers are wrong. But the claim that analytic philosophers ignore or dismiss enduring questions is simply unsupportable.

[Brian Leiter]

I agree with JDKBrown's comment, above. "Concerned Professor" has, I think, confused the idea of philosophy as "way of life" with philosophical interest in "enduring questions." The NEH targets the latter, and philosophers have, for millenia, worked on these questions. Questions about "the meaning of life" is only one kind of question philosophers might ask; my point in the Introduction to The Future for Philosophy was that, at least as that topic is popularly understood, most philosophers have had little to say directly about it. Of course, answers to questions about the good life, the nature of knowledge or beauty, the existence or non-existence of a deity, and so on surely bear on views about the meaning of life--but, once again, contemporary Anglophone philosophy is as much interested in those questions as historical figures have been.

It's unfortunate to learn that the silly Kronman book may be behind this whole project, though I suppose it might be a salutary effect of the book if it leads to more funding for teaching on central philosophical questions. Kronman is mostly peeved at the largely defunct pomo tendencies in literature departments; he's probably also put off by hard M&E stuff in philosophy departments, but mostly my sense is he just no longer has any idea what goes on in philosophy departments.

[John Turri]

Dear Concerned Professor,

I presume you agree that these count as "big questions":

A. What is knowledge? What do we know? How do we know it? What is understanding? What do we understand?

B. What is goodness/rightness? What makes actions good/right? Which of our actions are good/right?

C. What is virtue? Can it be taught?

D. What is freedom? Is acting freely consistent with determinism? (What is determinism, by the way?) Are any of our actions ever free? Is moral responsibility consistent with acting un-freely?

E. What is beauty? What makes objects beautiful? What things are beautiful?

F. What is meaning? What makes words/thoughts meaningful? How does literal meaning relate to other forms of linguistic meaningfulness, such as suggestion and metaphor?

Those seem like big, important, pardigmatic humanistic questions to me. English-speaking ("Anglo-American," "analytic," etc.) philosophers routinely address them.

So we've got the content right.

But that wasn't all or mainly what you were concerned about. Aside from content, there's also the practical goal of helping people live well. And here, as I understand it, you're worried that the way we address the questions prevents us from promoting that important practical goal. Perhaps we're too bogged down in technical details, or aren't properly motivated (helping people live well isn't *our* goal in answering the question), or are just plain old boring. Maybe we're too much like Dr. House: to hell with the patients, we're interested only in puzzles and problems!

Two points in response. First, I think that, practically speaking, intelligently addressing the big questions almost invariably helps people live better lives -- and the more intelligently the better. So, in a sense, seriously addressing the right questions promotes the practical goal.

Second, I know many philosophers who do care about promoting the practical goal, and explicitly say so. Roderick Chisholm is about as mainstream an analytic philosopher as you can get. Here's how he described the "faith" that informs and motivates his epistemology:

"I am justified in believing that I can improve and correct my system of beliefs. Of those beliefs that are about matters of interest or concern to me, I can eliminate the ones that are unjustified and add others that are justified, and I can replace less justified beliefs about those topics by beliefs about them that are more justified." (_Theory of Knowledge_, 3rd edition, p. 5)

That's why Chisholm did epistemology the way he did. In a sense, he thought of epistemology as careful, critical intellectual self-help in slow motion!

And I'm sure that many philosophers working on, say, the relations between determinism, free will and moral responsibility see themselves as contributing to a more just society, at least in the long run. They want to help us live better lives.

So we've got the motivation right.

As for being too technical or boring or otherwise uninspirational, to some extent this cannot be avoided. These questions are difficult (otherwise they wouldn't have endured), which diminishes enthusiasm, which leads more readily to boredom. But living well involves hard work, at least for finite and fallible beings like us, so it'd be unfair to expect us philosophers to make it easy and fun.

So, in sum, we're addressing the right questions for the right reasons, and promoting the basic humanistic goal in the process.

So I think that earns us the right to feel, at the very least, puzzled and confused by the EH project. I don't know whether we're entitled to "whine" about it, or whether whining would promote a better outcome in any event.

[Mark Couch]

I’m in agreement with those who’ve noted that contemporary philosophers engage in fairly traditional “enduring questions” and that only someone ignorant of the field would claim otherwise. What’s true is that you won’t find detailed papers in journals like Philosophy of Science raising broad questions about the meaning of life, ethics, etc., but that’s not to say that nobody addresses these issues. A five minute search on amazon brings up the following series of anthologies for undergraduate instruction, appropriately titled “The Big Questions.” An examination of these texts shows that both classic and contemporary philosophers (including anglo-american philosophers) address these issues. So I fail to see that it has been anywhere shown that philosophers have somehow abandoned their responsibility to address these issues to other fields.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-keywords=&field-author=&field-title=the+big+questions&field-isbn=&field-publisher=wiley&node=&url=&field-feature_browse-bin=&field-binding_browse-bin=&field-subject=&field-language=&field-dateop=&field-datemod=&field-dateyear=&sort=relevancerank&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0

[Mike Austin]

As a philosopher who received one of the grants mentioned in the initial post above, I've decided to weigh in. It seems to me that there is a very straightforward way to take "enduring questions," namely, that they are questions that have endured because no consensus has arisen regarding answers to these questions. Unlike questions about the existence of phlogiston, we are still exploring answers to the enduring questions mentioned by the NEH in its description of the grant. For example, the enduring question for the course I'm teaching is "Do we need God for the good life?" This question has received renewed attention from the so-called new atheists and religious apologists. But it has been addressed and is still being addressed by contemporary philosophers in sophisticated and groundbreaking ways. So in my course, after reading a little bit of Tolstoy, we'll take a chronological tour of some of the major answers to this question in the history of philosophy as found in works by Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. The last few weeks will be devoted to a critical study of Eric Wielenberg's Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe. The grant enables me to devote extended time to an intensive study of the foregoing works, as well as some brief examinations of the relevance of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as it relates to religious belief, ethics, and human fulfillment. This will benefit students at my university, and hopefully generate some interest in philosophy as they see how the methods of philosophy can aid them in discovering the most plausible answers to the question of the course. And this has nothing to do with "sexing up" the course, because we're just going to read a bunch of hard books and try to make some sense out of them. Certainly this isn't very sexy, at least in our day.

[k kemtrup]

The discussion is headed off in the wrong direction.

The question at hand isn't, 'Do philosophers work on the "Enduring Questions"?' Even those whos deflate these questions have something interesting to say about them. Rather, the question is, 'Given that philosophers are experts on the enduring questions, why didn't philosophers get most of the enduring question grants?'

There are two possible answers: 1. The reviewers were biased against us in some way. 2. We didn't do a very good job on the grant proposals, even though we have expertise.

What we've learned from the anonymous reviewer at the top of the comments page is that two is the more likely answer. Anonymous states, 'But standard contemporary philosophy courses typically failed to stand out. I rated a couple of them very highly. But a number of such applications failed to even express in the application essay any excitement about the importance of the questions being addressed, and certainly carried no hint of being able to excite undergraduates about them.'

In my opinion this is damning and it has an air of truth in it. The weakness here is not in philosophy itself, but in how we train graduate students and young academics. How many philosophy programs teach students how to write grant proposals? (This is a useful skill, as these NEH grants prove.) How many philosophy programs have classes, or mentors, focused on the pedagogy of teaching philosophy, especially to non-majors? (I know there are some prgrams that do this.)

All people needed to do to get these grants was come up with some novel pedagogical ideas for delivering philosophy to a wider audience. But, apparently, it didn't happen. Why? In my opinion, the problem isn't philosophy itself. Indeed, the best philosohers know how to make philosophy exciting to a lay audience. It's a valuable skill that Dennet, Nagel, Singer, and a host of others have in spades.

In my own experience, I've seen some philosophy teachers fail to even try to find ways of bringing students into philosophy. I once read a friend's syllabus -for an introductory class, mind you- where the students were asked to read a lot of articles about non-conceptual content. There was no easing the students into the philosophy of mind, no attempt at relating the technical material in the readings to the big questions in the philosophy of mind or to issues students may have thought about. This is admittedly an extreme example, which doesn't prove anything, but I think we can all remember a similar failure to engage students made by ourselves or our colleagues.

I do think there is work to be done that we're not doing. Of course, there may be strong biases in other disciplines working against us. But if the wider academic world isn't being fair to us, it's our job to stop them.

[John D.]

This has been a very interesting discussion, and I have enjoyed reading the recent comments of established professionals. The points made about specific philosophers who do valued work that is both interdisciplinary and within the discipline is very good. And Robert Johnson is correct to praise Dennis Whitcomb's comment.

However, I still share some of the worries raised by Concerned Professor. It is true that my evidence for this is largely idiosyncratic. But I have still seen many individuals from my mother who is an established professor of education on the west coast, to random other professors at the university I am a part of portray philosophy in such a negative light. As someone who cares deeply about philosophy I find these experiences very disconcerting. I think many people outside of philosophy view philosophers such as Gibbard, Velleman, Dennett and many others as exceptions to the philosophical norm. I would like to be wrong about this, but I am not sure I am. Remember, I am talking generally, and as a whole here. We can all come up with examples to counter the sorts of worries raised by Concerned Professor (no one has professed to find any necessary or sufficient conditions here). But the question is are the kinds of examples cited above the standard? One way to approach this qustion would be to find the sort of data that John Doris enquired after. This would at least show that the appearence of philosophers in terms of how they are funded by the humanities is not unfavorable. And thus, maybe philosophers are in general considered with higher regard than appears to some.

For some of you these worries may not matter so much. You have tenure, are financially stable, have established yourself within the discipline. But as someone who loves philosophy, and has made the choice to dedicate his life to becoming (and being) a philosopher, I find what I take to be the apparent (general) perception of philosophy to be terrifying.

I would like one of the goals of philosophers to be to leave the discipline as good, or better, than it was when they found it. I think one way to do this is to make sure philosophy is on good terms with the practitioners of other disciplines. It would be terrible if philosophy has become, or is on the path to becoming, the black sheep of academia.

[Skef]

I'm late to the party here, but I think the controversial issues can be narrowed somewhat for a more focused (and possibly more animated) discussion).

First off, the grant lists 9 questions, which were mentioned in jdkbrown's comment on 7/21 at 11:35. I'm aware, just through osmosis, of active philosophical work relating to the last five questions, and if you count aesthetics, on the fourth. So let's focus on the first three: "What is the good life?", "What is happiness?", and "What is friendship?". Isn't it fair to say that whatever contemporary philosophical work weighs on these three questions does so at quite a distance, a distance that is rarely bridged, even for the benefit of illustration, in philosophy classes?

Second, on the interdisciplinary issues, Steven Hales cites philosophical interest in physical and social sciences but not in the humanities, and those people who have mentioned that they interact with the humanities have been vague as to what work comes about. I think if you were to ask the originators of the NEH grant whether interdisciplinary work with the sciences addressed their concerns about isolation, they would probably say "no". If anything, the focus on number-crunching solutions on the part of the group normally thought responsible for these questions would be of some concern (valid or not).

So here's a more pointed question: what work is going on in philosophy that goes somewhat directly towards answering these three questions (which are certainly among those that undergraduates _expect_ to be discussed in their philosophy classes, if nothing else), and that is interdisciplinary outside of the sciences? I think that the concern on the part of "outsiders" is that such work is quite limited, and is isn't clear to me that they're wrong.

[Recent leaver]

I would like to contribute a different perspective to this. I am a philosopher who has recently left academia. In the business world, philosophy DOES have a PR problem. When other Ph.D.s transition to the business world, there are often clear expectations generated by the subject matter of their Ph.D.s (even if these expectations are sometimes off):

Engineering Ph.D.s can do engineering, technical writing, and statistics
Psychology Ph.D.s can do (clinical) psychology and statistics
Political Science Ph.D.s can do public policy
History Ph.D.s can do public policy and market research
English Ph.D.s can be editors, copywriters, and technical writers

So, in the business world there are often clear career paths for people with these Ph.D.s.

With respect to philosophers, people are dumbfounded:

Philosophy Ph.D.s can do ....??????

Now, those who've interacted with Philosophy Ph.D.s know what they can do. In general, the skills you pick up getting a philosophy Ph.D. (Esp. critical thinking and problem solving) translate quite well into the business sector. But, and this is the point, this has to be discovered. It is NOT an expectation that people have about us. Also, I'd be willing to bet that many in academia have no idea what philosophers do.

That's a PR problem, if anything ever was.

I'd like to continue by picking up on an idea mentioned above, in particular, that we need to demonstrate our usefulness to the larger world.

How is philosophy useful? How does reading it/doing it/being aware of it help out in some way? How do philosophers make the university/society/the world better? What have philosophers done to show non-philosophers that philosophy is indeed useful?

My bet is that there are not good answers to these questions. Sure, there is a radio show about philosophy. but not that many people listen to it, and having listened to it myself, I can say that it does not have a clear take-away message about the usefulness of philosophy. Sure, there are some websites. But, again, same point. Reading many of the above comments, it is clear that some philosophers are just hostile to others, that they have no patience for others' lack of understanding, and that they just don't care. That's sad.

I propose that the APA convene a session at the December conference on creating a PR campaign for philosophy. In the interim, if you care, and even if you don't, you--we--should all think about how philosophy REALLY makes people's lives better/the world better, etc. I reiterate that philosophy's PR really does matter and it is something to be thought about and acted on.

[VS Bandaneer]

Part of the problem is that the other liberal arts and social sciences are influenced, sometimes heavily, by what we call "literary" philosophy--outside the Anglo-American analytic tradition--- Derrida, Foucault and the like---and probably a high percentage of people making the NEH decisions are under that influence.
I talked at length to an Anthropology grad student recently--who
told me that recent continental philosophers are studied intensely in her department generally and their ideas used extensively in anthropological analysis. She knew very little about the analytic tradition and little about Continental Philosophy before Husserl.
I have heard from other academics that literature and history
are likewise influenced, more or less, in many departments across the country.
If true, then it is no mystery that the analytic tradition is
at a disadvantage.