The distinguished legal historian A.W. Brian Simpson, reviewing the journal Feminist Legal Studies in the TLS (of November 7 2003), writes:
"The successful production of a feminist law journal is an aspect of the more general proliferation of specialist law journals, a phenomenon which reflects the tendency of professional groups to fragment, with their members coming to know more and more about less and less. In so far as this is a threat to the homogeneity of the profession this may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you think homogeneity is a desirable state of affairs. It is certainly rather boring."
This "tendency of professional groups to fragment" is also apparent in philosophy. These days, the so-called "analytic/Continental" divide (for my doubts about that one, go here) may be less serious than, e.g., the mutual ignorance that is now quite common between, e.g., those who do history of philosophy and those who do metaphysics or philosophical logic; or between those doing value theory and those doing philosophy of mind and cognitive science. At the University of California at Irvine a few years back, the philosophy faculty split in to the group doing logic and philosophy of science, and the group doing history of philosophy and value theory (more or less that's how it went). Talk about a "divide"! I suspect we'll see more of this in the years ahead.
But is it a good thing?
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