On Pluralism in Philosophy Departments, Once Again (Leiter)

Jason’s provocative post has, as usual, stimulated a quite interesting discussion. Here are a few thoughts of my own, partly in reaction to Jason’s thread and the comments that ensued.

It seems to me that three things are or have been meant by the label “pluralism”:

1. A department might be pluralistic in virtue of having many different views on philosophical questions represented. Jason’s original posting makes it clear that “analytic” philosophers (whoever they are, obviously not folks who share a view!), like philosophers historically, hold many different views on substantive philosophical questions. In other contexts, this is what might just be called “diversity of viewpoints.” I don’t think there could be any serious worry that, say, the top 25 or so departments in the PGR tend to be “pluralistic” in this sense, with some allowance for departments that are strongly pro- or strongly anti- the Wittgensteinian/quietistic/Drebenized view of philosophy. 

2. A department might be pluralistic in virtue of the breadth of its coverage of the field of philosophy, both in its contemporary manifestations and historically. Small departments can not be faulted for not being “pluralistic” in this sense, since it is hard to cover everything with a small faculty. More deserving of being faulted on this score are bigger departments who repeatedly hire in a narrow range of areas, with a resulting paucity of coverage of important subfields. Sometimes I think those who champion the banner of “pluralism” have something like this in mind: they will point out that, e.g., very few of the top 25 or so departments have anyone covering 20^th-century French philosophy or American pragmatism. This charge doesn’t strike me as hugely compelling, standing on its own, since very few of the top 25 or so departments have faculty covering medieval philosophy or Chinese philosophy either. The charge has more force against very large departments that could, in principle, be “pluralistic” in this sense, though the demand for this kind of pluralism has to be balanced against the value of having philosophers with shared interests as a stimulus to their work and in providing a broad and deep graduate program in particular areas of philosophical research.

3. Those, often associated with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), who have most often championed “pluralism,” have often meant something different than either (1) or (2): they have championed pluralism about philosophical methods. Jason’s original posting is wholly unresponsive to this way of understanding the call for pluralism: indeed, Jason seems to confirm the worry about lack of pluralism by referring repeatedly to “mainstream analytic philosophy.” The objection would be that that is only one method for doing philosophy. 

But this then puts front and center the questions (1) what is the method of “analytic” philosophy? and (2) what other methods of doing philosophy are there? 

We’ve tackled (1) before on this blog, and each time it seems to me we confirm that there is no “method” of analytic philosophy anymore. (The discussion with Jerry Fodor seems to me especially illuminating on this score.) “Methods” of contemporary philosophers—who often self-identify as “analytic”—run the gamut from shameless intuition-pumping and armchair speculation, to work that could easily (and often is) part of the scholarly discourse in cognate fields, from physics to linguistics to cognitive science to law. If all of these methods are well-represented in the top 25-or-so PGR departments, then what other methods of philosophy are missing?

One obvious candidate is phenomenology, which really is a distinctive method, though one that, as a philosophical program, is as moribund as logical positivism.  (Is it a failure of "pluralism" not to have defenders of the logicial positivist program circa 1935 on one's faculty?)  It is true that those who employ the methods of phenomenologists are not hired at leading graduate programs (though some very good scholars of the history of phenomenology do teach in such programs). To show that this is an objectionable failure of pluralism, though, someone has to make the case for what phenomenological practice would add to philosophical inquiry, given the failure of the original Husserlian project. 

Are there other “methods” of philosophy slighted at the leading departments? Pragmatism is not a method of philosophy, as far as I can see; nor is “postmodernism.” “Deconstruction” is a method not represented in philosophy departments, and it is increasingly out of favor in departments of literature; it also isn’t clear that it is a “method” that has anything to commend it. Nietzsche’s “method” of doing philosophy is sui generis, and neither teachable nor replicable—and his method has more to do with his rhetorical aims than with the absence of, in many ways, quite familiar philosophical claims and arguments. From the Frankfurt School and perhaps Foucault come “methods” that integrate recognizable philosophical concerns with history and cultural criticism of a kind that is, unfortunately, underrepresented in leading philosophy departments, but it also has very few competent practitioners any longer, notwithstanding large numbers of acolytes. 

In any event, the case for pluralism of methods requires specifying methods and making the case for their value or significance. I invite philosophers to comment on this reformulated version of the issue about "pluralism" in philosophy departments.