Patricia Marino (Waterloo) calls my attention to this startling display of ignorance about the state of academic philosophy by Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe. Wolfe writes:
Contemporary academic philosophy is riven by a great divide: Either you adhere to a Continental perspective identified with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger that addresses big speculative subjects like the Essence of Being, or you identify with the British and American analytic school that puts a priority on rigorous logic, language, and meaning. What, then, are we to make of John Stuart Mill, who belongs to neither?
This, alas, doesn't even qualify as a caricature of the contemporary philosophical scene, though it has, I fear, a simple explanation: namely, the idiosyncratic Boston College Philosophy Department (which is fairly squarely on the Heidegger side of this make-believe divide) probably encourages its colleagues elsewhere in the university to think that this "great divide" exists. (And poor Nietzsche gets sucked into the Heideggerian camp of "big speculative subjects like the Essence of Being"!)
'Tis a shame that Professor Wolfe didn't do any research at all into "contemporary academic philosophy"--or Mill for that matter--before writing about it. If he had done so, he would have quickly learned that Mill made contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and moral and political philosophy, all of which remain of profound interest to Anglophone philosophers, from the heyday of "analytic" philosophy in the mid-20th-century through that movement's demise and continuing to the present. Even a bit of lazy google research would have turned up this quite representative overview of Mill's contributions across all the main areas of philosophy, precisely the areas with which Anglophone philosophers have been occupied for the last one hundred years. A bit more ambitious research (but he still could have done it from his armchair!) using this helpful site would have revealed that (by my quick estimate) half of the top 20 PhD programs in philosophy in the U.S. include at least one faculty member who has published scholarly work on Mill! Needless to say, in every single one of these programs, Mill is taught regularly at the undergraduate level, and fairly regularly at the graduate level as well.
Mill, in short, "belongs to" Anglophone philosophy of the last hundred years more than any other 19th-century philosopher except Frege (who, of course, worked well into the 20th-century).
Professor Wolfe appears to be dimly aware that his presentation may not be entirely accurate, since he writes:
Mill, as eminent a Victorian as one can find, foreshadows almost none of the analytical approaches that would dominate his country's philosophy a century after his death in 1873. True, he did write A System of Logic (1843), which addressed questions of reasoning and causality, but Mill was not interested in logic for logic's sake; his purpose was to demolish the so-called intuitionist school, whose views on human nature he found too conservative.
Does Professor Wolfe really mean to imply that Mill's radical empiricism--manifest across a range of issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics--was a pose adopted for political reasons, and that Mill didn't really believe it? Presumably not. But what then is the force of saying he "was not interested in logic for logic's sake"? And who, apart from second-rate philosophers with formalism fetishes, is interested in "logic for logic's sake" rather than for the sake of truth, knowledge, and understanding? It is, of course, precisely because Mill's concerns are so continuous with Anglophone philosophy over the past century that he looms so large in the canon.
Wolfe, to be sure, is not nearly as ignorant as Carlin Romano, but two pieces peddling misrepresentations about academic philosophy in the usually high quality Chronicle of Higher Education in less than a year is not a happy sign.
UPDATE: A philosopher in Pennsylvania writes: "Aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure that Mill's 'Utilitarianism' is taught in the majority of intro to ethics classes, his philosophy of math is broached when doing a class on Frege's 'Foundations of Arithmetic,' and 'On Liberty' is taught in many intro level political philosophy classes, apparently that whole (ongoing) 30 year+ debate about Millian theories of names was about some OTHER John Stuart Mill fellow. Perhaps we should all aspire to be as ignored as Mill has been. ..."
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