Following up on this earlier post about ranked departments that, remarkably, have no specialists in these traditions, let me note the most obvious prudential reason why all departments should want to have faculty teaching in these areas: undergraduate students are interested, really interested, in Marx and Nietzsche, and, when given the chance, in Schopenhauer and Foucault and (someone I don't like much) Heidegger. Philosophy departments can pass off the student interest in these figures to hacks and intellectual tourists in other departments, but that will just be large student enrollments lost to the Philosophy Department. There are now so many excellent and philosophically-informed scholars in these traditions, that there is no credible excuse any longer for not having specialists in these fields. You can hire someone who will bring in the student enrollments for 19th-century German philosophers and still be able to talk to the epistemologists and moral psychology folks in your department.
Analytic metaphysics and deontic modals may be "hot" in the leading graduate programs--and some of this work may even have longterm intellectual value--but undergraduates don't care, and they aren't wrong, unless they want to get a PhD. Most of your undergraduates get three or four years of university study before they are thrown into the merciless jaws of the marketplace. All philosophy departments should aim to equip them with some useful analytical and writing skills that will serve them well in life; but they should also equip them with familiarity with the most important diagnosticians of the modern world and the human situation in it. And most of those thinkers are in the post-Kantian traditions in Europe.
As one of my law colleagues observed, when retired people come back to university for "enrichment" classes, they come back to read literature and history and philosophy (and not analytic metaphysics or philosophy of language). They want to understand the historical moment in which their lives have unfolded. All university departments should introduce their students to the "state of the art" of knowlege in their discipline. But they should also be mindful that their own judgment of the "state of the art" may not age well. And that is why philosophy departments should teach the history of philosophy, and especially the history of philosophy since Kant, which so many Anglophone departments bizarrely neglect.
UPDATE: Philosopher Nick Stang (Toronto) writes: "You hit the nail on the head here, but I would just add: students really care about Hegel too, in my experience much more than they do about Kant."
And philosopher Erik Encarnacion (Texas) writes:
I liked your persuasive post on post-Kantian Continental philosophy.
For what it’s worth, as an undergrad, I came to Princeton as someone with a slight interest in philosophy – mostly existentialism and maybe some Nietzsche and Rousseau – but primarily thinking I’d be an engineer. I took an intro epistemology class with Bas Van Fraassen, partly because I saw that he’d assigned Sartre. I also took a Heidegger course with Sean Kelly, a junior Seminar tutorial with Beatrice Longuenesse on Sartre, and considered taking a Nietzsche class with Alexander Nehamas (I decided against because the course conflicted with something else I needed to take). All were wonderful experiences.
At the time, before David Lewis passed away, I recall learning that Princeton had the top department (or near top?) in the United States. All of that was compatible with having quite a lot of post-Kant Continental offerings. And those were what initially drew me in, even though what kept me in was analytical normative ethics and philosophy of law. (Sorry for all the name dropping, but I think it’s relevant.)
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