Of course I think philosophers (of all people) ought to be cultured people of
wide curiosity. However, it's a fact that in high-powered reserach
institutions and places that aspire to be like those places, they are mostly
not. I don't think philosophers are unique here: we see a general pattern of
the effects of professionalization on higher ed. Didn't someone post a
reference to a nice chapter of a book what happens to physics students?
Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not
sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement
about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't
necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly
cultivated man.
I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship
in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really
said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even
intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and
looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal
and very macho professional culkture of intense competition.
But you have to look at the problem in a wider context. Few academics are
intellectuals. Moreover the kind of humanistic education all good scientists,
philosophers, and scholars used to get is lost foreover, an artifact of a
lost world.
A dimly recalled story: von Neumann, a logician's logician and a founder of
game theory, honored the nuclear physicist Fermi for something brilliant he'd
done, maybe it was getting the first reactor to work at Chicago, at a
Manhattan Project dinner, by standing up and announing in Latin, "We have a
Pope," a reference to what the cardinals say when a new Pope is announced. He
knew the expression, probably knew Latin; made a joke about Fermi's Italian
background, and could safely assume that at least the Europeans present
(which many Manhattan project scientists were) and Oppenheimer would get it,
although it would be lost on the Americans, thus reinforcing the European
exile sense of superiority over the barbarians like young Feynman. Today,
they are all barbarians, European and American alike; and no one would be
capable of making such a joke. Alas.
--jks
<<
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/11/00 02:03PM >>>
Justin writes:
>My experience of academia is that philosophy professors are not . . .
readers or
>people of wide culture, or even much curiosity.
Jim: Maybe I'm naive, but I can't understand this. Shouldn't philosophers, of
all people, be experts on a wide variety of philosophical thought
((((((((((((
CB: They should be, but I think Justin is telling us they are not the way
they should be. Speak on , Justin.
Jim: , going
back to the ancient Greeks and nowadays stuff from non-"Western" cultures?
After all, don't we build on the foundations created by Aristotle and all
those old guys? Does this ignorance -- and non-intellectualism -- have
anything to do with the method of "analytical philosophy"?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>>
