In a thought-provoking opinion piece by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, the authors argue that modern philosophy has engineered its own irrelevance by retreating into elite research universities where it has struggled, and largely failed, to compete with the positivist natural sciences around which the modern university was built. Rather than remaining a democratically situated facet of daily life and a familiar component of all manner of intellectual inquiry, Philosophy, as a discipline, surrendered to the institutional pressures to specialize and to endlessly “produce” new knowledge.
While I agree that one reason Philosophy has been marginalized is due to the same disciplinary, epistemological tensions that populate ongoing debates about scientific rigor and results between scholars of the “hard sciences,” like Chemistry and Computer Science, and the “soft sciences” such as Sociology and of course, Philosophy. However, I would offer that the rising eminence of the applied philosopher, aka “the ethicist” as a feature of research teams, board rooms, and news columns, counters some of the trends cited by the authors. Applied Ethics is a move towards the re-democratization of philosophy in my opinion, and has risen in eminence due to a rising discomfort with the abuses of increasingly powerful and influential institutions (e.g. Enron, Wall Street, etc.). The main limitation there though is the same one that has neutered moral accountability within the natural sciences: capitalism. Boeing, Amazon and Google may employ ethicists (unlikely at Amazon actually), but can their work make those institutions “good?” Or do they simply provide cover and PR talking points for business as usual?
So, my question back to these authors, which is perhaps addressed in their book: Where is there actually space in our society for philosophers outside of the research university? The academy appears to be the last refuge for anyone who doubts that a society based entirely on free markets and social darwinism is necessarily a good society (and that refuge is shrinking). Who would have the philosophers now except for self-help book readers, cable news-segment producers, and public relations “damage control” teams? Maybe it’s not just that Philosophy felt the need to ape and compete with the natural sciences and so retreated to their own ivory tower, it was driven out of industrialized consumer society and dismissed as vaguely interesting and quaint, but mainly inconvenient. (Modern religions could lodge a similar complaint, but their troubles are complicated by widespread hypocrisy and intolerance.) Academic institutions may not be ideal or particularly democratic places, but they do preserve the realm of free thinking about ideal societal models in an era when self-interest, greed and accumulation appear to be the ascendant societal values, while harmony, charity and compassion are viewed as weak.
It’s become fashionable to trash the academy as an ossified, siloed, nearly-irrelevant institution that produces far less “value” than the resources it takes in. Many of those critiques are of course quite valid. Universities and their cultures are not at all above reproach and should be the subject of ongoing scrutiny by their communities. But these critiques occur at the same moment that bootstrap-pulling libertarians demand that our educational institutions make a “business case” for their existence and prove their “relevance.” The creeping corporatization of universities, particularly grant-driven-but-otherwise-cash-strapped public universities is, in part, a quest to delegitimize the types of inquiry that do not lead to the creation of new consumer products, but instead challenge existing power structures by questioning the current arrangement of society. Like that of Socrates and Martin Luther, independent inquiry and public declarations of dissent makes the powerful very uncomfortable. That is the value of so-called “academic freedom” which, when it actually functions and enables truly free expression, allows thoughtful people to boldly challenge the status quo. Philosophy deserves a place in society. Blaming the discipline for its balkanization may, in part, be a case of blaming the victim.
Dr Michael A. Katell 