Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities(chronicle.com)
chronicle.com
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Trying-to-Sell-the/243643?key=m1JvRRyygNd0EHj5AaFoO0ti00iCHCUA2K5ZxC8dMYxDxHtupVA2vVdwCkhaYR63dmtqcHlDbzFCVllkSGhIczZsMXBNMGRlUVpJWFdFUjRSR1cxNS01VnN2SQ
3 comments
I’m sympathetic to the idea that philosophy as its own focus/major should be shuttered. If you’re doing “philosophy” and you’re being careful and intellectually honest, then you can probably do it in the math department.
I disagree with the claim that philosophy could be shuttered/migrated to the math department without something being lost.
Part of why it is useful to have different academic departments/fields is that those fields teach a different set of tools and approaches to a problem, even if they look at overlapping problems.
The way of thinking about logic taught in philosophy departments is quite different from that taught in math departments, at least in my own experience.
In philosophy, Tarski (a logician) feels adjacent to Montague (a logician who studied semantics), and Montague feels adjacent to Austin (a philosopher who studied semantics). If we were to shutter philosophy, the math department would lay claim to Tarski, the linguistics department to Montague and Austin. I think its useful to have them in conversation with each other.
But ultimately I think its very hard to argue that philosophy has got enough new work being done; my metric is whether or not a discipline's "2017 in <discipline>" page on Wikipedia has a greater number of accomplishments than deaths, and philosophy's is not looking so good in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_philosophy
In philosophy, Tarski (a logician) feels adjacent to Montague (a logician who studied semantics), and Montague feels adjacent to Austin (a philosopher who studied semantics). If we were to shutter philosophy, the math department would lay claim to Tarski, the linguistics department to Montague and Austin. I think its useful to have them in conversation with each other.
But ultimately I think its very hard to argue that philosophy has got enough new work being done; my metric is whether or not a discipline's "2017 in <discipline>" page on Wikipedia has a greater number of accomplishments than deaths, and philosophy's is not looking so good in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_philosophy
Thousands of years ago - philosophy was more of an operating system.