On Analytic Philosophy Departments, departments like ours

The Dissent’s many philosophy majors have put their heads together and written down to the best of their abilities the reasons for their disenchantment with philosophy at Pomona College.¹  The editors ask that you do not put the article down immediately and say, “It doesn’t apply to me. I am not a philosophy major.” Philosophy is important. Every discipline needs philosophy; every discipline has a philosophy, explicitly expressed or not. A university without a coherent philosophy department is not a smooth-sailing craft. It is a passenger ship whose captain has been replaced by a committee of crewmembers, each with different ideas about where the ship should be going. Who could say on which shore the passengers will find themselves? And will they pick up on the ship’s aimlessness? Is bingo night each Wednesday a sufficient distraction? Actually, weird thing with that, yes, it might be…

I.

 

We know the secrets of the modern Analytic Philosophers. We are not the first ones to know. Many have found these people out before, and years ago. Like our numerous predecessors, we realize that they have trained themselves to be slightly more proficient at manipulating language than the rest of us – better stated, at manipulating their language – and that with their abilities they have fooled the majority as to the content of their careers. We see that with their linguistic superiority they solve the very small pseudo-problems that their colleagues and philosophical associations have kindly created for them. And even for the current heavyweights – once we can speak as they speak and think as they think, we are able to ascertain that their attempts to define knowledge, or to get a grip on the mind-body problem, or to provide a foundation for morality are going nowhere, are stuck in the past, pathetically reliant upon outmoded ideas and assumptions, for instance the idea that God exists, or that a soul exists, or the assumption that there is such a thing as an objective standpoint from which one has access to TRUTH, or that when we interact with the world we are presented with a “mirror of nature”.  We understand that they penetrate no deeper into reality than those who do not practice their trade, that if anything they tend toward superficiality, and that their inquiries do not yield discoveries or insights: if they claim to possess anything called “wisdom” we will not believe it for a second.

 

One thing to keep in mind about these men and women, these alchemists in the time of chemistry, is that they are quite limited. They have only that single skill to their names (logic chopping within their linguistic schemas) and as a result they are as unwilling to admit that logic chopping is a dead end road as they are delighted to take you by the hand and lead you down that road, past the abandoned factories and decrepit laboratories, on to the unpopulated terminal point, and to exclaim there: “Do you see the splendor? How wonderful is this view?!”

 

The view, as all can see, is not wonderful. We should mention that a second equally impotent type admits as much by approaching philosophy with sarcastic irreverence. These people have glimpsed the lies and the futility of their enterprise, and they are a little bit proud of their insight and the slight edge it gives them over their peers, but they are not about to spark a revolution.  They are the pessimistic-yet-content type – pessimistic about their love lives, but not in pursuit of a new mate, pessimistic about their students, though not seeking employment at a different university, and the smallest hint of pessimism regarding their profession will not undo them – actually, reflecting on things, they could be much worse off, they could be professors at a third tier university, they could not be professors at all, heck, they could be unemployed, and they should remind themselves that what they really ought to be feeling, instead of feeling peeved, is lucky.

 

The third and final group of professional professors, the all-too-common-group, sadly, the majority, do not concern themselves with philosophy’s merits. They have never seen philosophy as a worthy pursuit for its own sake; they do not share the foundational Greek vision of philosophy as essential, meaningful and redemptive. They were excellent and energetic students, but not blessed with a critical intelligence, and when it came time to decide what to do with their lives, staring down career paths in applied mathematics, finance and engineering, it occurred to them that it would be nice to have their summers free, and to have short work hours, and school had always been their thing – so why not go ahead and get a PhD in philosophy?²

 

II.

 

You might be surprised by our interest in the lives and motivations of philosophy professors, but it should make sense to you if you understand the road we have traveled. We came into college, not focused on getting a job afterwards, not interested in picking up useful skills or connections, but attached to the hope that we would spend four years studying something that would broaden our perspective and engage with questions we find important. In other words, we came here with pure philosophical aspirations. It is a good and optimistic place we came from, and after our first philosophy class we thought, ok, no big deal, the next one will explore more relevant problems and rest on more tenable assumptions; after the second we said, alright, nobody would do philosophy if every class were like these first two, and we were disappointed, but remained hopeful when we saw appealing titles like “Ethical Theory” and “Knowledge, Mind and Existence” in the course catalogue. Not finding other disciplines particularly fulfilling either, we tried these courses, and they also disappointed us.

 

These courses, like most philosophy courses, do not stand up to common sense – common intellectual sense, we should say. Even with a limited education and limited experiences, it is quite clear that there is something off about their approach to knowledge and problems. We guess that the average student has this intuition when grappling with a philosophy course, but pushes it aside (and quite understandably) as evidence of his own ignorance and unsuitability for philosophy, since the professors with the sustained educations appear very comfortable, and the senior boys with tortoise shell glasses keep raising intelligent objections. It is best to remain confident and pay attention to these intuitions however: they constitute the only challenge you need in order to write philosophy off, and if you ignore them for too long and do not write philosophy off, surrounded as you will be by alchemists, you may forget about your initial feelings and end up as one.

 

What do these intuitions look like? In an ethical theory course, you will be given an ethical system, usually either a brand of consequentialism, which holds that the consequences of an action determine the moral validity of that action, or deontology, which is a rule-based approach to ethics, or you will be given an admixture of the two of them.  You are asked to evaluate actions based on these systems – to take individual moral cases and figure out what the system prescribes. You are also, though less regularly, asked to examine critiques of a certain ethical system. You accomplish these things with premises and conclusions. The problem with doing this, which you should sense, is that there is a giant presupposition behind all of your efforts, which is that Analytic ethical philosophy is a valid enterprise. Why proceed on with consequentialism and deontological ethics if you lack evidence that it is justified to evaluate actions according to either system? Why flesh out the consequences of these systems if you have no reason to believe in either? What are you gaining? What we should keep in mind is that these are supposed to be theories on how a human being should live; the proponents of any one of these theories must say (or else what are they doing?) that an individual is compelled to act as his choice theory says a person should act. The first order of business for an ethical philosopher then is not exploring specific cases, or comparing his theory against others, but is making a case for a theory independently of all else. On this view, a course that deals in ethical thought experiments and compares systems against each other, for any person who keeps the goal of ethics in sight, is a waste of time.³

 

 

This is what ethical philosophy is, or has become – a waste of time. You can tell because it is not asking you to take it seriously. It is giving you moral scenarios like these: “A train is headed for ten people, and if it hits the ten people they will all be killed. You can pull a lever, and if you do this, you will shift the train onto a separate track. One person will be killed if you pull the lever. What should you do?” It is asking you to evaluate this moral scenario with a certain moral theory in mind, and to comment on the plausibility of the theory based upon what the theory would have you do in the situation. You are essentially asking yourself, “Does this moral theory square with my unconsidered prejudices or not?” And if it does, you find that moral theory “attractive”. Your other task is to compare systems against each other, and to determine which is “more attractive.” It is a cheap trick to compare ethical systems against each other, as opposed to comparing them against no ethical system at all. A true ethical code demands that you follow it. A true ethical code is not attractive because it squares with your intuitions or turns out to be good by comparison, but is mandatory on its own.

 

The sad irony for ethical philosophers is that the sorts of questions that must be asked of any ethical system worthy of the name are precisely the questions that they are least fit to answer. The questions: “Why should I practice this form of ethics? What, under your system, compels me to be ethical? Why am I obligated to be moral in this way? Why be moral at all?” Placed in the shoes of an ethical philosopher, what could you say? It seems like the only sound grounds for ethical compulsion is the existence of God, for then heaven and hell are at stake, or then there would be a respect in which an action is right in a meaningful way, because omnipotent God has declared that it is right. But ethical philosophers want to make secular arguments. What could you say? There is moral realism, which holds that moral facts exist, but moral realism is a dubious proposition, and even if there were moral facts out there, if say it were a fact that stealing is wrong in the same way that it is a fact that a certain person has brown hair, does it follow that a person should act ethically? The answers become even less convincing for the philosophers who do not take the leap and subscribe to moral realism. What could you say, and whom could you convince? Would you stop a man who is headed off to cheat on his wife, and implore him, “Wait, sir, please wait, before you take another step out that door, I want you to listen to someone speak, there is a lecture tonight at the local university, it’s a professor proposing a modified deontological argument. He includes a contractarian aspect that answers Nozick’s worry concerning personal autonomy. Please, just go and listen – before you do anything rash!”? Whom could your arguments convince? 

 

This leads to the second intuition that matters (with the first being that foundations are the central component of ethics), which we think most people have and ignore: it is an odd enterprise to argue for a moral system based on strictly rational premises. It is a strange thing to make one’s way, proposition by proposition, to a decision about the morality of actions, about how one should live. And so the onus is on the ethical philosopher to defend the enterprise somehow. The ethical philosopher must provide a reason to be moral. Plato, who we recognize as the founder of this tradition in  Analytic philosophy, provides us with persuasive reasons to pursue an ethical life, more to his point, to pursue a life that will culminate in understanding of justice; he goes as far as to imply that a prolonged ecstatic state will meet he who understands the ethical. However, we know too much to believe that years of training in the art of dialectical reasoning will lead us to the higher plane of being where we are in communion with the Form of the Good. Kant heroically argued that being moral, as a product of pure rationality, represents the ultimate in freedom for the individual. However, we are told (even by ethical philosophers) that there are a few holes in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Kant was unsuccessful in establishing a foundation for morality on rational grounds.  Though they failed according to modern judgments, Plato and Kant gave us a reason to cherish the moral life.  What is yours, modern ethical philosopher? Your blends of consequentialism and deontology, your endorsements of a prior theory but with one small revision, which itself was just a prior theory but with one small revision, your pages and pages of refutations and counter-refutations, they fail to convince us. And the more you write, the more you nuance, the less convincing you become. A clear order without justification from a figure of authority, a simple and loud “You must”, is more compelling to us, far stronger. Kant and Plato encountered the same difficulty of arguing for morality from rationality, but at least they saw the challenge, at least they were persuasive. In the same way that it is perhaps correct to say that St. Thomas Aquinas, the moment he set quill to paper to argue for the existence of God, was arguing for a doomed cause, but at least we can respect him, whereas we cannot respect the man proposing arguments for the existence of God today, we can say that perhaps Plato and Kant were dead in the water from the get-go, and you ethical philosophers share that with Plato and Kant, but you, unlike them, are laughable.  Why haven’t colleges gotten rid of you?

 

We have decided that we will direct our anger toward you, moral philosophers. Here is why: We can criticize the methods of our courses, and say, “Ethics should not be this way. It should focus on the foundations, and only the foundations.” But of course it cannot focus on the foundations, because there are none. So the discipline must be this way, must direct attention elsewhere, if it is to continue to exist. And the next step is to say, well, without foundations, there should be no discipline. And then we blame the people who keep it going: we blame the ethical philosophers. We blame in addition the colleges that continue to have departments that practice ethical philosophy. But then we temper ourselves and say, “Well, these colleges are not pure institutions here for the sake of pure learning; they are the higher education system of the United States, and there are only certain things that can really be said and done and thought at such institutions.” National character is part of the equation, and there is something about the U.S., in comparison to the European countries that share somewhat its style of thought, that is naïve, childlike. It has not dealt with so much conflict and cruelty. It has not dealt with bombs dropped on its cities by foreign countries, or militarized occupations. It has not dealt with the Holocaust, or anything so bad. Its moral certainty has not been challenged as often or as cruelly as Europe’s has; it is ethically naïve after all, and an ethically naïve country deserves and requires an ethically naïve moral philosophy. The U.S. does not possess the strength or maturity to confront a Nietzsche or a Foucault head-on; it hasn’t been through enough to recognize their truths and drop its secularized religious outlook – better to surreptitiously throw them into the English and History departments.  The unavoidable thought then is that there may be no getting around teaching philosophy as we do, for it is all Americans can handle. But still, still, even after these considerations, even when it looks like our very impoverished and very wrong moral philosophy is unavoidable, we can continue to find fault with, because it is within their power to know, the people who teach it; we can in good conscience maintain that it is unethical to disseminate false doctrines to the young. This we should say without reservation – and without a word of argumentation.

….

 

Moral philosophy is in a bad state, and so it has changed the questions it asks, become, in fact, something new and something lesser. We know this for several reasons, but one is that it would be assertive if it were true. We would hear in public from moral philosophers if they had something they thought they needed to communicate, and we do not hear from them.

 

Taken as a share of all spiritual-intellectual-aesthetic doctrines in the United States, and measured by its truthfulness, moral philosophy has appropriate cultural cachet (very little). Taken as a share of doctrines in the university system, moral philosophy’s piece of the pie is much too large. Given this country’s hostility toward intellectualism, however, the second fact is not surprising, and actually rather fitting: it is part of the plan that our university departments are spinning their wheels, and especially that philosophy is doing so.      

….

 

On to the other family of courses, epistemology classes, which concern themselves with establishing foundations for knowledge, for telling us what we can trust as knowledge and what we cannot. For your benefit we will cover epistemology in less detail…Briefly, the intuition you should be having in an epistemology class: these philosophers are claiming that we are capable of more than is humanly possible.  There is an assumption that underlies epistemology, which can be seen everywhere when reading epistemology papers, that humans can access things-in-themselves; that they can arrive at a true and mind-independent representation of reality, a more real reality in other words, through philosophical reflection. From this reality, the story goes, we access the foundations of knowledge. The story is invalid – incompatible with an up-to-date picture of human beings. We construct the world out of our evolved perceptual faculties and have no external authority to cross-reference; with only the human-constructed reality as a point of reference, where can we look to determine what true reality is? Why would we expect to uncover the mind-independent and unassailable foundational knowledge that epistemologists pursue?

 

Now, there are various bones to be picked with this line of thought as it applies to epistemology: for one, the discipline has been complicated and has absorbed to a degree the prior intuition; certain philosophers have made it naturalized, a study of the processes by which we reason rather than being an attempt to create foundations for knowledge, which we would say makes epistemology a branch of psychology, and again proves what a sorry state Analytic Philosophy finds itself in… but although this for our purposes is in some sense the point, it is also somewhat beside it. The point is that we can see and you can see, based on what our classes are like, that the philosophy we are taught is a false and artificial enterprise. There are brilliant people within the profession who have written books on the matter saying as much point-by-point, Richard Rorty⁴  notably, but we should not expend our energy worrying about how they accomplished the dismantling of epistemology. We should view them as unfortunate – lured into becoming alchemists, and they did what they could once they found out the truth: they took the pseudo-science down from the inside. It is preferable to avoid this situation – to steer clear of alchemy’s bad logic entirely rather than laboring to prove its mythology inconsistent. We should judge Rorty and company positively, invoking the principle that the best thing to do with a fallacious intellectual system is to ignore it, and the second best option, if you cannot ignore it, is to focus on how it has impacted you, and address the misconceptions with which it has saddled you. According to this principle, the philosophy professors from the above class of men have acted honorably in writing books attacking epistemology. The principle also places a demand upon us: we are compelled to study philosophy, though in a nontraditional way. Because philosophy has exerted a tremendous influence on Western thought and Western culture, on us in other words, we must, as aspiring Western intellectuals, engage with it. We must, because we are smart enough and know enough, assume that the standard philosophical approach is misguided, and focus on fleshing out its errors as best we can. We must see how these errors have impacted our worldview, and finally inquire as to what can be done. This is the task of a philosophy student, who, until a vital tradition replaces the current desiccated one, must be a history of philosophy student first and foremost.

 

There are severe consequences if we stick with the current game plan: if we philosophy students remain tied down with Analytic Philosophy, we are on the fast track to anti-intellectualism. We will extrapolate from our experiences, and surmise that we are better off relying upon our intuitions than embarking upon a rigorous course of study. When people ask us that annoying question in that semi-mocking voice, “So what is your philosophy degree going to do for you?” we will have to admit that they have a point. With Analytic philosophy as our guide, we will continue to turn our backs on academia and what we have good reason to suppose are the rest of its mythologies, until it is out of sight entirely.

….

 

We started off this section with the intention of explaining how, before we knew it, we became disenchanted majors in no position to wriggle away from Analytic Philosophy. The short of it is that we are upset that no one ever sat us down and explained philosophy’s falsity to us, for we are certain now that our professors have deceived us, or themselves, most likely both parties. For your own good you should trust us when we say that there is nothing that lies beyond in Analytic Philosophy. With assurance we say: It is tedious arguments of insidious intent all the way down.

…

 

We don’t want you to become resentful like us, for we are a sorry case. Now, you see, each time we read Analytic Philosophy for class, our indignation at the violation of our innocence – that crime perpetrated against us back when we were first told that what we were studying was real – is renewed. Our insight has made us some combination of apathetic and angry, and we half-wish that we could just erase the insight and be less knowledgeable, oblivious once more, able again to care about our professors’ opinions, and trust in their assessments. The distressing thing is that when we lost respect for the alchemists, no force of fairness intervened to reduce the authority of the local branch; to our dismay, no just god swooped down and snatched their grade books away. Their judgments of us remain connected with our chances of attaining our future goals (the revised emphasis, by the way, of our academic experience), and we are loath to allow them to injure us doubly. But when our professors have us read twenty pages dissecting for instance a Neo-Kantian ethical position, we know going in what we are being subjected to, and we have a difficult time of it. Told to turn in an essay on the paper by 6:00 pm on Thursday – and 6:01 will be counted as late! 6:01 is one letter grade off! – we are hard-pressed to summon the energy and respect necessary to do our duties. Working makes us nauseous, and we have to step away from the computer every now and again to remain balanced. Drinking helps too, and late at night when all is said and done we turn out something satisfactory. Tell us though: should we take receiving an A as consolatory? And isn’t a B-plus a slap in the face?

 

“It looks as if you have misunderstood the author’s task in section 4, paragraph 3” we are too-frequently coached in the margin, when we are certain that our real mistake is that we have understood too well – too well and too quickly. Do not let our example escape your attention!

 

III.

 

You must not misinterpret us: we want to do philosophy. We are not students of history, not students of English, not students of the natural sciences. We are philosophy students, and for the present at least, we remain hopeful about philosophy in the truest sense of the word: we stick to the belief that there is something out there that should be called philosophy, and that this field should be the pinnacle of thought: it should be a sweeping, perspective-endowing field, and should be treated with the highest seriousness. We see it as being naturally justified in this way. Our professors have a different vision for their different version. These conflicting visions are perhaps the root of our most deeply rooted disagreement with them. When we ask, “Why philosophy?” we receive from our professors the justification that philosophy is about arguments, a fun premise and conclusion game for students to master. If we are being taught to argue, we cannot help but ask: what does it matter what we are arguing about? Why not a premise and conclusion game with politics as its subject, or economics, or football? Why not make it really simple and choose the topic we were first taught to argue about when we were taught that shouting wouldn’t fly? Why not make it really simple and argue about, say, recess?

 

Point being, philosophy cannot justify its existence in an academic setting on the grounds that it instructs students how to argue. Argumentation is a tool of philosophy, not its goal. A discipline that studies argumentation is the discipline of Argumentation. It is not Philosophy. (Here, if you are interested, is the shortcut evidence that Analytic Philosophy is on its deathbed: its practitioners justify it as an exercise in argumentation.)

 

There is, of course, more to the philosophy curriculum than the justification that our professors offer for it. There are certain things that count as philosophy, and other things that do not. We have alluded to the topics our Pomona-style Analytic Philosophy deals with earlier. Its questions are something like, “What is knowledge?” “What are the types of things that exist?” “What is a moral action?” “What is free will and do we possess it?” – questions like these.  We have also alluded to the fact that we can no longer answer these kinds of questions in good faith, as many of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers who had a go at them were able to. We are now obligated to view knowledge as power- and discourse-dependent and far too complicated to approach in any sort of straightforward logically argumentative manner. Morality is looking more and more like an anthropological as opposed to a philosophical phenomenon. The problem of free will is – how to put it? – artificial; it depends what you mean, and you could mean a variety of things. So, to repeat the refrain: this is the philosophy curriculum, and it is outdated. These are the kinds of arguments we analyze, and they too are outdated.

 

IV.

 

To repeat another refrain: Don’t take us as saying that the philosophers and ideas we study are useless. The philosophers have been hugely influential in the creation and direction of Western culture, and among our modern ideas and prejudices we can usually locate, in attenuated or (often enough) unaltered form, their ideas. It can be argued that there is no study more worthwhile than this – a study that would seek to understand the conditions that gave rise to their ideas, the impact their ideas have had throughout history, and how they are manifest today. This is interesting; there is work to be done here.

 

You know what we will say next, in our repetitive rant: philosophy undergraduates and professors do precisely the opposite. We de-contextualize thought. When we are studying the history of philosophy, we block out the fact that the people we are studying are a product of their times.  We ignore that the French Revolution inspired Kant. Locke and Hume philosophized in order to address the scientific and political problems of the 1600s and 1700s, but no one mentions this. We are not asked to make reference either to their historical epoch or to our own. When approaching these dead men, we are instead asked to act as if both the philosophers and we were ripped clean out of time, escaping this universe and landing safely in an atemporal land, equipped only with the pure reasoning faculties in our minds and the philosophers’ works in our hands. We are told to adopt their schemes and pretend to possess their knowledge: “Just assume that the mind is nonmaterial as Descartes did”; “Work with Leibniz’s definition of substance”. This readies us for the meat of the class – analysis of their arguments. The professors stand at the front and defend philosophers’ arguments, or evaluate their validity for us, and they are always impartial to them; they are not supposed to proffer opinions. Our paper prompts lay out the same task for us: “Summarize Plato’s view on why the Guardians of his ideal city would rule the city. Give a compelling objection. Does the objection invalidate Plato’s argument?” “What is Kant’s conclusion regarding the possibility of metaphysics? Provide a compelling refutation to his argument. Does the refutation call into question Kant’s thesis?” And as a result we never get to understand the philosophers, but merely their surfaces – just their arguments, and we never really know what they are talking about, which problems of their age they are addressing (this receives a quick gloss), which social and political universes they inhabit (little to no attention paid), and so we never comprehend the urgency of their task and the passion with which they meet it. The best we get is a history of philosophy from the standpoint of ideas (“Kant synthesized the Rationalists and Empiricists”), but never a history that includes adequately the soil out of which their ideas grew. The interesting and invigorating questions (How could, and why would, a philosopher think that way, approach from that angle?) are neglected, primarily, we would guess, in order to present Analytic Philosophy as a still-valid way to spend one’s time. What happens is that Hume, Kant, Plato, Spinoza, whoever – they never catch our attention as they deserve to. They are great minds, but out of ours forever once the semester ends⁵.

 

When dealing with the living, a more mediocre bunch, we are bid to forget that their conceptions of truth, knowledge and reason are illusions, and are made to sort through their lengthy arguments and specialized vocabularies.⁶   Our stock joys are the joys of the student of a foreign language: “I think I know what that means!” Our rarefied pleasures come in the classroom, when we offer for the professor’s enjoyment an articulate translation, paired with a probing and potentially argument-undermining question. Reflecting on the classroom environment, we can’t help but feel disrespected, like grade schoolers, ultra-competent grade schoolers admittedly, but do we feel different sensations than grade schoolers feel, with our not-too-different classroom model, and our similar pleasures? The noteworthy difference is that we are less free than they are – that we are circumscribed grade schoolers, without a class clown, without opportunities for flirtation, devoid of rowdiness.  We experience, however, the same boredom (just look around at the faces in the classroom), the fading in and out, with complete attention paid only when talking or thinking about talking, and happiness achieved only when we are recognized for what we have said.

 

This happens because we (all of us, not just the disaffected) are neutral with regard to the class content. It does not interest us. The material does not resonate, and so class becomes about asserting one’s intelligence and about nothing else; it becomes about who can demonstrate mastery and nothing else. We don’t like it when we hear other people talk. When others speak, it is annoying to us, unless the person communicates embarrassment or a discreet apology for having opened his or her mouth in the first place. We always return to our dorms complaining about the student we find annoying, but really he is just the student we find most annoying. We listen to others in order to find an in to speak ourselves. Or else wouldn’t the conversation continue outside the classroom more often? Wouldn’t people ever wish to extend class to permit for a few more questions? The philosophy classroom is a sickeningly egotistical zone, which would not be a huge deal if there were outside-of-class compensatory zones, but judging by the startled looks professors give us when we walk into their offices seeking to discuss anything besides the paper due next week, there are no such regions. It is not our fault of course. We are given an antiquated discipline, a restrictive social setting, a group of students half of whom are completely unfamiliar with philosophy (does it bother you any that philosophy courses do not have prerequisites?), and a script (does it detract from your experience any that professors have heard your objections already – the year before, or if you’re clever, maybe three years ago?). Why should we expect engaging classes? Why should we expect to be challenged?

We don’t see how, given the current academic situation, a student can leave Pomona College passionate about philosophy. The most common philosophy student must be the type of student who has an instrumental relationship with philosophy – the student who uses philosophy to train himself to reason like a lawyer or, even more worryingly, the student who studies philosophy because law schools like to admit philosophy majors. We should see this as a problem – for if there existed any major insulated from a pre-professional mentality, one would think it would be philosophy. We don’t see how the professors can be content with the education they are imparting. We think it bad that Analytic Philosophy professors deal with issues of no concern to anyone but the professors involved, worse still that their dialogues and articles rest on foundations destroyed long ago, and unforgivable that they subject students to their empty discipline.

 

The Dissent acknowledges the very sane reason that causes the madness: if philosophy were given a context and were clear about its assumptions, students would quickly lose faith in it and give up on it. It would be over and done with. We are not shocked anymore that we are told lies. The Old Regime dies hard, and it often displays the most ingenuity on its way out; in this case its last-ditch effort comes in the form of modal logic, jargon, and involved arguments, which to our unclouded eyes are nothing but sophisticated rationalizations for bad behavior.

…

 

A Closing Argument:

Premise One: Analytic philosophy does not suit students.

Premise Two: Students should not study what does not suit them.

Conclusion: Either reform philosophy at Pomona, or abolish it.

 

Footnotes:

 

¹ None of the criticisms you see here apply to Professor Erickson. We highly recommend his classes. Plus, he teaches Continental Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy’s more literary counterpart.