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Rethinking Philosophy
After a painful period of internal upheaval, a flagship department is still struggling to rebuild.
November 1995
by Jon Zonderman
Jon Zonderman is a freelance writer living in Orange, CT.
For centuries, philosophers have, by definition, spent their time thinking about big ideas: the nature of good and evil, justice, even how people know they are human. And their conclusions have long been a cornerstone of university curricula. Along with history, languages, science, and mathematics, philosophy is a subject about which every well-educated person was expected to have at least some basic knowledge. But philosophy today is not what it was 100—or even 25—years ago.
While the canonical works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche remain central to most programs in philosophy, the discipline is increasingly touching upon other areas, from psychoanalytic theory and medical ethics to computer science and international affairs. This process has created strains both within philosophy departments and in their relations with other academic disciplines. At Yale those strains have been aggravated for more than a decade by internal dissent. Indeed, by 1990, the department was so bound up in its squabbles that then-President Benno Schmidt placed it into “academic receivership,” meaning that the central administration appointed a scholar outside the department to oversee its activities. A report released this past September by the National Research Council showed that Yale’s doctoral program in philosophy had plummeted from 18th place in 1982 to 59th (tied with Michigan State) in 1992.
Today, the department continues to struggle with its rebuilding effort while confronting basic questions about its larger role. “We need to ask ourselves, ‘What should be the place of a philosophy department in the context of a university such as Yale?’” says Mellon Professor of Philosophy Karston Harries, who directs the graduate programs for the department. Beyond that global question, Harries believes the department must also struggle with the tactical question about whether to rebuild the ranks of tenured professors—of which he is one of only four—by seeking senior scholars from outside, or by promoting junior faculty, who have been carrying a disproportionate burden since the mid-1980s.
Two years ago, Yale invited Robert Adams, a specialist in the philosophy of religion and the chairman of the philosophy department at UCLA, to come to Yale with a mandate to put the department back together. “He’s a first-class philosopher, and a first-class person to look to for change,” says Alan Wagner, a former chairman of Yale’s psychology department who had overseen philosophy during the “receivership” period and led the search team that selected Adams. “We were attracted by his breadth of scholarship, and the fact that he is broadly respected for both his scholarly work and his administrative experience.”
Although virtually all the humanistic disciplines are undergoing self-examination as they approach the 21st century, philosophy presents some unique challenges. Primary among them is the degree to which the traditional boundaries of the discipline should be redrawn to accommodate new definitions of what philosophy means. And part of that investigation involves rethinking the degree to which members of the philosophy department should interact with other scholars.
Although the process is clearly not an easy one, it is not without precedent. Indeed, in the Western tradition, philosophy originally embraced aspects of mathematics, religion, and the physical and natural sciences. But these strands were slowly teased out. Modern political theory and systems of law also began as part of the philosophical quest, and were removed over time from the pure study of philosophy. Ethics has at times had a difficult time finding a home, jumping among philosophy, religion, and law.
From the beginning, Western philosophers have depended on two tools: logical and speculative reasoning. Aristotle aimed at constructing arguments that were both true and valid by logical standards. Early Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras felt that mathematics was the key to understanding reality. But Aristotle felt mathematics was about ideal objects, and not real ones; mathematics can prove certainty about the nature of things, but still tell humans nothing about ultimate reality. Mathematics thus began its exit from philosophy.
After Christianity entered the Greek world, philosophers took on the task of trying to understand the new religion from a rational, philosophical standpoint. Some theologians within the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions tried to synthesize religion and philosophy, while others argued that religion could never be explained in rational philosophical terms, only in terms of faith and belief. And so, increasingly, religion and philosophy went their separate ways.
Beginning in the 17th century, the natural and physical sciences also fell away from the philosophical universe. Until then, “scientists” had fit their data into metaphysical theories. But the scientific work of Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo simply didn’t fit into the metaphysical paradigms. By the 18th century, philosophers in England and France were arguing that science, because it described and codified observations, was completely independent of philosophy.
Much of 20th-century philosophy is an extension of or a reaction against the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Schooled in theology, Hegel created an all-encompassing system, based on his triadic thesis of the dialectic, according to which an original thesis is followed inextricably by its opposite, the antithesis, and together through conflict the two reach the new, higher concept, or synthesis, which becomes the next thesis in the next triad. Hegel saw this dialectic acting not only upon each individual, but upon society and the state, leading to an inevitable progression of history.
On the continent, anti-Hegelian sentiment took many forms. Soren Kierkegaard argued that Hegel had denied the lived experience of the individual. Kierkegaard also found Hegel’s metaphysics sterile, believing the highest level of human life to be the recognition of the need for religion. Kierkegaard had no unifying system, arguing instead the existential concept that truth lay within each individual.
To Kierkegaard’s existentialism, the continental tradition added phenomenology, developed by the Germans Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Husserl, a mathematician by training, argued about what it meant for something to be a “phenomenon,” and found it necessary to not judge a given reality but rather to “bracket” the consciousness in order to describe the phenomenon. Heidegger explored anguish and death as his chief way of shedding light on ontology, the nature of being.
Away from the continent, analytic and linguistic philosophy was coming into being around the turn of the 20th century in Great Britain. Bertrand Russell is often thought of as the formulator of the field, creating a rigorous method of formal, symbolic logic, which started out as an effort to establish a vigorous logical foundation for mathematics. He applied logical analysis to problems by trying to break down human knowledge into minimal statements that could be verified by logic, reason, or empirical observation. Later philosophers both developed and changed these basic concepts.
By the 1950s, philosophers of the continental tradition and those of the Anglo-American—or analytical—tradition were at odds over the primacy of their points of view. This was the time when Yale and many other universities were building strong and large philosophy departments. Many scholars who were educated and spent their early careers in the midst of those squabbles were among the senior faculty in Yale’s department in the 1970s and 1980s, when these issues—as well as a number of personal conflicts—led to such dysfunction in the department that it was unable to come to decisions about appointments and promotions. Finally, the University stepped in.
When Benno Schmidt and his provost, Frank Turner, decided to intervene, their goal was to fill in one grand hiring all five of the tenured faculty slots that had been made available by retirements. In addition to a University-wide advisory group, a group of outsiders was formed to help the President by nominating candidates for recruitment. The hiring effort, which failed, coincided with the last year of Schmidt’s presidency and the controversial series of reports his administration issued on academic restructuring. The fallback position, Wagner recalls, was “to find a strong chairman who would take on the task of rebuilding and hiring over time.” That was accomplished when Adams agreed to leave his post as chairman of philosophy at UCLA.
Today, Adams, who was named Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics last month, believes the tone of his profession is much more congenial than it was 20 or 30 years ago. “There has been a lot of opening up,” Adams says, especially between the continental and analytic positions. “Today, most younger philosophers are interested in drawing materials from those who in the past would have been labeled from ‘the other camp.’”
Adams sees many of the strands that were pulled out of philosophy in the past being gathered up again today and woven into a new tapestry of 21st-century philosophy. The philosophy of language and logic, first championed by Russell, “has taken a more metaphysical turn; the philosophy of mind, some of which parallels psychology, is ascendent,” Adams says. For example, in a course called, “Inside and Outside the Mind,” Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities Jonathan Lear uses readings from Plato, Hegel, and Freud, as well as from modern psychoanalytic thinkers, to examine “how the psyche acquires structure via meaningful interaction with the world.”
“Ethical theory,” Adams says, “is increasingly focusing on what people would think of as substantive issues. Up until the 1970s or even the early 1980s, the Anglo-American tradition had focused on the methodology of ethics”—the question of how one reaches an ethical position, which many find artificial. “Now it is looking at conclusions; there is a rich development of discussion about how to live an ethical life.”
Not only have the various philosophical camps come closer together, but the demarcations between philosophy and other academic disciplines have begun to erode. Adams says Yale is in a rare position to take advantage of that erosion. There are serious scholars of philosophy not only at the Divinity School—where Adams has a natural affinity as a philosopher of religion, and where his wife, Marilyn, has an appointment as a professor of historical theology—but also at the Law School. And philosophy plays an integral role in Directed Studies, an interdisciplinary freshman program in Western thought that President Levin has recently proposed for expansion (see “Light & Verity”).
Also, as Wagner puts it, the philosophy department “has more contacts with humanities than at institutions with weaker humanities departments. If Yale is committed to one thing, it is to maintaining the breadth of the department that it has been known for.”
However, skeptics such as Harries wonder if this is possible in a department envisioned as having a maximum of eight tenured and eight junior faculty, down from a total of more than 30 two decades ago. He is still angry about the takeover of the department by the administration, and believes the administration itself caused some of the department’s problems by eliminating tenure lines throughout the 1970s and 1980s as senior faculty retired.
Harries is especially put off by the advisory committee, headed by the provost, which conducts searches and has a large say in hiring decisions. Wagner, who sits on the advisory committee, responds that all such decisions are made jointly by the advisory committee and the philosophy department senior faculty. “There has been a subtle shift over the last few years that has brought department members more into their normal role,” Wagner says, adding that with a fifth senior faculty member this year he believes the philosophy department is getting close to assuming the leadership in hiring. Despite that, Harries says, “I don’t see a very clear, convincing vision for the department. I don’t see that we know where we are going.”
Wagner is more optimistic. “There are some very exciting opportunities at the boundaries” of formal academic departments, he says, adding that the inability of the philosophy department to explore those boundaries was one of the causes of its internal schism during the 1980s. At one point, there was a move to create an interdisciplinary program in cognitive sciences, drawing on expertise from psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy. The philosophy department wouldn’t participate, and the idea fell apart.
The department does currently have programs in philosophy and physics, philosophy and psychology, and philosophy and mathematics, all of which Adams hopes to strengthen. A model for further interdisciplinary work is the program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (EP&E), a major that draws faculty from more than a half-dozen departments, as well as from the schools of Law and Management. The first of the five tenured appointments Adams had to offer was made to Shelly Kagan, a leading scholar in contemporary moral philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Kagan became the Henry Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics in July, with a joint appointment in Philosophy and EP&E.
That the philosophy department’s first appointment during the Adams chairmanship should be an ethicist and moral philosopher might be seen as telling. Although Adams says, “I think and have always thought it is a mistake to be too programmatic in seeking to fill faculty positions,” he also believes ethics and moral philosophy is one of the increasingly important areas of study in a changing landscape of American philosophy.
While philosophy isn’t, in and of itself, public policy, “philosophy has a role to play in informing public policy,” Adams says. Harries agrees, adding that “philosophy is about options, and science circumscribes options. Philosophy needs to face up to the challenge of science and technology, understand that it has legitimacy, and recognize its task of setting certain limits.”
Despite moves toward more interdisciplinary studies, the department’s academic core remains Western philosophical thought. And, as Adams admits, dealing with it is no easier than it ever was. “Philosophy can be very intimidating to undergraduates,” he says. “We must not use our argumentative skills to indoctrinate students. Philosophy instruction should press students to take seriously people and points of view they disagree with.” Students, Adams says, should examine important questions, looking at them through the various schools of philosophical thought, but with the goal of beginning the trek along the road to finding their own answers, whether through logical positivism or Hegelian dialectic, or even through faith. The message, Adams says, has to be for instructors to let students know that “just because you can’t prove your point of view, that you can’t 'win' an argument, does not mean that your ideas are not valid.”
Educating that kind of philosophy teacher is as much the task of Yale’s department as is instructing undergraduates. In the two years Wagner ran the department, there was a moratorium on admitting graduate students. And for some years before that, the department’s difficulties no doubt discouraged some students from applying. Adams is now recruiting vigorously for graduate positions. This year two graduate students began their studies in the department, and three others, although not yet admitted to a graduate degree program, are studying philosophy. And while job prospects are not particularly good, Adams says “there is always a need for new blood; the best students should not shy away because of a poor job market.” The three graduate students who recently finished their dissertations all found full-time teaching appointments away from Yale, Harries says.
The department also has to examine how much of its next generation of tenured faculty will come from the large group of junior faculty. There are some tenure slots open, but not nearly enough for all of the department’s junior faculty, who are becoming restive and exploring job offers elsewhere, some with guarantees of tenure. Two junior faculty left at the end of last year for appointments with tenure or promises of a decision on tenure within a year or two.
At least two tenured positions should come up for appointment this year. But Yale’s tenure rules mean that these will be advertised openly, putting junior faculty who would like them into competition with established scholars from outside the University.
Given the multitude of tracks the department is moving on, it is difficult to measure success, particularly at such an early stage. Wagner says more congeniality, both within the department and between philosophy and other departments, will be one measure of Adams’s achievement. In strong departments, he says, people can disagree with each other honestly and forcefully, both regarding departmental matters and scholarly ideas, yet respect each other’s scholarship and points of view. Strong departments, he notes, also find it relatively easy to collaborate intellectually with other departments.
Adams says that measuring true success for a department that has as one of its key missions to train graduate-level scholars is really “a 20-year proposition. Do good people come to study? Do they stay and get their PhDs? Do they get jobs? And finally, do they get tenure?” He says that by these measures the UCLA department was just beginning to prove successful in the last few years, as a generation of scholars recruited in the late 1970s, who graduated in the middle-to-late 1980s, begin to achieve tenured positions. To see if Adams has been successful at Yale, check back in 2010.  |
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