Kant trumps cant any day - Comments

I enjoyed Professor Blackburn's essay, and would only point out that the AHRC budget (£102 million/annum) amounts to around just 0.2% of the annual _interest_ on one trillion pounds: So the bank bailout would have paid for art and humanities research, and indeed all other state investment in research, in perpetuity, even assuming zero return on this investment. Conversely, if this £ trillion bailout is written off, it will impact on reader's prosperity to a degree similar to around the last 10-12 years of their savings and investment being wiped out. As with the Cathedrals, we have only begun to see the impact of this reduction in our capacity to invest in arts and science — as Adam Smith pointed one of only two routes to an increase in wealth (the other being division of labour).

A prose platypus of a repy; noble sentiments but metered out in dribs of dull satire and drabs of weak outrage. Too bad because Professor Blackburn is normally a superb and lucid stylist!

"But industry, knowledge, and humanity, are not advantageous in private life alone; they diffuse their beneficial influence on the <em>public</em>, and render the government as great and flourishing as they make individuals happy and prosperous" - David Hume, <em>Of Refinement in the Arts</em> And we might add the counter truth: that industry - but especially knowledge and humanity - will be advantageous in neither private nor public life, if strangled and controlled by a government as base, ignorant and vicious as the only knowledge and humanity such a meddling government will tolerate to exist.

Well said, Simon Blackburn.

Brilliant! But I have a quibble: Should you equally scoff at applying such criteria in-house, when making hiring decisions in philosophy? Are applicants to professorships in philosophy not assessed according to competitiveness, effectiveness and impact? Do hiring committees not demand evidence for the same? And wouldn't it be odd if these criteria were suitable for evaluating individual philosophers, but not departments?

'Envoi -- The Age of Universities (late 11th c.- early 21st c.) in the West may be drawing to a close .... Eventually, there may still be “academics” of sorts (or “knowledge entrepreneurs”, or high-grade, or not so high-grade, purveyors of “knowledge services”, some of them still claiming, perhaps, one wonders, without even a tinge of embarrassment, lineal descent from the academics/scholars of yesteryear), but no longer academics-in-universities (certainly not scholars-in-universities, in contradistinction to academic managers, or skills-managers), no longer universities at all .... Eventually, there may be no-one able (even if they were so inclined) to write an elegy for Academic England, or even just to entertain the bare possibility of such a thing, for no-one will have any clear and distinct memories of how things were, no-one will know any better, or any different ...' R.I.P. (Herminio Martins, Oxford and Lisbon)

Brilliant! But I have a quibble: Should you equally scoff at applying such criteria in-house, when making hiring decisions in philosophy? Are applicants to professorships in philosophy not assessed according to competitiveness, effectiveness and impact? Do hiring committees not demand evidence for the same? And wouldn't it be odd if these criteria were suitable for evaluating individual philosophers, but not departments?

This is about what I would expect from someone who wrote a dictionary that a person could just as well read cover-to-cover without getting bored.

The money could be better spent elsewhere, helping combat the social mobility problems that are rising in primary and secondary education, rather than subisidising middle class students. It is perfectly possible to obtain a PHd in any arts or humanities course whilst working a job. Whereas funding these people means they never actually work a real job in their life, never appreciate the real world because they have always been paid for by the state going from student to lecturer living in a little university bubble. They really offer very little value to society and claims of marx and jesus, while first niether did their works whilst engaged in a Phd and second if those are the examples you want to hold then essentially we should abolish all philosophy programmes now given the sheer tonnage of corpses those two's ideas have caused.

Jon Doyle writes "The money could be better spent elsewhere, helping combat the social mobility problems that are rising in primary and secondary education, rather than subisidising middle class students." That's a very interesting argument Jon, but an argument it is rather than a declared fact. As Aristotle put it 'if you wish to show me that one must philosophise, then to do it one must philosophise; if you wish to show me that one must not philosophise, one must philosophise. Either way one must philosophise.' It is a question much debated in political philosophy, which draws on the arguments of moral philosophy on the one hand and the techniques from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, formal logic and epistemology what the ends of political funding ought to be, and what justification the state has for gathering to them the means to effect those ends from otherwise citizens. The verdict we would appear to be drawing towards is that those who flourish under the status quo have a duty to promote the well being and capacity to make informed choices of their fellow citizens. This is a philosophical claim; built upon thousands of years of work, and substantiated as anything other than a bald assertion by the existence of the dialectical buttresses which keep it in place. If you are not, in making your claim, availing yourself of these resources then it is simply an assertion. If you are making use of them, then you are attempting to throw away the ladder you used to reach the position you hold. I am a 'working class student', philosophy has immeasurably improved my life which is why I am currently pursuing post-graduate studies in the same to pass on what I have gained to others. I hope some day you'll join us.

I'm at a position in between those of Jon and Duncan. With the exception of formal logic and some interesting peeks into what I see to be deliberate, crafty abuses of semantics, I don't think philosophy is terribly worthwhile socially or individually. Using philosophical texts as a prop for discussion of contemporary issues is somewhat useful, but it seems that any body of texts that enables heavy logical analysis and criticism is fit for that task. There is no reason that I see for isolating the problems to philosophy, nor for the existence of a standalone philosophical department when the most worthwhile aspects of philosophy can be covered as sub-studies under separate departments (We see this happening plenty with the surge of "philosophy of x" subtopics.). This I say in hypocrisy, since I am a comparative philosopher, but unfortunately both traditions that I study state that we don't need philosophy for distinct reasons. In the first tradition, philosophy is unnecessary because the means to the closest thing that we're going to call truth outside of the analytic truisms we get from set theory and arithmetic on up is going to come from the efforts in empirical science, not philosophy. The second tradition I study holds that philosophical speculation is a sign of misunderstanding of the use of terms and predicates within a language, and so must either be rectified or abandoned. These reasons stem from what is deemed "philosophy," but one gives an epistemic reason why philosophy ought not continue, and the other gives a pragmatic reason why it ought not continue. Perhaps most irritating is that philosophers don't seem to know what they study, and some find somewhat gainful employ just asking themselves what they do for a living -- metaphilosophy. Is that not just a prime example of wasteful spending on a stupid endeavor? Further, if it is true that philosophers don't know what they do for a living, then I don't see a non-self-preserving point to bother toting the term as though it were meaningful. Couldn't "philosophy" (whatever that may be) survive as an appendage to all of the more substantive studies, a sort of department of logical nitpicking at all of the other departments' claims and findings? That appears to abolish a department, but still keep many of the employees. Philosophers of language can thrive in linguistics; political philosophers can thrive in political "science"; philosophers of science can thrive in the empirical science departments; philosophers of religion can thrive in religious studies departments; ethicists can thrive in almost all of them, but better (I think) in departments of psychology, medicine, and law.

To change the subject: in the frustrating arguments about access to Oxbridge and the tendency for middle class and privately educated students to gain a relatively high proportion of places, it never seems to be mentioned that this kind of imbalance is to be expected on genetic grounds. Intelligence of the academic kind is partly inherited. Better educated and more intelligent people often send their children to private schools (whether for good reasons or bad ones). Their children, as well as having expensive educations, are likely on average to be of above average intelligence. That's part of the reason they do so well in the generally fair competition for undergraduate places. (To try to ward off some predictable complaints: I write as someone whose children went exclusively to state schools, then to good universities (one to Cambridge) and who acknowledges both the importance of environmental factors for educational achievement and the success of many poorer children in succeeding in education through their own efforts and intelligence). The simple fact is that in a meritocracy a high proportion of the most intelligent students will descend from highly intelligent parents.