Friday, July 14, 2006
Myopia in American Academic Philosophy
In a post that's begging to get philosophers frothing at the mouth denouncing the evils of French-influenced humanities departments, Prof. Jason Stanley artfully introduces what probably ought to be (and maybe is) a topic of concern in American academics: the complete neglect of Angle-American philosophical interests within non-philosophical humanities programs.
In other words, professors in your average comparitive literature department just don't care about reading Kripke.
Of course, Prof. Stanley's most important point isn't that they don't care, but that they evidence distate for and attempt to deligitimize the activity of Angle-American academic philosophy. Which brings us to the next question: why?
There's much to be said about this, and I'm not going to attempt an answer here. But Kosta Calfas, a commentor to Prof. Stanley's post, begins, I think, to note a key difference between Anglo-American academics and French academics when he remarks:
That French intellectual life involves such a unification of concerns, and that American intellectual life resembles the structures found in a large business corporations, explains in part why American humanities students have so largely been reading Derrida and Foucault whilst neglecting Frege.
In other words, professors in your average comparitive literature department just don't care about reading Kripke.
Of course, Prof. Stanley's most important point isn't that they don't care, but that they evidence distate for and attempt to deligitimize the activity of Angle-American academic philosophy. Which brings us to the next question: why?
There's much to be said about this, and I'm not going to attempt an answer here. But Kosta Calfas, a commentor to Prof. Stanley's post, begins, I think, to note a key difference between Anglo-American academics and French academics when he remarks:
It seems to be the case, rather, that philosophers in the US tend to work with little concern to what their colleagues in the other humanities are doing and vice versa. In contrast to, for example, France, where sociologists(eg. Pierre Bourdieu), historians (e.g. Marc Bloch and the Analles School) and psychologists (Piaget, Lacan) either studied philosophy or had more than a passing familiarity and philosophers (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault) were well acquainted to ultra-philosophical humanistic pursuits of their time. For better or worse, there seems to be a division of intellectual labour in America, which breeds its own kinds of problems (e.g. the near-complete absence of philosophical ideas from intellectual or political discourse, and the conspicuous lack of synoptic philosophical projects of the greek or german variety which attempt to unify or order the disciplines).
That French intellectual life involves such a unification of concerns, and that American intellectual life resembles the structures found in a large business corporations, explains in part why American humanities students have so largely been reading Derrida and Foucault whilst neglecting Frege.
