Do We Need Philosophy?

Two items are on my mind this Sunday morning, and I think they are connected in some way. The first is that my friend David Hull died last week. I wrote about him (although not by name) a month or two back, about his being in hospital and how it brought on a form of dementia, something that went when he returned home. He was very frail when I visited in June and basically went downhill from there. He had pancreatic cancer and that develops quickly. He never, thank God, returned to hospital — he died at home, with friends there to care for him.

I wrote the last time about my fondness for him and my respect for him as a truly good person. Now I want to focus on his professional life, namely that of a philosopher, both teacher and scholar. He taught for nearly40 years, first at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and then at Northwestern University in Chicago. He had a number of graduate students, although not, I think, a great number. Where his influence was felt was more in the philosophical community at large, particularly among the philosophers of science, and also significantly among certain groups of scientists.

David wrote a great deal, especially in the early years, and a number of his writings were very influential. This was particularly so with respect to systematics, the (biological) science of classification. In the 1970s, there was a huge debate among systematists about the right ways to proceed, with tension between the old guard who (quite frankly) tended to treat the whole process as something of an art as much as a science, and the young Turks who wanted to quantify and count and (increasingly, as computers came on board and allowed the crunching of huge amounts of data) make the whole process much more objective. David was right in the thick of things, and greatly respected, so much so that at one point he was president of both the major philosophy of science association and the major systematics association.

The point I want to make — and I haven’t even mentioned the huge amount that David gave to individuals, particularly junior people starting out, whose unpublished writings he would read willingly, always giving good advice — is that my friend had a good and worthwhile career. He was a professor of philosophy, proud to be one and rightly so.

The second point on my mind is a suggestion made in a column this morning in The New York Times, by the chair of the department of religion at Columbia University in New York City. He is talking about an important issue, namely the staggering rise in cost of university education in the United States and how, if anything, it is going to get worse rather than better. The amount that is now owed by Columbia and New York University is truly staggering. It puts even the Ruses’ credit-card debts into perspective.

One suggestion that he makes is to combine the philosophy departments at Columbia and NYU. He writes that “it is absurd for Columbia and N.Y.U. to have competing philosophy departments at a time when there are few jobs for philosophy academics. Instead, they could cooperate by forming a joint graduate and undergraduate program, which would reduce costs by requiring fewer faculty members and a more modest physical presence, while at the same time increasing course choices for students.”

Now, if you are in the trade, you would have to have the sweet spirit of a saint not to take a certain joy from this. Knowing some of the super-size egos in both of these institutions, I am sure that Sunday brunch is not being enjoyed today with quite the zest that is normal. And also it is worth pointing out that it is not so much the lack of jobs that is at issue, but the lack of permanent (tenured or tenure-track) jobs that is at stake. There is a lot of work out there if you don’t mind a huge amount of driving and marking and so forth. (Part of the “so forth” being that you often don’t know until literally the morning a semester starts whether you will be in the classroom that day.)

Also there is the fact that if you keep downsizing, then God only knows what is going to happen to the country. I am still in a state of shock about a New York Times story earlier in the week about outsourcing law work to India. Apparently now major firms are getting cheaply paid Indian lawyers to do a lot of the routine work for them. This means that it is junior lawyers as well as junior philosophers who don’t have work. As Henry Ford pointed out, you can only take this sort of thing so far. If Americans don’t have good jobs, then they simply cannot afford to buy the products on sale, despite those products being produced cheaply abroad — even assuming that being “produced cheaply abroad” is going to be reflected in prices to the consumer and not simply profit for the firms involved.

Having said this, I also believe there is no question but that university costs are often now too high and still going up way too quickly. Although it is worth pointing out that a number of institutions (NYU is notorious) have been spending huge amounts to hire high-status profs and they themselves are basically to blame for the situation. And it is still possible in the United States to get a good education at a lot of state institutions (including my own) at a far more reasonable price — in fact, in Florida, at a ludicrously reasonable price, this being a state that values Medicare a great deal more than higher education.

Also, things do have to change. I am still feeling a bit sad from learning that the English grammar school I attended in the early 1950s, founded in the reign of Queen Mary in 1554, now no longer offers Latin. This is the first time in 450 years! It does, however, offer Spanish (as well as a host of other modern languages), which is a change from my day. I cannot honestly say that this is wrong. The more the English learn that the way to talk to foreigners is not by shouting at them in English baby language — a practice about which Dickens is very funny in Little Dorrit — the better off the world will be.

Things have to change in philosophical circles, too. Most departments now offer courses in environmental ethics — something unheard of in my youth — and a jolly good thing, too. Unfortunately, too much that does go on in philosophical circles is more akin to the medieval disputes about the numbers of angels on the head of a pin. I don’t mean that philosophy departments should teach only the “relevant” topics — “improving your reasoning,” “business ethics,” “bioethics,” and so forth — but that more than one distinguished (and not-so-very-distinguished) department could use a bit of a broom of change.

But — and this brings me back around to the life and career of my friend David Hull — I do wonder where it will end and where it should end. I think that David’s life was truly worthwhile. But was he a bit like a lamplighter, someone who had a good career in his day but for which we no longer have need? Are we getting to the point where philosophy, if it is to be taught at all, could just be a subgroup within an English department? (Wouldn’t they just love that, with their obsession about Heidegger!) And if philosophy goes, what about classics and more? What about departments of religion?!

Quite apart from the economic worries I expressed above, I cannot but feel that something will be lost if universities do just become glorified technical institutions, or business schools. Personally, I don’t think you can claim to be an educated person if you have never done any philosophy. With Socrates I agree that the unexamined life is not worth living, and unlike the average scientist or engineer in my experience (Richard Dawkins being at the top of my list), I don’t think you can do philosophy on your own after work in the pub. I think that knowing something of the great thinkers of the past is vital.

But then don’t forget that I am only five years younger than was David Hull, and, like him, I have had a full-time career as a philosopher. Maybe you are just hearing the sad lament of another lamplighter.