The Trial of Socrates That Never Ends: An Introduction to the Socrates Tenured Symposium

Socrates Tenured by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle offers what I would call a “social-epistemological” critique of the professionalization of philosophy in the academy over roughly the past 100 years. It focuses on the U.S. context, but the argument is meant—rightly, I believe—to apply more generally. I wrote the Foreword to this book, so the reader should assume that I think the book matters. In the following pages, I have assembled various sharp academic responses—from the hostile to the sympathetic—to which Frodeman and Briggle then respond. But before letting that drama unfold, let me say something about how I think philosophy should be institutionalized in the academy.

If I had to organize a philosophy department, I would populate it with those who for the most part were not originally trained in the field, who are then entrusted with instructing a student body who for the most part intend to work outside of the field. In other words, it would look like a contemporary business school. It might even flourish as well as business schools have, if it adopted that organizational model. However, my point is about the aptness of the model to the discipline of philosophy, rather than its exact financial consequences. Rather like the word “business,” “philosophy” would then primarily refer to the forum—or market (the same word in Greek, agora)—where people who would otherwise be strangers to each other are given a free space to transact knowledge claims, presumably to the mutual benefit of both, perhaps even to achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In principle, this space could be anywhere, but the classroom would be an exemplary space for such transactions. The overall aim of the exercise would be to generate a common sense of humanity.

To be sure, the transaction is not exactly symmetrical. No goods are sold unless there is something to sell, and so the academics must be first to step up to the plate, trying to persuade prospective students that there is something they need to know. At a more abstract level, this opening gambit underwrites the idea of burden of proof, the normative foundation on which any real-world argument rests: if I claim that you are lacking, then the burden is on me to prove it. It follows that I must possess some goods worthy of delivery. This is shown by what the students take away from what the academics have offered. Inspired by Adam Smith, the economist Deirdre McCloskey (1982) has long argued for a similarity—if not identity—between negotiating ideas and goods, which she associates (rightly, I believe) with the art of rhetoric.

What passes for the “canon” of Western philosophy may be understood as the sort of knowledge that is forged in such a spirit of supply and demand. On the pages of canonical works, the reader will find many real and imagined transactions being conducted and sometimes even resolved. Plato’s dialogues are only the most obvious case in point, which perhaps explains why he always opens the canon, to which the rest of philosophy is “footnotes,” at least according to Alfred North Whitehead, who was not exactly Plato’s biggest fan. In any case, works other than the ones currently venerated could have been selected to elicit a comparably “canonical” effect—and probably will be selected in the future. In fact, one of the contributors to this symposium has compiled a volume on just such canonical also-rans (Schliesser 2016).

It is striking that even in these times of hyperprofessionalized academic philosophy, the least contestable parts of the canon were authored by nonacademics, for whom philosophy was an “amateur” activity, which literally means a labor of love not employment. It is perhaps not by accident that Kant is both the cornerstone of “modern philosophy” and the first canonical philosopher who was an “academic” in the modern sense. But even once it became generally accepted that a philosopher had to be an academic, it is striking just how many of the great academic philosophers were intellectual carpetbaggers—or interdisciplinary interlopers, to put it somewhat more politely. I mean not only Hegel and Heidegger from theology; or Husserl, Bergson, Russell, and Whitehead from mathematics; or Carnap and Reichenbach from physics; or, for that matter, James from medicine, Popper from psychology, or even Nietzsche from classics—although the last totally crashed out of academia once he turned to philosophy.

I also mean contemporary analytic philosophers, who are often seen as the most “professional” of philosophers. While it may be well known that Willard Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Michael Dummett were originally mathematicians, it is perhaps less known that those Oxford stalwarts Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin—as well as the American, Donald Davidson—began as classicists. And not only was Ludwig Wittgenstein originally trained as an engineer, so too was Rom Harré, who for most of his career was “University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science” at Oxford, which meant he taught the subject to students regardless of their disciplinary point of entry. Indeed, Oxford did not have a proper philosophy faculty before 2000, and Cambridge’s dates only to the 1970s. At Cambridge, you traditionally entered philosophy through the “natural sciences” or the “moral sciences” tripos, whereas in Oxford, the corresponding course portals were “PPP” (Philosophy, Psychology, Physiology) or “PPE” (Philosophy, Politics, Economics).

I flag Harré because the second half of his career has been largely dedicated to correcting what he regards as the mistaken default assumptions of contemporary experimental psychology. This is exactly the sort of research orientation that one would expect of a philosopher whose student audience has already received training in experimental psychology before they have studied philosophy seriously. If successful, such instruction is bound to lead to defection from the experimental psychological ranks, and indeed Harré has developed a fan base among “discursive psychologists,” who focus explicitly on verbal behavior rather than nonverbal behavior or computational methods. They tend to be better received in sociology than psychology. Jonathan Potter, who is now dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, is representative of this movement.

Notwithstanding its global reach, the professionalization of philosophy that disturbs Frodeman and Briggle is a phenomenon of American origin, one based on how aspirational Americans interpreted the ascendancy of German academic culture in the second half of the 19th century, which by the First World War had made Germany the global pacesetter. And even after Germany’s humiliating defeat, its academics remained highly sought after throughout the world. And of course, the same followed the Second World War. Indeed, the sort of professionalization that is under the gun in Socrates Tenured resulted from the emigration of German-speaking academics broadly associated with logical positivism to the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s, during which it morphed into the analytic philosophical establishment, which remains dominant to this day.

However, the Americans understood the secret to the success of the German academic system in a particular way. It has now become the familiar story that is told not only in disciplinary histories of philosophy but also in histories of higher education more generally. The plot is about a move away from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s founding of the modern German system with philosophy as the basis of a liberal arts program designed to enable students to function as empowered citizens. This had been the context in which so-called “German idealism” flourished. However, so the story goes, Hegel brought the system into disrepute and so after his death, university education became more specialized, conforming more to the dictates of the phenomena under study than the world-historic visions of the people studying them. On this basis, academic specialization—signaled by the ascendancy of the doctoral degree—became the gold standard of academic achievement.

The German idealists had a completely different self-understanding of what they were doing. They regarded philosophy’s task as the overcoming of the various conceptual and empirical obstacles that Kant posed to humans realizing their godlike potential, which they understood in terms of the Enlightenment’s secularization of Christian eschatology as “progress.” From this standpoint, Hegel seemed to have given the most definitive answer—certainly definitive enough to have inspired Feuerbach, Marx, and the other “Young Hegelians” who managed to destabilize European politics in the middle third of the 19th century. And to a large extent, this idealist understanding of the history of philosophy remains in discussions of the discipline’s role in the history of politics and international relations; hence, the success of, say, Fukuyama (1992).

Nevertheless, in terms of philosophy’s official disciplinary history, the death of Hegel is cast as an occasion to reboot philosophy back to Kant, from which it might carry on as if the German idealists had never existed. Thus, the more unavoidable idealists—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel himself—are seen as inhabiting some failed offshore intellectual archipelago of mere antiquarian interest. Here, one needs to attend to the various “Back to Kant” movements launched in the second half of 19th-century Germany, which informed a wide range of metaphysical positions, from Friedrich Lange’s materialism to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. These academic movements shared a willingness to work within Kant’s constraints on human capacities. By the end of the 19th century, this resulted in a proliferation of “Neo-Kantianisms,” each justifying the specialization of inquiry on methodological, ontological, and/or axiological grounds. On this view, philosophy is no longer lighting the way to human progress by foreshadowing a unified vision of reality but instead is simply mapping the terrain on which never-ending but necessarily partial epistemic journeys are taken. Thomas Kuhn’s “evolutionary” view of science, with its self-organizing and self-destroying paradigms, provided a more dynamic update of the same basic idea for the late 20th century.

The Americans imported the Neo-Kantian version of the German university into their higher education system, resulting in the ascendancy of doctoral programs, which in the first half of the 20th century came into increasing conflict with the traditional liberal arts basis of U.S. academic life. Perhaps the most wide-ranging and sustained version of this struggle was played out during Robert Maynard Hutchins’s presidency of the University of Chicago (1929-1945). To be sure, Hutchins, a staunch defender of liberal arts against the encroachment of the social sciences, ultimately lost that battle, which served to push the liberal arts into the margins of academic life, where it remains an exotic species to this day.

However, the discipline of philosophy played out a more specific version of the struggle. It is often forgotten that in the 19th century, American philosophy had largely adopted a German idealist modus operandi, which suited the nation’s aspirational self-understanding as the next world-historic player. Beyond the quite explicitly “Neo-Hegelian” philosophers who populated American universities at the turn of the century, one can even detect in the common conceptual framings of, say, Peirce, Royce, and Dewey—among the most original philosophers of the period—a debt to the idealist tradition. However, the crucial person here is William James, who as a young man had been immersed in the emerging Neo-Kantian German academic culture. This led him to hire Hugo Münsterberg to run Harvard’s psychology lab, during which he invented the role of the “expert witness” in court proceedings. Although James himself was never a convert to the cult of expertise, he helped to normalize it in a country whose democratic sensibility would have been otherwise ill-disposed toward it (Winter 2012, chapter 1).

In any case, the institutional triumph of Neo-Kantianism, first in the United States and then the rest of the world, would send Humboldt spinning in his grave—but not only Humboldt. Also left spinning would be all those late 19th-century German scientists now regarded as disciplinary founders who nevertheless saw themselves as operationalizing the issues raised by the German idealists in humanity’s quest to grasp all of reality. Indeed, what we now recognize as the modern academic disciplines emerged as part of a negotiated settlement among metaphysical worldviews that were competing for academic dominance (Heidelberger 2004). The settlement effectively allowed space for all of them. Put plainly: Fields like “biology,” “chemistry,” and “physics” originally stood not for a discrete domain of objects but a distinct way to regard everything. Where I part company with Frodeman and Briggle, whose critique of contemporary academic philosophy I share, is that I would like to see a reinvention of Humboldtian idealism for our own times (e.g., Fuller 2013).

For their own part, Frodeman and Briggle aspire to something considerably more modest, namely, a style of training that would enable the graduate to bring philosophical insight into all manner of everyday affairs and policy matters. They call the result “field philosophy,” by analogy to the sort of “field work” conducted by ethnographers and ecologists. My guess is that they would be relatively comfortable with the “business school” model of philosophy that I sketched at the start. However, from the five responses to Socrates Tenured, it is clear that their philosophical colleagues have a hard time making sense of their project. I have arranged the texts in the order which Frodeman and Briggle respond to them in the article that concludes the symposium. The order ranges from most to least hostile, which also seems to correspond from least to most understanding: Eric Schliesser, Babette Babich, Ashley Shew, Raphael Sassower, and Stephen Turner. A telling point that our two authors make in their omnibus response is that while professional philosophers may be very acute in technical argument, they appear incapable of thinking with anything like the same level of rigor when considering philosophy’s potential impact on the larger world. Given that Socrates Tenured is a relatively easy philosophical book to read, and looking over the tenor of the responses, I can only agree. At points, the symposium appears to suggest a discipline in a state of denial.

However, to end on a more constructive note, let me return to Robert Maynard Hutchins’s efforts to promote the liberal arts ethos in 20th-century U.S. higher education. One of his protégés was Mortimer Adler, who is perhaps best known for introducing what he admitted with some pride as a “middle brow” philosophical culture to the average mid-20th century American household (Rubin 1992). The centerpiece of Adler’s quiet cultural revolution was a set of 54 volumes and a reading program surrounding “The Great Books” from Homer and the Greek dramatists to William James and Sigmund Freud, all admittedly written by dead white males (the possible exception being St Augustine). Very much in tune with Hutchins, whose own expertise lay in natural law theory, Adler embedded his middle brow philosophy in an updated version of Aristotelianism, understood as a metaphysical horizon firmly grounded in human existence, where virtues of wisdom and prudence prevail in all things. Given that Socrates Tenured encourages similar virtues in the “field philosopher,” it would be interesting for its authors in future work to reflect on the usefulness of cultivating such an unashamedly antiexpert “middle brow” approach to philosophy to support their own project.