In a recent 3:AM Magazine interview, Richard Kraut raises some of the same concerns about the ever-increasing pace of philosophy and rush to publish that Ruth Millikan raised in her Dewey Lecture and which I have raised several times here at the Cocoon. Kraut says:
You ask about changes in the way philosophy is done and its status. I was an undergraduate and a graduate student in the 60s, and when I look back at the 40 years of philosophical work that has been done since then, my sense is that it has been a period of tremendous growth and accomplishment. The subject of moral philosophy has been enriched by many great figures like Rawls, Nagel, Scanlon, Williams, and Parfit. In the study of ancient philosophy, there have been many advances in our understanding of the three main Hellenistic schools (stoicism, epicureanism, skepticism), while the study of Plato and Aristotle has also flourished. My sense is that as an intellectual practice academic philosophy is in a healthy condition. The importance of such major thinkers as Hegel and Heidegger is more widely acknowledged than it was when I was a student, and there is a broad consensus among academic philosophers that the subject should never lose touch with the canon of great historical works of earlier centuries.
Since philosophy is inherently an adversarial activity (one is always arguing against someone), it is in a way remarkable that we agree as much as we do about which problems ought to be taken seriously and which authors should be read. One unhealthy change should be mentioned, however: it has become necessary for academic philosophers to do quite a bit of publishing in order to remain in the profession. Graduate students are encouraged to have one or two publications in professional journals. At research universities (and even at some teaching-oriented liberal arts colleges), junior faculty members must have five or six publications or a book, if they want to become tenured. There is nothing unfair about any of this; these or comparable quantitative standards apply to every academic field. But I think philosophy is a field in which it often takes decades to reach a point at which one has something very important and worthwhile to say. One result is that some talented philosophers who might have done valuable work leave the field because they are developing too slowly. I suspect that many other academic fields do not suffer in the same way from the pressure, which arose in the 1970s, to publish and establish one’s reputation at an early stage of one’s career. Is economics, for example, losing talented economists because of the need to publish? I doubt it. But I’m pretty sure that philosophy is.
Thoughts?
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