We should lament the demise of philosophy departments

"Philosophy has taught us why a urinal is an artwork". I'm all for it, but this is not an achievement I'd have drawn attention to.

Response to Brian Ball & Patrycja Kaszynska I was surprised by the observation that, in general, disciplines are not differentiated by their subject matter. Isn’t it precisely what distinguishes, say, oceanography from linguistics that each has a field of enquiry and its own methods of investigation? I wonder what it is that gives philosophers in their university departments the confidence to think of the methodologies of other disciplines as ‘orthodox’, and as ‘rabbit-holes’ into which philosophers in their deliberations are preserved from falling. Surely no discipline boasts only a single, ‘right’ methodology; and how is it that philosophers bring to physics, or history, a perspective, an ‘objectivity’ that physicists and historians lack? I am sure that these practitioners would defend their capacity for self-criticism and analysis with the same rigour that philosophers claim for themselves. Is it likely that non-philosophers will have heard of, never mind read, Barcan, Kripke, Lewis, Hintikka, Tarski, Danto, Millikan, Boden, Jeffrey, Grice, and Sellars? Perhaps the AI fraternity of the fairly recent past will have come across the work of Margaret Boden; but theorists of reasoning have contributed little if anything to the way we reason in so-called ‘ordinary’ language; such language-in-use is impatient of axioms and equations that affect to mimic the supposed certainties of mathematics. Kahneman in his Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) and Mercier and Sperber in The Enigma of Reason (2019) owe the above theorists of logic and semantics little or nothing. A case could be made for the influence of Peter Singer on eating habits among a tiny minority of book-reading vegetarians; but the long-term trend towards meat-and-dairy-avoidance has been as much climate-emergency-driven as it has been the writings of any one individual. Feminism has taken even longer to bring about gender-equality, and we are not there yet; Wollstonecraft, a thinker rather than a professing philosopher, did undoubtedly contribute to feminist thinking if not directly to suffragism. It is not to re-phrase the golden rule, but it is to invoke it, when we acknowledge that we are just one self-regarding species among many, and when we accord to women the same rights that we accord to men. Asking ‘what if’ questions is by no means the preserve of philosophy: historians and political scientists ask them – indeed, scientists of all stripes do so when they hypothesise and test their hypotheses in the field or laboratory. They are probably quite happy to leave it to philosophers and theologians to decide ‘what ought to be done’, on the strength of their ‘what if’ answers. It is true that ‘philosophy’ aims at an unusual level of generality’; but it should be wary of attempting to construct theories for which its tools are either inadequate or out of date, or it will find itself being merged with other humanities subjects in Integrated Studies, or Liberal Arts departments, if it is not discarded altogether. The job-security of all those metaphysicians and epistemologists cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. Colin Swatridge