Meta-Philosophy

Don't Hold Your Breath

I haven’t yet gotten Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works, but John's description of it provokes some thinking. Unfair labor practices in the university? Gee, I wonder if that could have anything to do with the explosive (60%) increase in the number of grad students in the last ten years (see earlier post)?

Or with this: if we take the top 20 Leiter Report departments (according to the latest rankings), we see that the total number of tenure track professors employed in those departments went from 403 in 1994/5 to 443 in 2004/5, a healthy 10% increase. But the number of faculty employed in philosophy departments generally, according to the Directory of American Philosophers, went down over the same period, from 8756 to 8567. Meaning that the number of faculty employed at non-top-twenty Departments went from 8353 to 8124, a 3% decrease.

Hmm— a thriving elite, a suddenly increasing proletariat, and a middle ground not quite holding steady—I wonder if this could be philosophy in the Age of Bush? Could politics really affect philosophy?

If the APA were a responsible professional organization like the MLA and the APSA, these issues would be receiving discussion at a national level. But respirationem noli reservare, as the monks used to say. Maybe we should ask all those TA’s.

Or are they too busy grading papers?

Marc Bousquet YouTube interviews

Marc Bousquet, author of the new and highly recommended NYU Press book How the University Works, and the man behind the essential blog howtheuniversityworks.com, has some great YouTube interviews on labor practices in the contemporary American university. Check out my colleague Michelle Massé's line at the end of her interview "Higher Ed: A Pyramid Scheme" on the coming K-12-ization of the university. Massé (English and Women's & Gender Studies at LSU), is co-editor with Katie Hogan (English and WGS at Carlow University) of the forthcoming collection, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces from SUNY Press.

Michelle's point is very well-taken: wouldn't you rather be a "loving teacher" than merely a "professor"?

Reflections on Balkanization I

There is, of course, no such thing as a ”causal chain.” When you look to the antecedents of any event, you discover not only whole flocks of previous events, but entirely different orders of events. Just my typing the last word in this sentence is going to involve rafts of chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, institutions, politics, and heaven knows what else, and now I'm almost too tired to do it.

This is why a book like Scott Soames’s, which omits all orders but one--the argumentative philosophical order—is not a work of history. To capture wie es eigentlich gewesen with analytic philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Soames would have had to include discussion of political pressures on philosophers, personality disputes (à la Wittgenstein’s Poker), religion (a not-so-subterranean force in much analytical philosophy), accidents of language, and so  forth. This doesn’t denigrate his achievement; it is a matter of seeing what sort of achievement it is. If I read my Aristotle correctly— Poetics 1451b—the proper name for what Soames has produced is “poetry.” It is like a Platonic dialogue in which the Forms themselves are doing the talking.

So the balkanization of philosophy, which is probably its dominant trait these days, cannot be given a linear explanation—it cannot be the product of a single causal chain (any more than anything else can). It cannot, therefore, result solely from the increase in size of the profession, as Rescher and Soames suggest. Indeed, the figures I adduced in my previous postings have suggested that the increase in size of the profession may not be nearly large enough to have played any significant role at all.

So what do you do, as an historian? You make as complete a list of possible causal factors as you can, and you try to weight them. What other things might we put on our list of causal factors in the balkanization of philosophy?

• Institutional pressures: employment in academia depends upon a dossier that can fit on a dean’s desk. It is largely, then, a matter of letters of recommendation from prominent figures in your field. The smaller your field, more likely it is that you know its prominent figures personally; the easier it is to get letters; and the more effective those letters are likely to be. Balkanization is found across academia because it is such a good survival strategy.

• Lack of good unifying ideas: mainstream American philosophy has suffered a number of blows since the early 70’s. Kripke, according to Soames, showed that the main philosophical problems turned, not on how language works, but on what reality is like. Rorty, according to me and others, showed that the dominant paradigm, being foundationalist, was little more than faith-based. Mainstream philosophy now appears to be caught between an old paradigm widely recognized as untenable, and a new paradigm that hasn't shown up. The better part of wisdom, perhaps, is for philosophers just to trickle quietly away into safely specialized backwaters

• Proliferation of Journals: More intriguing, however, may be this possibility: Consider the two areas in which there has been an undeniable explosion, in the number of grad students and the number of journals. It is clear that a 60% increase in the number of philosophical journals would certainly give the impression of an explosion in philosophy as such, certainly to someone who (like a good historian) is trying to keep up with what is published in journals.

And the explosion of journals is not unconnected with the explosion in grad students, because the real demand for journals comes not from readers, but from prospective contributors. Grad students need jobs; they therefore need to publish; and they have no time to write books. They, and their older siblings in the junior professoriat, are the real market for new journals.

It used to take money to start a journal, but online publication and other new technologies have obviated that. Now it takes primarily two things: a staff, basically a few philosophers who care enough about the prospective journal to devote some time and effort to it; and another group of philosophers, hopefully larger, to be your potential contributors. If those two problems can be solved, everything else—including library subscriptions—will follow.

It is easier for a group of like-minded friends to start a specialized journal than to get together the kind of more diverse group needed for a more general journal, and it is easier to ask your friends for articles than to try and get submissions from strangers. So journal publishing goes together with balkanization. Perhaps the proliferation of journals, resulting from the proliferation of grad students, is one factor producing the impression of growth and balkanization to which both Rescher and Soames appeal.

Journals encourage balkanization in another way. A book is out there for sale on the shelf of a bookstore. It shares that space with very different books; my book on Hegel will be a matter of inches away from Christopher Peacock’s A Study of Concepts. Michael Williams’ Unnatural Doubts may be right next to Marianne Williamson’s commentary on A Course in Miracles. Any of these books thus runs the risk of being picked up and thumbed over by someone profoundly unsympathetic to its subject matter and approach, let alone its theses.

Journal authors, however, have an added layer of protection from this. Someone who is into Peacock is not going to be looking into Hegel-Studien. A Heidegger scholar won’t bother with Mind. And so specialized journals disseminate their authors’ views primarily to the like-minded. Books do this too, of course—but not with the same comfort level.

One final thought. Let us assume that an average journal publishes 15 articles in a year. In 1994-5, according to what I posted previously, the 166 philosophy journals would thus have published 2490 articles. Since there were 11184 “philosophers” in that year, this works out to .23 articles per philosopher per year. Ten years later, 267 journals would have published a total of 4005 articles, written by 12703 “philosophers—“ .32 articles per philosopher per year. With half again as many articles coming out per philosopher, isn't some lowering of quality inevitable?

Further Statistics on the Philosophy Profession

In his 2006 “The Transformation of American Philosophy” (available through the APA web site), Nicholas Rescher refers to the enormous growth in the philosophy profession:

The discipline presently has more than 8,000 members, and the comprehensive Directory of American Philosophers for 2004-05 lists some 14,000 philosophers affiliated to colleges and universities in the USA and Canada, while in the late 1930’s, on the eve of World War II, the membership of the American Philosophical Association stood at some 750.

These numbers are a bit tricky. We don’t know how large a proportion of  philosophers belonged to the APA in the Thirties (I know many that don’t today), and we don’t know how many Canadian philosophers did (Rescher’s second figure includes Canadians; the number of American philosophers in 2004/5 is given by the Directory as 12,703). Moreover, strictly speaking this latter figures represent philosophers affiliated to philosophy departments in colleges and universities; there is evidence that more and more philosophers are being housed outside such departments. But the trend is clear.

Toward the end of his 2003  Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Scott Soames makes an observation superficially similar to Rescher’s:

In my opinion, philosophy has changed substantially in the last thirty or so years. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publication has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied. Not only is the broad field of philosophy today far too vast to be embraced by one mind, something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields (Soames,  op. cit. vol. II p. 463).

Both maintain that as one result of this increase in size, “balkanization reigns supreme” in philosophy today (Rescher’s words). One result of this, Rescher notes, is democratization within the profession. With so many more philosophers working in so many more subfields, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a few individuals and departments to dominate the whole. Another result is that American philosophers do not influence the larger society; for the Balkanization is such that they cannot even influence each other. A third result, referred to both by Rescher and Soames, is that a history of American philosophy is impossible to write. As Soames puts it, such a history

…would look, not like one linear and integrated story but like many distinct and overlapping stories…It is, I think, a mistake to look for one big picture of analytical philosophy in this era. What we need is a collection of more focused pictures, each giving a view of the major developments of related lines of work, and each drawn with an eye to illuminating the larger lessons for work in neighboring fields (Soames, vol. cit. p. 464).

Though both Rescher and Soames refer to a huge increase in the size of the philosophy profession, they date it differently. Rescher is referring to the whole 65 years from just before World War II until the 2004/5 edition of the Directory of American Philosophers. Soames is just referring to the 30 years before his writing, or 1973-2003.

Figures I have developed from the Directory of American Philosophers tell a somewhat different story than Soames’, and a more nuanced one than Rescher’s.

In 1964-5, the first year of the Directory I could get, the number of philosophy faculty members was over 4755 faculty members.

(Pause for explanations: “philosophers” is active faculty plus grad students plus emeriti. For various reasons, I believe that the Directory's category of faculty members, those holding permanent positions in philosophy departments, is a better indication of the size of the profession than is "philosophers." The Directory’s numbers, as I mentioned in a previous post, are at best approximate; it is the trends they indicate which count. Even these are not always accurate: early on, the Directory had problems getting people to return its questionnaire, which is one reason why its then-editor, Archie Bahm, was careful to say “more than 4755.” Still, 4755 is the figure we have, and the only figure we are likely to get. Same for the others)

By 1972-3, when Soames’s time period begins, faculty had risen to 6870—a 44% increase in just eight years. This presumably reflects the booming job market of the 60’s. By 2004/5, the number had increased to 8567, a further increase of 26% in 30 years. In other words, the rate of increase after 1972/3 decreased by a factor of slightly more than 5.

The enormous increase in size of the philosophy profession thus occurred before Soames dates it. Indeed, during the last ten years of Soames's thirty year period (plus one year--i.e. 1972-3 to 1994-5), the number of philosophy faculty shrank by a couple of hundred (perhaps more, depending on the identity of the 1919 “unknowns,” as noted in a previous posting). The increase in the overall number of “philosophers” from 11,184 (1994/5) to 12,703 (2004/5) occurred entirely within the ranks of emeriti and graduate students. The latter have had a particularly “explosive” 163% increase in the last ten years.

I’ll have more later, but right now I want to pose a question. In 1973, philosophy faculty amounted to 6870 tenured or tenure track professors. The discipline was unified in that there were several figures whom you had to be acquainted with in to be a credible member of it: people like Quine and Davidson, among logicians/philosophers of language; Rawls and Nozick among social philosophers. A central debate, over Kripke’s theory of reference, was rocking the entire profession; but it was conducted, in the main, by only a couple of dozen philosophers.

Can the total Balkanization which reigned by 2004/5 be assigned to the presence among the philosophy faculty of just 1697 more members—an average growth of about 57 people per year? Or is it reasonable to suspect that other factors might be in play?

Some ten-year comparisons

I've been comparing the statistics for the profession given in the Directory of American Philosophers for 2004/5 with those for ten years earlier. The comparison is below (sorry the columns won't line up!):      

                          A. 1994-1995        B.2004-5         C. B as % of A

Philosophers                11184              12703                   114%

Active Faculty               8756                8567                    98%

Prof.                             3506              3023                     86%

Assoc. Prof.                   2022               1796                     89%

Assist. Prof.                  1696                1626                     96%

Unknown                      -----                 1919                      –––

Grad Students               1547                 2519                   163%

Journals                         166                  267                    160%

[Book?] Publishers           235                 183                     78%

Of the top twenty departments on the most recent Leiter Report (actually 22 because there is a three-way tie for 20th place), 10 grew;  9 shrank; and 3 stayed the same size. Of those which grew, the mean growth was 5.7 faculty. However, there was wide variation: one Department is reported as adding 15, another 10, and another 9
.
The mean shrinkage was 1.9; the largest shrinkage was by 4.

Aggregate growth in faculty at these 22 Departments was 40, or 10%. Subtracting the three departments named above, however, reduces that to 6.

During this decade, according to the web page of the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment in postsecondary degree granting institutions rose from 14,300,000 to 17,500,000, or 22%.

According to the MLA, enrollment in modern language courses rose from 1,096,603 to 1,522,770, or 39%.

No data on philosophy enrollments is available, but departments seem to be swamped, at least in lower division courses.

Caveats: as George Leamon, the Editor of the Directory, has pointed out, the figures it provides are not transparent. In particular:

(1) Are the “unknowns,” tabulated in 2004/5 but not in 1994/5, people whose status is so murky they cannot be assigned a rank—visitors, instructors, etc.? Or are they simply people who didn’t fill out that section of the form?

(2). Cross appointments are not tabulated, but would obviously reduce the figures here.

However, to the extent that the figures were obtained in the same way for both editions, we do have indications of some trends. I will reflect on these in a future post.

The Spears Conundrum

Britney Spears was rushed to the hospital last night "under the influence of an unknown substance."

As a Serious Philosopher, I don't like dwelling on celebrities, and specially not on those in as much trouble as ms. Spears--not unless there is an ontological lesson to be learned.

Question One: what's the deal? All substance is unknown--all we can know is properties of substance. This is why Locke called substance "x I know not what," and even doubted its existence--a doubt he retracted after being rebuked by Stillingfleet.

Which leads to Question Two: if the substance is unknown, how can we know that it has affected Britney?

We must be able to know something about this substance (viz. that it influences Britney), without knowing "what" it is. Which brings us to the Socratic "ti esti" question, the only possible answer to which is some kind of essence. So, clearly, Britney was under the influence of an unknown essence.

And this leads to Question Three: if an essence is unknown, how can we know that it is an essence?

At this point, an Hegelian (such as myself) would end what is clearly a fruitless chain of thought by saying that if the substance in question affects Britney, and that is all we know about it, then that (provisionally, of course) is its essence.

Let us, then, face this truth: There is a kind of thing whose essence it is to influence Britney Spears.

The price of accepting this is giving up the fixity of essence: the identification of anything as the essence of something else is only provisional, made by us for present purposes.

I am not claiming that Britney Spears is an Hegelian. But I am saying that her problems are to some degree ontological; and, like everyone else's ontological problems, they cannot be fully understood without Hegelian strategies.