Meta-Philosophy

In response, may I just add

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/09/newapps-has-a-new-cast-of-characters-but-is-still-imploding.html

Morris Judd VII

Raymond B. Allen was the President of the University of Washington. As such, he had to deal with Howard Phillips, the philosopher whose case (together with that of Joseph Butterworth, a professor of old English) became the single most important academic freedom case of the entire McCarthy Era. It was what the German call maßgebend: it set the parameters, procedures, and rationales for how these cases were handled across the country. And it was up to Raymond B. Allen to articulate what those parameters, procedures, and rationales should be.

This was the case, by the way, in which the professorial investigating committee cited the opinion that Phillips, the philosopher, had the reverse burden of proof from Butterworth, his colleague in the English Department:

As a teacher of philosophy, it might be suggested that, without specific proof, his objectivity as a teacher would necessarily be impaired by his strong bias in favor of a doctrinaire political philosophy (see my Time in the Ditch p. 30).

According to Jane Sanders’ history of McCarthyism at the University of Washington, Cold War on the Campus, at one point no fewer than eight members of the tenure committee at the University of Washington voted in ways that defined academic incompetence as “unfitness in a faculty member’s field of scholarship and teaching” (pp. 54-55). This would keep academic freedom cases involving Communist Party members within the Departments and the appropriate faculty committees. Clearly, there was strong support for this at the University.

But President Allen could not allow it. Allen was a complex figure, more complex than he is portrayed in my history of the McCarthy Era’s effects on American philosophy, Time in the Ditch. Today it is hard not to see him as a right wing henchman, which is how I presented him in that book. But he saw himself as squarely in the center—and this view was plausible enough that at his last faculty meeting as President of the University, he was given a standing ovation (Sanders p. 95).

Allen in fact was trying to defend the University from all outside influences—Communist and McCarthyite alike. He believed that it was better for administrators to do this difficult job than to leave the faculty to fend for themselves. But in order to do it, he had to get academic freedom cases out of individual Departments. Allen therefore opposed the eight members of the University of Washington Tenure Committee.

His argument (Sanders pp. 54-55) was that there is a single set of rules for all inquiry, imposed by the very concept—the very unambiguous concept—of objective truth. Though central administrations and Boards of Regents do not have scholarly expertise in individual fields, that doesn't matter because the rules of rationality do not vary across disciplines; they are the same for everyone. Therefore, who should and should not be fired was best left up to central administrations and Boards of Regents, not to scholars in the appropriate field.

Fearful symmetries are in play here. On one side we have the Logical Empiricists, besieged in Vienna by anti-Semitic would-be tyrants, on the one hand, and ambivalent about the Ostjuden on the other. On the other side we have Raymond B. Allen, besieged by McCarthyite forces from outside the university on the one hand, but not wanting to defend the Communists within on the other.

For both, salvation lay in the idea that there could be only one set of rules for rational inquiry--a set empty enough to exclude anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, McCarthyites, and Communists as need be. For both, too, the uniqueness of that set of rules was absolutely central, and needed to be fought for tooth and nail.

And not only in Seattle and Vienna. News of the moves, countermoves, arguments, rationales, and rationalizations at the University of Washington went right across the country—as I have said, the case  was maßgebend (cf. Sanders pp. 81-83). It must have gone into the office of the President of the University of Colorado. And when Morris Judd—in all innocence, in the belief that the quality of his arguments should actually matter—refused to answer the President’s questions, he sealed his fate.

For this President, like the other one, needed above all to get control of academic freedom cases, get them away from Departments and Tenure Committees and from everyone who believed that different disciplines have rules of their own. Rules that are distinctive and important enough that proper judgment of scholarly merit is properly located within the discipline of the person being judged—not with administrators and Regents.

So Morris Judd had to be fired—fired in order to defend the University against McCarthyite forces.

The whole thing at Washington played out with English professor Joseph Butterworth and Philosophy professor Herbert Phillips both getting fired. Butterworth spent the rest of his life working at odd jobs; Phillips eventually found work as a laborer (Sanders p. 97).

Allen left Washington in glory the following year, just ahead of major budget cuts, and eventually became the first Chancellor of UCLA. He arrived in Westwood just in time to sign off on the hiring of Rudolf Carnap.

And Morris Judd, whose fatal flaws were intelligence, honesty, moral sensitivity, and belief in reason--a man who exemplified everything philosophers should strive to be--went off to work in the junk yard.

He will not be forgotten.

Morris Judd VI

So the Logical Positivists, coming out of Viennese cultural politics, had strong incentives to

(1) adopt the view that rationality plays by only a single set of rules;

(2) make that view, in the specific form of the Principle of Verification, central to their philosophy; and

(3) to fight for it tooth and nail.

This whole stance, in the Viennese context, was entirely understandable. And when the Empiricists moved to America and became known as the Logical Positivists, it fit right in with a debate that was going on in the new country.

Remember what Morris Judd found out when, in 2002, he finally got to see his file? The exact words of the Boulder Daily Camera’s story were:

It confirmed what many people had suspected was the real reason for Judd's dismissal: His name had been added to a list of suspected subversives because he wouldn't give a straight answer to former CU President Robert Stearns' questions, "Are you a member of the Communist Party," and "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

Morris Judd later said the answer to these questions was No. But he did not believe it was proper for the University to ask them. Unfortunately, everybody was asking them, especially in the case of a Philosophy Department where background checks had been ordered on every single member.

Morris Judd may well have been asked such questions by his Department chair, for example, or the promotion and tenure committee at Colorado. But when he was asked it by the President of the University, the context was very different, and his refusal to answer propelled him into a situation where he could not survive.

That context is complex but important, and it will take a moment to explain.

In the McCarthy Era, Communists were never fired simply for being Communists—this is a free country, after all. Americans are dedicated to open inquiry and critical thinking, etc., etc. Americans aren’t afraid of ideas!

So the rationale for firing Communists, supplied by philosopher Sidney Hook, was that the Communist Party had nothing to do with ideas—it was, in fact, an assault on them.

Marxism and other heresies were acceptable for critical discussion within academia. But being a member of the Communist Party meant that you were following, not truth, but the Moscow line. You had sold your soul to Moscow; were therefore not a respectable scholar; and were therefore undeserving of academic employment.

This argument, I should note, did not sound as bad then as it sounds today; it gained a lot of currency from the Hitler/Stalin Pact. Anybody who stayed in the Communist Party after that was about as politically astute as Martin Heidegger.

So: Professor X is a Communist, but we can’t fire him for being a Communist, so we’ll fire him for not being a “respectable scholar.” The next question was, who decides who is or is not a respectable scholar?

A lot of American academics felt that this should be up to individual departments, who alone had the expertise in their fields to decide such things.

In their view, the rules of rationality are at the disciplinary level, and there are many (or at least several) different sets of them. Somebody in one discipline could not be presumed able to judge the scholarship of someone in another, and non-scholars could not be presumed able to  judge anyone.

This view amounts to a tightening-up of Kant's battle cry of academic (i.e. philosophical) freedom: Über Gelehrte können nur Gelehrte urteilen!

But it was intolerable to a man named Raymond B. Allen.

Morris Judd V

There has been an awful lot of attention paid, beginning with the Logical Positivists themselves, to the content of the Verification Principle. The Principle, roughly stated according to the Carnap text I discussed last time, holds that only sentences which can be empirically verified by the scientific community have meaning—and rough statements were all it ever got. Nobody ever figured out exactly what “verification” consisted in, and as for “meaning”—they just stipulated.

I’m interested in the Principle's form—not its logical form, but in the kind of form which function follows. And here we see its form is that of an exclusion which is

(a). very broad—broad enough to take in the “theses” of both the Ostjuden and their bitter enemies, the anti-Semites—and a whole lot of other stuff along the way. Husserl, for example, thinks you should submit phenomenological theses for verification, not by others, but by yourself; that is what he calls Evidenz. He’s out. Kierkegaard thinks that real truth is personally transformative—that can’t be adjudicated by a community, so he’s out too. And so on.

(b). absolute: utterances are distinguished from one another by their meaning, whatever that may be; so once you’ve called something meaningless, there is nothing further to say and no reason to mess with it any further. Husserl and Kierkegaard are no more or less meaningless than some Austrian anti-Semite.

(c). new—indeed, according to sociologist Randall Collins, this kind of exlusion was “unprecedented” in the entire history of philosophy, all the way back to China 5000 years ago (Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998 p. 751).

The form of exclusion brought about by the Principle of Verification represents a major innovation not only within philosophy, but in academia itself. From the first academy--Plato's--on, all judgments are supposed to be subject to critical scrutiny, and this includes judgments that someone else’s philosophy is worthless. So philosophers have traditionally tried to read and understand one another even when they did not like one another; Socrates talked with the Sophists. But the Logical Positivists changed this: to them, “metaphysical” philosophers were meaningless and so not worth reading.

Importantly, this judgment itself was exempt from criticism—for in order to revise it, one would have to collect the necessary data by actually reading the person. Labeling philosopher x “metaphysical,” i.e. meaningless, was a final verdict—a sort of philosophical death penalty.

Is it ever right to tell people not even to read the writings of other people? I don’t think so, especially in the case of people who consider themselves educators; but I can understand doing so in the case of anti-Semites. I, and I daresay the world, would be happier if no one had ever read Oscar Panizza (to say nothing of Adolf Hitler).

So telling people not to read Hitler and Panizza is wrong but understandable. But what if the price of telling people not to read Hitler and Panizza  is that you must also tell them not to read Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, or Derrida?

This could be even wronger, and for two reasons:

(a). the writer in question may in fact not be a “metaphysician.” Perhaps she really is, somewhere in the depths of her pages, offering theses for rational adjudication by a community. If so, se has been wrongly convicted.

(b). Or maybe the court—the community—has been wrong about the law. Maybe the person’s actions come under a different set of laws.

And here is the fateful thing: that can‘t happen in the case of the Logical Positivists, because for them there is just one set of rules for determining whether something it meaningful or not.

Behind both (a) and (b), then, lies a philosophical absolutizing of one of modernity’s least attractive components—the view that rationality operates by a single set of rules.  Modernity began with that view, for it was born with the conviction that everything premodern is ipso facto unworthy; hence the querelle des anciens et des modernes. But that doesn’t make it right.

The single-set-of-rules view was much more defensible back in Vienna. There, it would work out to something like this: If we countenance the Ostjuden playing by their rules, we will have to allow the anti-Semites to play by theirs. Nobody decent or sane wants that, and so the Ostjuden have to go into the outer darkness along with Husserl and Oscar Panizza.

The way the Logical Positivists lumped together philosophical approaches which differed from their own with contemptible pseudo-discourses like anti-Semitism was thus entirely understandable in the context of the times. The struggle was a desperate one and, as we know, the good guys lost.

What is not so understandable is what we find when we move back from this distant time and place (yet so close, to so many of us) to the State of Colorado—and to its University.

Morris Judd IV

What connects the Ostjüdisch immigration to Vienna with the Philosophy Department and President’s Office at the University of Colorado? What would connect American philosophers to something as foreign as central European social movements in the middle of the Twentieth Century?

Short answer: Logical Positivism. The long answer will take a while, and let me begin by asking a different question.

When the Logical Positivists inveigh against “metaphysics,” do they really mean metaphysics? Metaphysics as we understand it is a philosophical enterprise claiming to provide knowledge that does not come from the senses. Is that their real target?

In Carnap’s 1928 “Preface” to the First Edition of the Aufbau, the enemy is not just a few people holding professorial chairs, but something much larger. We see this where Carnap talks about the “inner kinship” between scientific philosophy, architecture and other unspecified efforts to gain “meaningful forms of personal and collective life.” Were architects also fighting philosophical claims to possess non-sensory knowledge?

Writing at a time of extreme social turmoil in Vienna, where he had arrived from Berlin two years before, Carnap is calling all of modernity to his side. At times he almost paraphrases Marx: “It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual.” (Marx had written about a society in which the liberation of all was the condition for the freedom of each.)

The political dimensions of Logical Positivism have been investigated by people like Michael Friedman, Ron Giere, George Reisch, Alan W. Richardson, Thomas Uebel, and others far more knowledgeable than I. The question I want to ask is: what exactly is being gotten at under the title of “metaphysics” in the “Preface” to the Aufbau?

The answer, at least in part, is a mode of discourse which arises, like all discourse, out of what Carnap calls “emotions, drives, dispositions and general living conditions,” but which does not submit the theses thus formulated for rational justification by others.

Anti-Semitism, for example. Heidegger’s Nazi engagement was still five years in the future when Carnap write the “Preface,” but it is not hard to see that “metaphysics” is already a code word, if not for Nazism, then for anti-Semitism and other anti-modern discourses—all the viciously irrational forces that were messing up European history. This explains their strong animus against it—contempt is not too strong a word.

Seeing anti-Semitism as the real target of Carnap’s critique of metaphysics has merit beyond its explanatory power. Suppose that Carnap is to be read as the Americans read him—that is, when he says “metaphysics” all he means is the propounding of unverifiable assertions as if they were scientific. Would you respect him? With all that is going on in Vienna? With armed gangs roughing up Jews, and the government caving in to it with alacrity? Shouldn’t Carnap—and all other decent people—be up in arms against them? If Carnap doesn’t think “anti-Semitism” when he writes “metaphysics,” shame on him!

But if he wants to attack anti-Semitism, why not do so? Why disguise it behind a broader trend, unnamed in the “Preface,” and then openly attack what seems to be a different example of that trend, academic metaphysics?

Many reasons, but in part because an attack on anti-Semitism would ipso facto be a defense of Jews—and in particular of the Ostjuden. Even assimilated Viennese Jews were cautious about defending the Ostjuden (Joseph Roth was a major exception), because it could backfire. One of the things anti-Semites liked to do, and had done for centuries, was ‘expose” Jews who thought they could assimilate (read, if you can, Oscar Panizza’s 1893 play “The Operated Jew;” it will make you physically sick). Associating yourself, as an acculturated Austrian Jew, with the Ostjuden could provide fuel for this particular genre of anti-Semitic writing. But even non-Jews, like Carnap, were reluctant to defend the Ostjuden. After all, the Ostjuden were religious fundamentalists, and not exactly modern in their own outlook. They, too, were not about to submit their “theses” to rational adjudication.

Problem: how to attack the anti-Semites without being drawn into a defense of the Ostjuden? Answer: find a principle broad enough to exclude both, and then call what you are attacking by another name. The Principle of Verification, will do quite well. It will enable you to exclude both the ravings of the anti-Semites and the humble beliefs of the Ostjuden (what philosophers today call “folk beliefs”). It will enable you to attack anti-Semitism without naming it, because your overt target is the broader field of “metaphysics.” And by making verification not merely the condition of science but of all “meaningful” discourse, you can make your exclusion absolute—as absolute as it should be. For what is senseless should not even be voiced:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Morris Judd III

To understand the significance of Morris Judd’s firing in the context of American philosophy, it will help to journey to a very different place and time: to Vienna between the Wars (i.e. 1918-1939)—the home of the Vienna Circle.

People who read Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value for the first time are often shocked at the vehemence of his anti-Semitism—Jews are “secretive” (p. 22), are likened to a “tumor” in the history of Europe (p. 20), are uncreative (“the greatest Jewish thinker is only a talent” pp. 18-19) and so forth. It’s frankly worse than anything the Nazi Heidegger ever said.

After the shock comes puzzlement. All the stuff is standard anti-Semitic fare—right down to the recurrent focus on (Felix) Mendelssohn as an “uncreative” Jew. How can Wittgenstein have signed on to such run-of-the-Schloß garbage? Many of the statements, moreover, are oddly ambiguous between what Wittgenstein himself thinks Jews are like and what Europeans in general think they are like. (The ambiguity is odd because it seems to be studied, but I won’t go into that.) Moreover, how can someone with three Jewish grandparents write such trash? What sort of self-loathing is in play?

There are many ways to loathe yourself, some more direct than others. Maybe you belong to a group of people you absolutely despise. Maybe you belong to a group of people of whom you despise some but not others. And maybe you think you have good reasons for your contempt.

Wittgenstein’s anti-Semitic passages seem to have been written in 1931, shortly after his return to Cambridge; but they are clearly influenced by his experiences growing up in Vienna. And the history of Vienna has a strange intersection with the history of the Jews around that time.

Beginning near the end of the 19th Century, the ethnic composition of Vienna had undergone a major change as Ostjuden—Galician Jews—migrated (or fled) westwards, along with Jews from Bohemia and Hungary. In the wake of the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, this accelerated. No fewer than 36000 Ostjuden now piled into a catastrophically impoverished and culturally demoralized Vienna, joining the earlier groups (see Chapter One of Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918-1938 by Harriet Pass Freidenreich, and Brothers and Strangers by Steven E. Aschheim). Where the earlier arrivals often spoke German at home (rather than Yiddish) and dressed in standard Western attire, these new ones did not; they looked and sounded strange. They had also been desperately poor even before leaving the Eastern provinces, and now were destitute:

Some dwelt in tiny hovels with six persons in a room, others slept on the floor in small shelters accommodating fifty to sixty people, while the homeless slept on park benches in the Prater. According to [Joseph] Roth [Juden auf der Wanderschaft] the Viennese population despised the Ostjuden, and even their wealthier cousins and coreligionists did not accept them (Friedenreich p. 15).

This all produced a vicious anti-Semitic backlash. Anti-Semites were not content with their usual inane broadsides; they adopted a policy of “armed promenades” through Jewish neighborhoods designed to intimidate Jews—or worse (see  Gebriele Kohlinbauer-Fritz, “Jiddishe Subkulttur in Wien,” in Bettelheim & Ley, Ist Jetzt Hier die “wahre Heimat p. 93). Much of their anti-Jewish rhetoric, while ostensibly aimed at the Ostjuden, actually attacked the assimilated Austrian Jews. The government caved and started expelling Ostjuden—back to Galicia and, more happily, on to America.

The “wealthier cousins” of the Ostjuden included the Wittgensteins—wealthier by far. They also included most of the notably less wealthy members of the Vienna Circle. How could these highly assimilated Jews, Germanic in their language and culture, (and, in the case of Wittgenstein, Catholic in his upbringing) not feel both deeply threatened by the anti-Semites—and deeply ambivalent about the new arrivals? On the one hand, you share a common heritage with them; on the other, they are not like you—they speak a different language, they are religiously fundamentalist, and they are poor. And most of the people with whom you do share a language, economic life, and culture hate their guts. What are you going to do? To disown them would be callous; to accept them would mean turning your back on everything you value.

What to do? The answer adopted by the Vienna Circle would change philosophy forever--and indirectly illuminate the fate of Morris judd.

On Morris Judd II: the American Context

I said that the obituary of Morris Judd in the Boulder Daily Camera contained important new information about how the McCarthy Era caused trouble for American philosophy, perhaps affecting it permanently. That is going to take a while to explain, but let me begin with the last paragraph of the obituary. It quotes Colorado English Professor Paul Leavitt:

“He was a man of great poise and dignity,” he said. “He had virtually every injustice visited on him, and you never once heard him complain or whine.”

Morris Judd was a better person than I am. When I found out that he was still alive, I complained and whined. But I and several other people could not get the American Philosophical Association to do anything to honor Morris Judd, or even to say that his fellow philosophers regretted that he did not have the career he so wanted and deserved.

The University of Colorado, once the facts had come out, held “Morris Judd Day” to honor him, and though he was in his mid-eighties he enjoyed that thoroughly. The APA did nothing. I just wanted to get that on the record.

The other passage I want to cite is the more revealing:

It [the 126 page report finally made public in 2002] confirmed what many people had suspected was the real reason for Judd's dismissal: His name had been added to a list of suspected subversives because he wouldn't give a straight answer to former CU President Robert Stearns' questions, "Are you a member of the Communist Party," and "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

Stearns originally said Judd was let go because he was a boring teacher…

First, a bit of context (the source is Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, p. 249-250):

Morris Judd was an untenured professor at the University of Colorado in 1950. Late in that year, David Hawkins, a tenured philosopher of science at Colorado, testified that he had been a member of the Communist party, but refused to testify about anyone else, The Board of Regents of the University then ordered background checks on all members of the Philosophy department.

Morris Judd told the investigators that he was not a Communist, but (as we see above) refused to discuss his politics further. He was fired over the protests of the Philosophy Department, which considered him a highly promising instructor. Judd spent his working life managing the office in his family's junkyard, and in real estate.

This was not an isolated case. At that time there were only a handful of serious philosophy departments west of the Mississippi—Berkeley, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and perhaps a couple in Texas.

Of these, Berkeley was already under heavy fire because of the California Oath Controversy (1949-1951), in which Jacob Loewenberg, a philosopher, was one of the few tenured professors to lose his job.

Washington had been through the Howard Phillips affair earlier in 1950; in what is generally recognized as one of the most important cases of academic freedom in American history, Phillips, a philosopher, was fired for being a Communist. He spent the rest of this life working at odd jobs (like Judd, Phillips has never been honored or commemorated in any way by the APA).

Only Oregon appears to have been without incident. A systematic purge of Western philosophers was clearly underway, and the news could not have failed to percolate back East.

But why would Judd’s refusal to answer questions from the university president cost him his job? Stay tuned….

Morris Judd has died

Morris Judd, one of the last survivors of the McCarthy Era assault on American philosophy, has died in Colorado. He was 91. His obituary in the Boulder Daily Camera is here. Exerpts are below. They contain important new information about how the McCarthy Era may have distorted  the nature of philosophy in America, and I will address these in future postings. Right now it is time to honor the man.

Judd was dismissed from the university in the 1950s after refusing to answer questions about his political beliefs in the CU inquest that produced a secret 126-page report. CU's Board of Regents voted 50 years after Judd's firing to make public that document, which had been locked away in a bank vault.

It confirmed what many people had suspected was the real reason for Judd's dismissal: His name had been added to a list of suspected subversives because he wouldn't give a straight answer to former CU President Robert Stearns' questions, "Are you a member of the Communist Party," and "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

Stearns originally said Judd was let go because he was a boring teacher -- even though his department had judged him the most valuable of its instructors, upped his pay and recommended his promotion.

When the secret report was released in 2002, Judd was awarded a medal for his service to academic freedom.

CU English professor Paul Levitt…said  “I think everyone in this university should be introduced to the dark side of the '50s at CU,” he said. “One would hope they would be disinclined to repeat it. But history does repeat itself.”

After Judd was banished from the university, he worked for his family's business in Greeley. He also worked in the travel industry and property development, according to his family.

Levitt said Judd impressed him because even after his name was cleared, Judd "never railed or screamed."

“He was a man of great poise and dignity,” he said. “He had virtually every injustice visited on him, and you never once heard him complain or whine.”

Baldy and Other Guy go for Chai

The sun was not yet coming up over Santa Monica Boulevard, but it had already been a long night of chai and I was looking for my car, which I had left on the street. A newish Mercedes screeched to a stop just in front of me, and fearing the worst—Lindsay Lohan—I stumbled back in the direction of my chai house.

Two odd looking men got out, and none too subtly gestured that I should get in the back seat. I say odd looking€ because, though they appeared to be clean and their hair and beards were neatly trimmed, they were both wearing togas. They were nowhere near young enough, and we were nowhere close enough to UCLA, for that to make sense.

"€œWe just want to ask you some questions," said one, who was slightly balder than the other. He had a slightly tantalizing accent, a kind of singsong.

"€œIt won't take long,"€ said the other, in the same accent, "and we'€™ll bring you back here. Buy you a nice cup of chai.€" They maneuvered me into the Mercedes, and Baldy slipped into the driver's seat. It was a really nice car, but not Lindsay Lohan'€™s. The unboxed diapers on the back seat made me think more of Britney.

We hummed along through the empty streets, in the direction of the Santa Monica Mountains.

"So, how is life among the philosophers?"€ asked Baldy.

"I don€'t know," I said. "I don'€™t live among philosophers any more."

"€œHad the wits to get out,"€ said the other one, who was driving. €"No," said his companion. "€œHe had the wisdom to get out—€”the wisdom to get out of philosophy!"

They yucked it up for quite a while over that.

"€œBut our problem is even harder," said the driver finally. "€œWe have to get the wisdom out of philosophy!"€

€"That'€'s not hard at all!"€ cried his companion, and they both collapsed in helpless guffaws.

"€œBut seriously,€" said the driver. €"We hear things aren't so good. We hear philosophers stopped getting Guggenheims in about 1994. We hear fewer and fewer philosophers get NEH'€™s. We hear no philosopher has gotten a Macarthur since—since the gods know when!"

The car was now well into the mountains, and in fact had left the ritzy residential streets behind and was bumping down a dirt road. On the left was an eerie looking ranch gate; in the smoggy moonlight I cold see that behind it was an empty field about a hundred yards deep, and beyond that just woods. It was the old home base, I knew, of the Hollywood Nazis—€”a bunch of none-too-bright actors who never got much further in their Nazi sympathies than gathering in Errol Flynn'€™s mansion, now burned to the ground, and grousing about the studio heads, all of whom they thought were Jewish.

Just inside the forest there was a fallen log, and they made me sit down on that. The two of them stood before me, and Baldy took over. It went like this:

BALDY: Does your society produce many philosophers?

ME: Not so many, about eight thousand.

OTHER GUY: that is quite a few.

BALDY: Where are they to be found? Where do you keep them?

ME: In universities, I guess, in philosophy departments.

BALDY: Aha! This is what we had heard. Your society, then, has rounded up philosophers and placed them all in "€œdepartments"€ so you can keep an eye on them (I could feel the quote marks).

ME: I don't know that anybody wants to keep an eye on them, but yes, most philosophers are in philosophy departments.

BALDY: So they are clearly identified. You can keep them where you want them€—how do you say, like fish in a barrel? This is a brilliant way to disarm critical thought! Does anyone outside the "œdepartments"€ talk to them?

ME: It's kind of de facto discouraged. A department is a busy place, and the people in it usually don'€™t have time to socialize widely. They mostly talk to one another.

Baldy and the Other Guy were elated to the brink of dance. "At last!"€ said Baldy. €"A society that knows how to handle philosophers! You get them a 'department' and you shut them up in it and then you watch them and nobody talks to them! Expensive, but I bet it works!"€

Then the other guy took over.

OTHER GUY: You certainly do no€™t, I assume, allow these philosophers to talk to young people.

ME: Sure they do. That'™s their job.

O.G.: That's their job?

ME: Well, yes. The function of a university is to educate people, and philosophy departments are in universities, so they have to educate people. It's what they are paid to do.

My two friends were dumfounded. "€œYou mean a '€œdepartment'€ is a sort of educational institution? It i€™s not a—€”how do you put it—€”desmôtêrion?

Oudamôs, I said, for the first time in my life using classical Greek for conversation.

"€œWe came here for nothing," said Other Guy.

"Ԕ Anyte," said Baldy, "€aphronoi eisi entautha, iômen!"

Kai hôs takhista, Ԕ Melete, said the Other Guy.

Anytus and Meletus—€”for it was they—€”tossed me the car keys and walked further into the forest. I stumbled behind them to a marble and copper contraption which looked like a sort of walk in barbecue. They did walk into it, and in a moment it began to glow and shake, and then it disappeared. The car keys were on the ground, so I picked them up and drove back to Santa Monica Boulevard. Somewhere down there, a homicidal starlet was looking for her Mercedes.

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?