Maverick Philosopher

At a gathering of Boston academicians some years back, by way of a conversational opener, I said to Professor X, "I understand you teach at the University of L." The good professor replied, "I conduct classes at the University of L." I found that to be a very good distinction, one borne out by my own experience.

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 30 years in the past, is dated 22 April. But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 30 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink.

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 284th birthday. Sapere aude!

Companion post: On Forever Putting One's Toolkit in Order

Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic

Thanks to Blake Reas, I found the perfect complement to my post The Overeducated. It is George C. Leef's The Overselling of Higher Education.

I once had a graduate student with whom I became friends. Ned, to give him a name, one day told me that after he finished high school he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a job with the railroad. His mother, however, wanted something ‘better’ for her son. She wanted him to go to college, which he did, in the desultory fashion of many. He ended up declaring a major in psychology and graduating. After spending some time in a monastery, perhaps also at the instigation of his Irish mother, and still not knowing quite what to do with himself, he was accepted into an M.A. program in philosophy, which is where I met him. After goofing around for several more years, he took a job as a social worker, a job which did not suit him. Last I saw him he was in his mid-thirties and pounding nails.

I have a sentimental connection to Antioch College. An inamorata from the '70's graduated from there, as did my old friend, the philosopher Quentin Smith. During my tenure at the University of Dayton in the late '70s and '80s I would often make the pleasant drive over country roads to the sleepy little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio to take in an art film at the Little Art theater or buy incense at a '60s style 'head shop' or chase a burger with a couple of beers at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, or hike in Glen Hellen, a nature preserve behind the campus. At home, my FM tuner was set to WYSO, which emanated from the campus of Antioch College and was a rich source of out-of-the-way folk, blues, jazz, country and other music. I may be a conservative, but I am a BoCon, a bohemian conservative, or perhaps a HipCon, or maybe even a Bobo (to adopt the term if not quite the sense of a David Brooks coinage), a bourgeois bohemian.

There is also the Twilight Zone connection. Rod Serling graduated from Antioch, taught there at one point, and featured the statue of Horace Mann on campus in one of his best episodes, The Changing of the Guard.

So it is too bad that Antioch College has suffered Death by Political Correctness. This excellent piece confirms my view of contemporary liberals: they are simply incapable of arresting their slide into the looniest precincts of hard Leftism. Quentin Smith was on campus during the beginning of the end in the early '70s. I recall him telling me about the bringing onto campus of unprepared ghetto blacks who proceeded to terrorize the place with Black Panther type demands and armed thuggery.

What fools these liberals be!

Mike Gilleland asked me if I am familiar with the work of the American philosopher, Henry Bugbee (1915-1999). I am not but I hope soon to make his acquaintance in the pages of his Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. I have just added it to my list.

A few years ago I quit the American Philosophical Association in disgust at their leftist tilt, but I find that that must have been after 2000 since I have the May 2000 Proceedings and Addresses which contains an obituary of Henry Bugbee written by Albert Borgmann. Excerpt:

Bugbee's love of wilderness was consonant with his love of fly-fishing, a passion he pursued for many years on the streams, rivers, and lakes of the East as well as the West. He fished with the same eloquence he lived. No fly-line could be cast with greater grace; no one could acquire a more studied knowledge of the streams and lakes and the fish that finned there; no one could have a more reflective understanding and appreciation of the fullness of the moment when a fish breaks water. For all who fished with him, Bugbee was a mentor of the art of appreciating the earth, its waters, and what they bear. (p. 247)

An obituary is supposed to be a tribute, but what if obituaries were more, shall we say, 'objective'? You may enjoy this attempt at an 'objective' obituary. Somewhat more serious is this obituary post.

'Academic' in 'academic philosophy' is an alienans adjective. To be fair: in many cases, too many cases. How much wisdom will you imbibe at the Sage School of Philosophy?

If Putnam in a hundred years will be where Lotze is now, why read Putnam rather than Lotze?

Open library stacks allow for browsing and finding books that otherwise might have gone undetected. I was on the prowl in the BDs a while back looking for BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason and Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction. Searle's book hangs out at BD 418.3.S4. Nearby, at BD 418.3.S78, I spied Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (1998). Though published by an obscure press, and obviously a reworking of the author's dissertation, it is turning out to be an outstanding resource. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I found it. But I might not have, had the stacks been closed.

On the other hand, open stacks allow any Tom, Dick, or Mary to cause mischief by stealing, defacing, hiding and otherwise mishandling books. A common problem is the removal of a volume and its return to the wrong position. Such a book is as as good as lost. A librarian acquaintance tells me that the problem is worse than one might think.

No doubt there are other considerations relevant to the open/closed question. But for the moment, I'm for open stacks. But in a society as tolerant of bad behavior as ours is, one wonders how long libraries can remain unprotected.

. . . some of them might read like this.

The copy editor, like a testosterone-crazed male cat, likes to mark his territory. His territory is your manuscript. But like a cat, he is lazy and easily bored, which leads to inconsistency. He starts out changing every occurrence of ‘identical with’ to ‘identical to,’ but then tires of this game so that the end result is a mishmash. He would have spared himself the bother had he appreciated the simple fact that in the English language ‘identical with’ and ‘identical to’ are stylistic variants of each other.

Suppose you are working on an article that you plan on sending to some good journal with a high rejection rate. You know that what you have written still needs some work, but you submit it anyway in the hope of a conditional acceptance and comments with the help of which you will perfect your piece. This is a mistaken approach. Never submit anything that is not as good as you can make it. And this for a reason supplied long ago by that master observer of the human condition, Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658):

Never show half-finished things to others. Let them be enjoyed in their perfection. All beginnings are formless, and what lingers is the image of that deformity. The memory of having seen something imperfect spoils out enjoyment when it is finished. To take in a large object at a single glance keeps us from appreciating the parts, but it satisfies our taste. Before it is, everything is not, and when it begins to be, it is still very close to nonbeing. It is revolting to watch even the most succulent dish being cooked. Great teachers are careful not to let their works be seen in embryo. Learn from nature, and don't show them until they look good. (The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231, tr. Christopher Maurer.)

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach teachers; those who can't teach teachers become administrators. That's my protraction of the old saying. I'm not endorsing, just protracting. Here is a different take on teaching, and here is a post on why teaching is no fun.

Plato and Aristotle both say that philosophy begins in wonder. The philosophy of the philosophy professors, however, does not begin in wonder but in the need to make a living coupled with an aversion to heavy lifting.

The Ph.D. is a trapping that means something, but not that much. There are fools with doctorates, and sages without them. Should Kierkegaard go unread because he is a mere Magister? Does anyone prefer his brother Peter over Soren because the fomer was called Doktor? Should we turn a blind eye to Eric Hoffer's True Believer because its author was a migrant farm worker and stevedore who, as a pure autodidact, had no credentials at all, not even an elementary school diploma? Fifty years after it was written, in these days of Islamo-militancy, Hoffer's penetrating book has gained even more relevance.

As Schopenhauer was always keen to point out, there is a difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy, namely, the difference between someone who lives for philosophy and someone who lives from it. The professors, parading their titles and credentials, show thereby that they are more concerned with appearance than with reality, when the office of the philosopher is precisely to penetrate appearance and arrive at reality. (I am reporting Schopenhauer's view here, and would point out against him that of course a professor of philosophy can be a genuine philosopher. Schopenhauer himself would be forced to admit this given his great admiration for Kant.)

An important text relating to this question is William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" in Essential Writings, ed. Wilshire (SUNY 1984), pp. 343-348)

Keith Burgess-Jackson explains:

As if to prove that he is a thug (should anyone have doubted it), Brian Leiter has threatened PowerBlogs with a lawsuit if it doesn't change the URL of my blog devoted to exposing his abusiveness. I don't care what the URL is, and I don't want PowerBlogs to risk liability, so I changed it. Here is the new address. Please reset your shortcut, bookmark, or favorite, and spread the word. This thug—Leiter—needs to be shown that he can't control others.

Eugene Volokh weighs in on the legal issues here.

. . . here. You will have to decide whether an entire weblog is needed to expose this contemptible status-obsessed careerist. I suspect your decision will be affected by whether or not you yourself have been attacked by this academic Gauleiter.

Multiplying enemies beyond necessity is not something a wise man does. By this criterion, Brian Leiter is no wise man. His vicious attacks on people, as unnecessary as they are personal, make him enemies. Some of the people he abuses are willing to view it all with Olympian detachment: "The dog barks, the caravan passes." Others, however, fight back.

The problem with not resisting the evil-doer is that he becomes emboldened in his evil-doing. Resisting him, however, is like fighting with a pig: you will come away dirty.

This is a useful resource. I won't let the bad experience I had with them dissuade me from advertising this site. When Kluwer sent them my book for review, the book was passed on to a reviewer who not only failed to write the review he had agreed to write but then sold the (very expensive) book! The proper procedure would have been for the potential reviewer to have returned the book to the editor who would then have either sent it to another reviewer or back to Kluwer. I now understand why Kluwer does not like sending review copies to NDPR.

If you are an academician or an aspiring or recovering one, you may be interested in the question of whether blogging is a help or a hindrance to your scholarly work, not to mention your scholarly career. (Virtus post nummos, as OL Phil always says, quoting Horace. "Cash before conscience" is my mischievous translation.) I have some thoughts of my own on the topic of academic blogging, but I will save them for later. For now I refer you to this resource, the perusal of the links of which should keep you busy for some time.

Like Rodney Dangerfield, we philosophers of religion get no respect. As Nelson Pike puts it,

Since I tend to overwrite, I thought that blogging might improve my style, moving it from the prolix to the pithy. I believe it has helped some. But blogging is to formal writing a bit like blitz is to slow chess. The blitz player develops quick sight of the board and learns how to maintain his cool in time pressure; but the overall assessment has to be negative: speed chess hurts one's slow game. (But my slow game is so bad, the hurt is inconsequential.) Does blogosophisizing hurt one's formal philosophizing? I don't see why it should.

A truly awful writer is Judith Butler. She is taken to task in this article on bad writing by D. G. Myers.

Maybe what Judith Butler needs is her very own blog, ButlerBlog, or perhaps ButlerBull. For all I know, she already has one.

This arrived by e-mail with no name attached:

Leiter fancies himself a gatekeeper to the realm of academic philosophy. You gotta love the professional gossip that seeps through his blog - Ned Block got an offer from Harvard but turned it down, here's the latest coming out of the Eastern APA, or noting, yesterday, that Ted Honderich consulted him during the publication of the new Oxford Companion to Philosophy. And look at the way Leiter prides himself on knowing the goings on at each school and each professor. . . what a status-obsessed elitist (I believe those are your words). No wonder this guy publishes the PGR. Others of us enjoy doing philosophy, most of the time, but here is a man who loves *being* a philosopher, all of the time.

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

I've been lurking (as fellow philosopher at a Philosophy Meetup group called it) around your web site and blogs recently. I have definitely come to the conclusion that you are a kindred spirit of sorts. I especially found your insights into what you call "religionism" [see here, sec. 3] to describe some less developed thoughts of my own on the subject.

Philosopher Allan Hillman writes:

I very much enjoy your posts on the weblogs Conservative Philosopher and Right Reason, notwithstanding your own personal blog. The mix of political and analytical topics I find refreshing and engaging.

I have a question for you, in light of the fact that you're both a well-respected scholar as well as a scholar situated outside of the academic university system. From a personal as well as a professional perspective, what do you think of the tenure system?

As an aside, I should say that I found your recent article "Three Conceptions of States of Affairs" [Nous, June 2000, here] remarkable in its clarity and incisiveness, and given your posts on the topics, I'd certainly love to pick your brain at some point in regard to Meinong & Brentano - especially in their relation to Russell's 1898-1910 writings. At present a graduate student in the early stages of doctoral work, I'm thinking about, as a long-term (perhaps dissertational) goal, the relations between Leibniz and the early Analytics (particularly Russell and Frege), so suffice it to say that your work on the Principle of Sufficient Reason [see here] I found thought-provoking as well. Should my workload ever decrease (even slightly), I look forward to reading your book, reviewed so glowingly at Amazon by Dr. Butchvarov. [Butchvarov's entire review of my book is here (DOC) and here (HTML).]

Sorry to take up so much of your time, but I very much wanted to a) ask you the above question, and b) let you know that there remain a few conservatives in the dregs of graduate studies in Philosophy.

An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox. For those few conservatives who have managed to obtain tenure, it doubtless functions to protect them. But for the faculty in general it seems to have become a prescription for political correctness and lassitude.

John Silber, the former president of Boston University, summed up the fate of academic freedom in his essay “Poisoning the Wells of Academe.” Originally, Silber observed, academic freedom

entailed an immunity for what is said and done by dedicated, thoughtful, conscientious scholars in pursuit of truth or the truest account. Now it came to entail, rather, an immunity for whatever is said and done, responsibly or carelessly, within or without the walls of academia, by persons unconcerned for the truth; who, reckless, incompetent, frivolous or even malevolent, promulgate ideas for which they can claim no expertise, or even commit deeds for which they can claim no sanction of law.

This is what Silber referred to as “the absolute concept of academic freedom,” according to which “the academic can say whatever he pleases about whatever he pleases, whenever and wherever he pleases, and be fully immune from unpleasant consequences.” The case of Ward Churchill—and this is a bit of good news to emerge from this sorry scenario—suggests that that may be about to change.

Finally, I am glad to hear that there are some conservatives out there "in the dregs of graduate studies in Philosophy" as you put it.