I’ve spent the last last nine-plus years of my life with philosophy as the focus of my academic and professional life. So it was a little bit of a kick in the teeth to read this article in the Inquirer this week about Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at Penn who has made philosophy a secondary academic and professional focus in no small part because because she doesn’t see the discipline as particularly relevant right now.
“I’m in a livelier, more hands-on world,” Allen says, offering a sharp view of the discipline with which she fell in love as an adolescent.
“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them.
“The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow.
“Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?
I do not mean this to be vindictive or defensive, but when a fellow academic is saying you’re not hands-on enough, there’s something of a problem.
Part of the issue is probably the very real diversity problem that Allen cites. Part of it is the fight within the discipline over what counts as being properly philosophical and sufficiently rigorous.
I’ve spent roughly a quarter of my life in philosophy and I’ve done it because I think the discipline has something to tell us about the problems we face in today’s society. And because I think it helps show us some methods that will work to help us solve those problems. Every day I step into a classroom and try to pass along that idea to a group of skeptical students. And some days I realize just how hard of a sell that is.