I was reading through Ruth Millikan's amazing Dewey Lecture and was struck by her description of how she got into philosophy, particularly her early courses as an undergraduate and graduate student. Millikan describes taking an amazing array of courses: a course by Kuhn on scientific revolutions, a course on Kant's first and second critiques, a course on ordinary language philosophy with Stanley Cavell (who does a fascinating and bewildering blend of analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and literature), an entire year on Wittgenstein with Wilfred Sellars, a course on "existence" covering Sartre and Kiekegaard, etc.
Three things struck me about her discussion here.
First, it struck me just how different–and more diverse–her courses were than the typical grad student curriculum today. My experience is that grad school courses today–at least in analytic departments–tend to have, say, a history requirement (take some ancient, some modern, etc.), a logic requirement, 20th Centure Analytic Philosophy (Frege, Russell, Kaplan, Quine, etc.) and then a ton of courses on cutting-edge metaphysics, epistemology, etc. It struck me, in other words, just how much narrower grad school offerings seem to be nowadays.
Second, it struck me that I was initially drawn to philosophy as an undergrad precisely because, as an undergrad, I was offered such a diverse array of fascinating courses. My very first philosophy course was a summer-school course at Stanford I took as a high-school junior with Taylor Carman called, "Philosophy and Literature." We read some philosophy–Nietzsche, etc.–but for the most part we read literature. We read "The Myth of Sisyphus" and Camus' Stranger (both of which informed a discussion of the absurd), Voltaire's Candide (which informed a discussion of the problem of evil), Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. It was awesome. I was totally "bitten" by philosophy. I wrote my first philosophy paper ever on the Problem of Evil, and have never forgotten it or lost interest in the problem. Philosophy seemed so relevant to human existence–to the "big questions", about value and meaning, that we face as human beings.
When I got to Tufts University, I knew I wanted to take philosophy, but I knew nothing about the profession. I asked to be placed into an intro to philosophy course and was placed in an honors intro course of six students with Dan Dennett. What a way to start an undergrad experience! We did Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, and some other people I can't remember, and Dan talked about robots and everything else he was interested in. It was awesome. I had five term papers to write, and Dan let us rewrite them all as many times as we wished–giving us pages of comments every time. Again, I was "bitten."
I then took a bewildering array of courses. Logic with Mark Richard–which was the coolest and most-difficult-by-far course I ever took. Groups of students pulled all-nighters several nights in a row together to solve his impossible problems. I once did a hundred step proof that apparently could be done in 40 steps. I was proud of myself nonetheless. I've always liked to make a mess of things. 🙂 Anyway, one day Mark had set up an elaborate toy farm on a desk in the front of the room. We all wondered what in the world it was there for. Then, at the end of the day, he put an incredibly difficult problem on the board for our final homework (there were no tests in his class, only 5 insanely difficult homeworks). Then, he pointed to the board and said, "Okay now, who is…willing to BET THE FARM that they can solve this?" The whole class erupted in laughter. It was completely awesome. He set up the toy farm just for that. 🙂
Anyway, I then took a course on existentialism with Stephen White on phenomenology existentialism, and we studied Husserl, Heidegger, Sarte, and Merleau-Ponty. White showed up 5 minutes late for class everyday, and responded to every question by stroking his beard, saying, "Hmm…", pausing for what seemed like an eternity…and then by asking a question in reply. I don't recall him ever giving an answer to anything. It was totally frustrating and totally awesome all at once. He was 100% committed to getting us to think about the problems for ourselves, like a psychoanalyst eliciting the unconscious by just sitting there. In any case, it was fascinating. I was sure that Heidegger's Being and Time was either the most brilliant thing ever written or complete bullshit, or both.
My grad school courses had their allure too. My first grad school course (at Syracuse, before I moved to Arizona) was a team-taught course on vagueness taught by John Hawthorne and the mercurial Jose Benardete, who is to this day the most hysterically funny person I have ever met (there is even a facebook page dedicated to recounting "Benardete stories"). We studied many-valued logics and, of course, Tim Williamson's book, which at that time had just come out (I recall my initial reaction to the book being, "The negative arguments are great, but I can't believe someone would spend so much time and energy trying to defend such a patently-false positive view"; something I still wonder about!). It was a great course. John would just show up and talk off the top of his head for three hours, and Jose was…well, Jose! I then took a Modality course with Ted Sider where we did David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds, as well as an epistemology course with Bill Alston where he savaged coherentistm and sang philosophy songs he had written to us in his ridiculous voice. It, too, was awesome.
As awesome as some of my grad school courses were, however, I quickly soured on a lot of it. Gone, it seemed, were the "deep questions." The questions I was interested in as a real flesh and blood person–questions about love, forgiveness, evil, literature, etc.–were almost nowhere to be seen. I had the experience that Eric Campell recounts here:
I think the idea that much contemporary philosophy has lost sight of the questions is exactly right. At least it has lost sight of the questions that tend to draw interesting, passionate and talented people to philosophy. Phil language isn't my specialty, but I was very excited to take a course on it in grad school, only to be bored to death and deeply disappointed by what contemporary phil language amounts to (at least as it was taught to me). I think the kind of mappings Searle talks about are an excellent example of how objectivity, rigor and difficulty squeeze out insight and general interestingness. This seems to be very widely the case as far as I can tell.
That's why I've been writing so much on my concern that contemporary analytic philosophy has been misled by language. I want philosophy to be less about tables and chairs, counterfactuals and indicatives, queer moral facts and modal semantics, and more about the things that made me fall in love with philosophy in the first place. I understand, of course, that my loves aren't everyone's–that some people wake up in the morning itching to work on formal topics. My worry, however, is that formal topics have crowded out the stuff that I (and others, it seems) care about. Recently, whenever I've, say, picked up a copy of Mind, it's been full of equations and formal modeling that I have no interest in. It wasn't always like this. When Ryle was in charge of mind, its priorities were very different. In any case, I long for a thousand flowers to bloom again–for serious philosophy to become more engaged again with art, literature, science, and flesh-and-blood life: love, forgiveness, hope, and yes, faith (not merely religious faith by the way, but faith in humanity, etc.).
Anyway, what drew you to philosophy? Does it still draw you? And, does professional philosophy still have it, whatever it is?
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