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36 responses to “Firing the Canon?”

1. 

   Owen

   February 20, 2014

   Apologies for the ignorance of the question, but could you clarify what exactly you mean by ‘Whig history’? My general understanding of the term (reflected in the Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history) is that it refers to the gradual progression towards the best or most accurate paradigms.
   However, your usage of it seems somewhat different. Your brief gloss suggests a back-and-forth development post-Kant; it does not presuppose progress towards some ultimate and correct paradigm. Instead, it’s something like a causal-influential history: understanding who/what each successive generation of philosophers were reacting to, and what Important Philosophers were most influential at each stage. This will, as you worry, of necessity reflect bias: if philosophers systematically ignore/exclude women and minorities, such groups will have relatively minor roles in a causal-influential history. And to the extent that modern debates are heavily informed by causal-influential history, there’s a very legitimate worry that such a focus will reinforce the exclusion of women and minorities in modern debates as well.
   But I would submit that a truly Whiggish approach (for all its flaws) need not have such a bias. If one is focused on progress towards an ultimate paradigm, figures not massively influential in their time (including members of marginalized groups) can nevertheless play central roles; they become historically important because they were ‘ahead of their time’. They contribute to progress insofar as a) they were right and b) we recognize that and read them today. This has the further advantage of (potentially) avoiding the problems you cite with 1980s English departments: the valuable aspects of the canon that contributed to progress will be retained (avoiding blind spots), while marginalized but important-to-progress works can be elevated. Some Canon will inevitably be pushed aside to make room – but that’ll be the rubbish that didn’t contribute to progress anyway.
   Of course, such an approach problematically assumes the truth of some paradigm which could bias one’s historiography. Dissenting opinions would be preserved in a Whig history, but only to the extent that they present objections as non-devastating, whose responses (in a Millian sense) clarified views and made more robust the progress towards truth. New blind spots emerge that fall out of line with the paradigm accepted by the Whig historian; different Whig histories then end up reading vastly different canons and readers of each thereby find it difficult to engage with each other. So maybe Whig histories aren’t the way to go overall – however, they won’t of necessity exclude women and minorities and so worries over exclusion need not be a reason to reject the Whig approach.

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2. 

   Matt

   February 20, 2014

   Along w/ the “unconventional history”, this new book (which I haven’t had the chance to read yet) looks really good.
   My reading of medieval philosophy is spotty, at best, but this review made me think that more attention should be given to Heloise, and that it’s sad we didn’t get to have her in a better setting
   One thing that I really liked about Shelby’s book We Who Are Dark was the way that it threw new and very interesting light on questions relating to nationalism. I might well think it’s the most interesting thing written on nationalism in the last 10 years or so- at least it’s much less stale than the latest variations on the old debates- but my impression is that it hasn’t really been taken up by people working on nationalism. That’s a real shame, and something I hope will change.
   Anyway, this isn’t so much about the value of Whig histories (something I’m sympathetic to) but perhaps can be read as ways that we might complicate them when we want to, or write somewhat different ones for the future.

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3. 

   John Protevi

   February 20, 2014

   Hello Jon, this early sentence of yours is incorrect in positing an effect that didn’t happen and a cause that didn’t exist: “I also agree with conservative critics that American English departments damaged their own enrollments when the 1980s attacks on the canon led to too sweeping curricular changes.”
   The effect didn’t happen; humanities degrees have been stable since the mid-1980s, after a decline beginning in 1971 (we can take that as a proxy for English degrees, unless you want to argue that the percentage of English degrees vs other humanities degrees has changed, something I don’t think is true, but you can argue for if you wish). From this useful database provided by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences:

   After 1971, the [post-WWII growth] trend reversed, with the annual number of humanities degrees conferred declining through the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, so that by 1985 the humanities were awarding less than half the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s the situation had begun to improve, and in the early years of the following decade the number of bachelor’s degrees crested again, rising back above 100,000. Following a modest decline toward the end of the 1990s, the number of degrees conferred on humanities majors increased throughout the 2000s before declining in the two most recent years reported here (2010 and 2011).

   Secondly, the purported causal agent doesn’t exist, as there were no “sweeping curricular changes.” As John Quiggin notes here, when Rachel Donadio cites the National Association of Scholars on the supposed evidence of a shift away from the classics their own claim actually proves the stability of the canon:

   The invasion of politics has been particularly notable in the literature curriculum. On campus today, the emphasis is very much on studying literature through the lens of “identity”—ethnic, gender, class. There has also been a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.

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4. 

   Jon Cogburn

   February 20, 2014

   Wow that’s great stuff. I like the distinction between properly normative Whig histories, and merely causal histories.
   I do take the history suggested above to be properly normative and correct. Hegelianism itself had to be denied, and this denial (positivism/phenomenology) had to be worked through. I think that contemporary philosophy, properly understood, is now on the other side of that, sublimating the two.*
   The problem is that I don’t know if this history is merely causal (at best the kind of stuff one should learn if one wants to understand the maximal amount of analytic and continental philosophy with the least work), or a proper Whig history. This is probably why the OP is a bit unclear.
   I very much like the way you suggest we can have pluralism (properly understood, not just as sops that analytics and continentals can throw to one another across the chasm) and Whig histories while still taking them to be properly normative.
   [*Abstract. Dialectical. Speculative. See how Hegel always wins. It’s a bit unfair.]

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5. 

   John Protevi

   February 20, 2014

   BTW and FWIW, I also agree with Quiggin that the 98 list is superior to the 65 list.

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6. 

   John Protevi

   February 20, 2014

   Lastly, for the full-on snark version, see Michael Bérubé here at Crooked Timber: http://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/24/everybody-wang-chung-tonight/

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7. 

   Jon Cogburn

   February 20, 2014

   The number of degrees isn’t relevant during a period where overall enrollment is increasing. What’s relevant is the percentage of degrees. From a source so biased one needs a handful of salt (http://theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department:

   Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):
   English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
   Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
   Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
   History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
   Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

   In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

   From a better source, with a link to an important report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

   The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times. So says a new report (http://www.humanitiescommission.org/_pdf/hss_report.pdf ) on the state of the humanities by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and so says the experience of nearly everyone who teaches at a college or university. Undergraduates will tell you that they’re under pressure — from their parents, from the burden of debt they incur, from society at large — to choose majors they believe will lead as directly as possible to good jobs. Too often, that means skipping the humanities.
   In other words, there is a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college. As the American Academy report notes, this is the consequence of a number of things, including an overall decline in the experience of literacy, the kind of thing you absorbed, for instance, if your parents read aloud to you as a child. The result is that the number of students graduating in the humanities has fallen sharply. At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a terribly small number.

   In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this year, they were economics and mathematics.

   I’m pretty sure that at LSU every humanities department except Philosophy has lost majors in absolute numbers since the last recession. I’ve read a number of news stories that say this is a national trend, and speculating that part of this is because philosophers do a better job respecting our canon than other humanities departments have done. This does not seem implausible to me.
   The thing about what students read is a bit of a non-sequitur. The 1980s hegemony of theory had the unfortunate effect of effacing the traditional view (grounded in literary naturalism) that the point of reading literature was because one learned important truths about reality from those texts that one could not learn in other ways. Once you chuck that what is the point? Why should a student spend four years studying them instead of doing something else? Because it will help “critical thinking skills”? Really? Aren’t there more efficient ways to do that?
   Philosophy never gave up on the idea that we study Plato, Kant, etc. because doing so will help us learn something about the world, something that one only gets by studying philosophy. Students are very sensitive to this.

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8. 

   John Protevi

   February 20, 2014

   Hello Jon, I will look into the percentages vs raw numbers question; that is an important distinction.
   Two points for now: one, what is the source of your second citation?
   Second, when you say:

   The 1980s hegemony of theory had the unfortunate effect of effacing the traditional view (grounded in literary naturalism) that the point of reading literature was because one learned important truths about reality from those texts that one could not learn in other ways.

   I think you’re falsely assuming that 1980s style “theory” is still hegemonic. But since the mid-90s Greenblatt-style New Historicism has been dominant in literature departments, not High Theory. And New Historicism is all about learning important truths about reality via literary texts.

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9. 

   Jon Cogburn

   February 20, 2014

   Oops, sorry. The second source is the new york times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html.
   As far as I understand it, the move towards historicism just deeply compounds the problem. At worst you are just learning something about the texts by situating them in their historical context and not really learning anything from the texts. At best you are learning something about the historical context from the texts.
   But, (1) there are much, much better ways to learn about history than the study of fictional texts, and (2) students who initially love literature take themselves to be learning much more from the literature than facets of contingent social facets. Historicism beats this out of them, and in both cases you can’t make a rational case for why anyone would want to major in English instead of History (and they do this stuff very well) or (if your goal was to learn about eternal truths) majoring in business and just scratching the itch for learning about deeper truths by buying New Age texts from Barnes and Noble.
   To see the problem, imagine if philosophy went historicist in the same way. Why would anyone want to study philosophy? Why should there even be a separate philosophy department?
   I don’t take myself to be speaking for all Lit types. The work I’m currently looking at in narratology (presenting at this conference http://narrative.georgetown.edu/conferences/ next month) is pretty deeply respectful of the fictional text’s autonomy as a source of genuine knowledge about whatever the text happens to be about (and not just its historical context). The trick is to recover what was right about literary naturalism without effacing the unnatural. Lots of brilliant literature scholars are working in this problem space, though my impression is that they are something of a radical fringe.

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10. 

    John Protevi

    February 20, 2014

    Follow up: your first source does make the case that canon / theory issues were a partial cause, but it also includes these economic factors: http://theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/

    But there are additional reasons for the drop in numbers of students concentrating in English and other subjects in the literary humanities. History, geography, and demography do not explain it all. Other forces, both external and internal, have been at work. The literary humanities and, in particular, English are in trouble for reasons beyond their control and for reasons of their own making. First, an obvious external cause: money. With the cost of a college degree surging upward during the last quarter century—tuition itself increasing far beyond any measure of inflation—and with consequent growth in loan debt after graduation, parents have become anxious about the relative earning power of a humanities degree. Their college-age children doubtless share such anxiety. When college costs were lower, anxiety could be kept at bay. (Berkeley in the early ’60s cost me about $100 a year, about $700 in today’s dollars.) Alexander W. Astin’s research tells us that in the mid-1960s, more than 80 percent of entering college freshmen reported that nothing was more important than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, reports that “being very well off financially” was only an afterthought, one that fewer than 45 percent of those freshmen thought to be an essential goal. As the years went on, however, and as tuition shot up, the two traded places; by 1977, financial goals had surged past philosophical ones, and by the year 2001 more than 70 percent of undergraduate students had their eyes trained on financial realities, while only 40 percent were still wrestling with meaningful philosophies….
    These, then, are some of the external causes of the decline of English: the rise of public education; the relative youth and instability (despite its apparent mature solidity) of English as a discipline; the impact of money; and the pressures upon departments within the modern university to attract financial resources rather than simply use them up. On all these scores, English has suffered. But the deeper explanation resides not in something that has happened to it, but in what it has done to itself.

    He then goes on to talk about what he sees as incoherence in curricular offerings. But I’m not sure how he can say this is “deeper” than the external, economic, factors he lists.

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11. 

    John Protevi

    February 20, 2014

    “At worst you are just learning something about the texts by situating them in their historical context and not really learning anything from the texts. At best you are learning something about the historical context from the texts.”
    In my experience, when properly done New Historicism goes back and forth; you learn about and from the texts and their contexts in mutually illuminating ways.

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12. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 20, 2014

    Agree 100% about the economic base doing most of the work. As far as this concerns us, we need to know how to conceive and sell our disciplines given these pressures.
    I should also clarify that I think the declining fate of “Theory’s Empire” is on whole a bad thing, independent of the rise of new historicism.
    To some extent theory is alive and well. The Deleuze talks at ASTR (theatre conference) were dynamite as is some of the Deleuzian stuff at the narratology conference (Ridvan Askin’s dissertation is absolutely dynamite). But I’m seeing way, way more history and sociology involving the artworks.

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13. 

    Trevor

    February 20, 2014

    I’m all for shaking up and broadening the canon, making our understanding of the history of philosophy more contextual in the process. Looking specifically at woman philosophers, I have a pretty good idea of how to do this for many periods and topics. For 17th century metaphysics and epistemology, you’ve got all the folks in Jacqueline Broad’s book. For 18th century social/political you’ve got Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, etc. The list for 18th century metaphysics and epistemology seems shorter, but there’s Émilie du Châtelet (on Newton, Leibniz, etc.) and Mary Shepherd (on Berkeley, Hume, Reid, etc.) — I’d love to hear about more. For early analytic you’ve got L. Susan Stebbing and Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones. For early pragmatism you’ve got Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
    But what about woman philosophers who were contemporaries of or in conversation with German idealism? Germaine de Staël is a good option; her account of German philosophy was influential on Emerson, for example. I also just came across this book by Dorothy Rogers, about woman philosophers affiliated with the St. Louis Hegelians and the Concord School. Can anyone offer more suggestions? In Britain there’s Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and Frances Simson, but I can’t find much beyond their translations and collections of Hegel’s work. What about woman philosophers in Germany?
    I have the same question about early phenomenology (pre-WWII).
    Was it just that women were able for some reason to be a more important (though sometimes anonymous) part of the conversation in the 17th century than in other periods? Or are there just more philosophers working on 17th-century philosophy, and thus we’ve uncovered more nodes in the conversational network from that period?

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14. 

    John Protevi

    February 20, 2014

    Okay, I’m happy to talk about canon and theory as long as we don’t think they are the sole or even primary drivers of enrollment changes compared to economic factors.
    One last point about enrollment would be the growth of double majors. From here: http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIIA.aspx#topII1

    The number of students who complete a “second major” in the humanities (i.e., a degree in a humanities discipline earned at the same time as another degree in a nonhumanities field or a different humanities discipline) has risen steadily since 2001, the year for which NCES first collected data on such degrees (Figure II-1c). In 2010, 22,709 humanities second majors were completed by undergraduates at U.S. institutions of higher learning. This figure represents a 72% increase over the 2001 level. In 2010, second majors in the humanities were completed by approximately 1.4% of bachelor’s degree recipients, up from 1.1% in 2001.

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15. 

    John Protevi

    February 20, 2014

    About relative numbers, one could argue that the current numbers are a sharp decline from the historical high of the mid-60s, but much less of a decline from the immediate post-WWII era. http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIIA.aspx#topII1

    As a percentage of all degrees, the core humanities remained in the 10–11% range from 1948 until the late 1950s, when the humanities share began to increase steadily, cresting at 17.2% in 1967. Along with the drop in absolute numbers of humanities bachelor’s degrees that occurred over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, the humanities experienced a substantial decline in their share of all bachelor’s degrees. Although the number of humanities degree completions increased thereafter, so did the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded. Consequently, the humanities’ share of all bachelor’s degrees remains well below the 1970s high. When core degrees are counted, the humanities’ share of all bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2011, 6.9%, was less than half the 1967 high. When CIP categories are used for tabulation purposes, humanities degrees represented 11.1% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2011. By either measure, the share of all degrees that were earned in the humanities declined approximately 7% from 2009 to 2011.

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16. 

    Grad student

    February 20, 2014

    “I also agree about 90% with Brandom on how this Whig history should be put together for philosophy. A philosopher must understand Kant, how Kant led to Hegel, how (and hopefully why with respect to the 19th century) Hegel was finally suppressed in the “back to Kant” movement, how phenomenology and logical positivism pushed the neo-Kantian moment to its breaking point, and how contemporary philosophy is a reaction to the agonies and ecstasies of positivism and phenomenology.”
    (The quote is from the original post.)
    The way I read this is Kuhnian: normal science is important because it imparts to students a set of concepts and skills, and with them a set of puzzles to solve. It provides them with a framework and conserves some of the norms from the previous generation.
    Putting aside the question of whether particular sciences follow this model, why think it should be inforced in philosophy? After all, if what is central to philosophy is being reflective, why not be reflective about its past? Folks like Hatfield and Dan Garber do the historical grunt work to show how philosophical problems and concepts have not remained invariant over time (e.g. Whether skepticism was “the” problem for the early Moderns as framed by some in the 20th century). Rather, by looking at the past in non-Whiggish ways we can understand current problems in a new light, especially re how we could reconcieve, for example, what the point of scientific philosophy is (e.g. M. Friedman) or philosophy’s relationship with psychology (e.g. Bordogna, Hacking). Why tell myths about Frege, Carnap and Quine when, for example, he can pinpoint fairly well the neo-Kantian influences in Carnap’s early works (in fact, both Carnap and Reichenbach were influenced in particular by Cassirer – Carnap in the early 1920s was especially critical of empiricism!)? Moreover, it’s also fairly clear now that Carnap’s and Quine’s mature views are much closer than normally told – but I suspect that’s not a result of a historical dialectic but rather a host of conceptual, but also socio-political and institutional reasons.
    All the more reason why I’m confused about your post. It’s non-Whiggish to look at the past (and, indeed, archives) to see who actually said what, rather than abide by the histories we are taught in grad school. That includes highlighting women philosophers (or mathematicians, scientists, ect.) who aren’t in the “cannon”. That is super important. But it’s seems like you want to reflect upon the past, but only if it doesn’t ruffle up too many of the standard stories re Kant to Hegel and beyond.
    P.s. I second the call for more folks to write on or read Susan Stebbing, e.g. she is a super important figure in the formation of Analytic philosophy in the 1930s.

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17. 

    Carl Sachs

    February 20, 2014

    I think we can gain some traction on these questions by asking, “who needs to know the history of philosophy, and for what purposes?” (I’ve only taught undergraduates, so please take with multiple grains of salt my opinions about what graduate students should be asked to understand.)
    At the undergraduate level, I’m become firmly convinced that we do our students a profound disservice by acting as if the foremost purpose of an undergraduate major is to prepare students for graduate school and the subsequent career of a professional philosopher. We should, instead, renew our vocation of equipping our students with the cognitive tools to flourish (hopefully) in an increasingly uncertain and perilous social and physical environment. (A first-year college student will almost certainly, if she has a normal life-expectancy for someone in the developed world, experience political and ecological turmoil of a degree that we may hope we never do.)
    In light of that, it’s not clear to me how much history of philosophy is really needed at the undergraduate level — and I say this as someone who mostly teaches the history of philosophy. Rather, I think there’s a strong presumptive case that understanding the epistemology of ignorance, or the mistakes that non-scientists commonly make when reasoning about scientific discoveries and theories, is of far more importance than getting our undergraduate students to appreciate the dialectic from Kant to Hegel to neo-Kantianism to neo-Hegelianism.
    Even at the graduate level, it’s not so clear to me that student pursuing a terminal MA really need to appreciate the history of philosophy in all that much depth.
    It’s only the Ph.D. students — those who are likely to secure decent tenure-track positions and become the next generation of professional philosophers — who need to “understand Kant, how Kant led to Hegel, how (and hopefully why with respect to the 19th century) Hegel was finally suppressed in the “back to Kant” movement, how phenomenology and logical positivism pushed the neo-Kantian moment to its breaking point, and how contemporary philosophy is a reaction to the agonies and ecstasies of positivism and phenomenology.”
    And we should figure out why understanding the discourse of these dead white men is going to help an increasingly pluralistic discipline avoid the mistakes of those dead white men.

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18. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 20, 2014

    I think I agree with everything you write here. . .
    Let me be clear. The Whig history I gestured at is certainly not what I was taught in graduate school. One of my professors (a dear friend who I learned the most from) once brought a copy of “Being and Time” into the seminar room and read random passages from it for laughs. But I would now rank Heidegger as the third most important philosopher and a necessary part of anyone’s Whig history. The Whig history I gestured at in fact comes from reading people like Friedman (who I think is absolutely right that positivism and phenomenology can only correctly be understood when seen in their anti-Hegelian neo-Kantian context).
    I do want to say this though. If you do enough philosophy you end up constructing a Whig history that leads up to yourself, but that part of doing this is critically examining the null hypothesis Whig history you started out with. Part of this examination will involve sympathetic exploration of things excluded by your previous null hypothesis Whig history. But doing this requires having a null hypothesis Whig history (normal science) in the first place. Thus, we do have to teach Whig histories in our programs, and teach students how to critically engage with them.
    There is the second issue of whether it’s rational to see everything as to some extent a footnote to Kant. As a causal claim about how we tend to use the word “philosophy” this is surely correct. But should it be so? I don’t know, I guess it depends on what counts as “philosophy.” It can’t be a complete free for all. . . For example, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers are (imho) two of the most philosophically interesting writers, but this doesn’t mean that they (or Mark Twain, for example) were writing philosophy.*
    This is harder for us because the meaning of x is always a philosophical question, even when x equals philosophy.
    I guess it comes down to the proper ends of philosophy and whether or not forcing people to slog through the first critique is an intelligent way to get them to get closer to those ends.
    [*I should note that I think that fictional texts allow us to learn things about the world that we could not learn otherwise. So saying that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is not a work of philosophy is not to sleight it.]

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19. 

    Robin James

    February 20, 2014

    Hi Jon–I want to try to give a counterargument to your approach to the canon. This argument works at 2 levels: there’s the content, but then the form of the argument also performs the practice it describes.
    I think there is a way to approach the canon that doesn’t reproduce either (a) ‘the canon’ or (b) the relations of privilege sedimented in that canon. In other words, there’s a way to tell our history to future/young philosophers that doesn’t engage in the project of what queer theorists call “reproductive futurity,” but instead fails to reproduce “philosophy,” and in this failure of fidelity to “philosophy,” produces something better instead.
    So, let me start with something outside philosophy proper but which I’m pretty sure you and I have a point of common grounding. The Clash, aka the only band that matters. I teach some music classes. In some of these classes, I teach The Clash. There is a standard “story” of the Clash (in fact, there’s a comp, “The Story of the Clash,” that pretty much encapsulates that story): it begins with Mick & Paul at art school and Joe in the 101ers, continues through the early days, treats the Columbia deal as The Fall, London Calling as the last burst of twilight before the end, which is effectively Sandinista, when it all goes to hell. That’s the standard story; it’s the story that locates The Clash as Great Men in Rock. It’s also a story in which punk dies (a few times: when they sign the record deal, with Combat Rock, with Cut the Crap, etc.).
    But there’s a different story to tell about The Clash, one that (a) de-centers the Great Men in Rock narrative, (b) is likely more musicologically accurate and interesting, and (c.) shows how punk is alive today, if in an aesthetic that is superficially unrecognizable as “punk.” This story begins with White Riot, maybe a little Safe European Home, but really focuses on Mag 7 and Overpowered by Funk–i.e., two of their hip hop songs. I teach The Clash as a (white) punk blip in a broader Black Atlantic musical ecosystem. The Clash begin with blues-rock and reggae, add in some hip hop after they visit NYC, and then continue on into Big Audio Dynamite, which influences acid house, drum & bass, and, eventually, dubstep. Though this is a somewhat queer genealogy/history of The Clash, it’s one in which punk is still alive, though in radically altered form. And even though dubstep is aesthetically very different than Year Zero British punk, if some teenagers in London tower blocks making noisy, offensive, abrasive, painful music on shitty computers and pirated copies of FruityLoops–if that isn’t as DIY/punk as fuck, then I don’t know what is.
    That story de-centers white punk and centers Black Atlantic musical practices, like reggae, hip hop, house, and dubstep. But in this de-centering we also get a story of punk’s continued viability, a story that also gives us a better understanding of its history as such. By telling a story that’s not primarily about punk, we get a better understanding of punk. But this story does not reproduce the “proper” Great White Men story of punk. It’s a story in which those Great White Men of punk have no future; we’re their future, and we are not them.
    So that’s also my approach to teaching the philosophical canon: queer the history so you don’t just reproduce, but make something radically different. Ironically, in making something radically different, you embody the ideals and practices of that thing you’re failing to reproduce…but, in a better way. It’s a way that de-centers the normative whiteness and masculinity of the philosophical canon. But in doing so it fails to be ‘philosophy.’ And that’s OK. I don’t think you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you have to make sure you’re washing away the germs and dirt.
    I said this argument also performed what it argued. See how I reached outside of philosophy to reflect back on philosophy? How, by taking the improper, oblique angle, I think I made what I hope is a clearer, more effective argument? How extraphilosophical thinking can sometimes be the best route to philosophical reflection?

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20. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 20, 2014

    Oh wow that’s fantastic (not just because it involved the Clash).
    I’m trying to get clearer about philosophy analogues. . . In the standard story the Clash are like the Great White Men of Philosophy with the albums being like dialectical moments in dominant Whig Histories. What would be analogous to placing their oeuvre in the Black Atlantic musical ecosystem?
    Would this be like taking a philosophically interesting issue such as love, alienation, freedom, necessity, etc. and seeing what people have written, sung, acted, weaved, painted, worshiped, etc. etc. etc. about it prior to and outside of what the Great White Men of Philosophy have written about it, and then reinterpreting the Great White Men in terms of that history? And then being in a position to change the original Whig History involving the Great White Men (this would be analogous to seeing Big Audio Dynamite as being part of the Clash’s oeuvre and perhaps one or more of the last three albums as not).
    I think this is a really cool way to look at things. I do have a couple of worries though. For me to tell a different story in that manner, don’t I have to be good at knowing the original story? That is don’t I need facility in a null hypothesis Whig history before I can use it to craft new stories? Related to this, is it O.K. to just teach my students an alternative story and not the Great White Men story that I myself drew from?
    I’m not asking these by way of trying to offer a refutation; I’m really interested in different ways you might concretely apply the Clash analogy to philosophical meta-narratives.

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21. 

    atd

    February 20, 2014

    maybe I’m misunderstanding Robin here, but I’m pretty sure that a key part of the argument (in both form and content) is that what is going on with the Clash is not in fact an analogy, but rather is the doing of philosophy otherwise.

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22. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 20, 2014

    I thought it was both. It will be funny (in an egg on my face way) if it wasn’t meant to be the former.

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23. 

    sk

    February 20, 2014

    I don’t know that much about the Clash, despite being a human being who purports to enjoy music… But as a Hegelian at heart, I think that this is still not dialectical enough.
    The bulk of the discussion seems to think diversifying the Brandomian/Whig history version of the canon is done best by seeking out those women who count(ed?) as philosophers also, to work into our account of the same history (there is also a whole philosophy of history at work beneath this remaining to be thought through, I think). This may be necessary, but I think it insufficient. Otherwise, at the panel on women in philosophy, the ancient scholars smugly reply, but what women am I suppose to teach in ancient philosophy, and how much of the Republic am I supposed to cut to do that? And they might be right, as far as that logic goes.
    For me, though, part of the lesson of feminist philosophy is that to treat this history as if race and gender were not already in play in it is ideology. This goes way deeper than just adding women and stirring. It means recognizing Hegel’s philosophy of history as raced; it means understanding the operation of gender in his concept of citizenship; it means wondering at the moment in the dialectic between identity and difference in the science of logic when Hegel makes the distinction between mere manyness and differences that make a difference by referencing the former as the sort of metaphysics done by ladies at court. Because of the deeply interconnected nature of Hegelian thought in particular, it is both too easy and inaccurate to treat these concepts as surface, practical, or merely political, a reflection of recent tastes – as if the exclusion of women and people of color from philosophy were just a simple whoops, my bad, that has had no effect on the substance of philosophy itself. These concepts call into question (not obviate, mind you, but rather open up to questioning) the very universality of the claims at work in Hegel, and in philosophy. To think of gender and race as surface issues leads to surface solutions, like anachronistically re-writing feminine pronouns into works in the history of philosophy – which immediately strips the text of all of the interesting philosophical questions available to us when we ask why Hobbes, or Hegel, or Beauvoir, used “mankind” instead of “humankind,” and what that means for other of their claims.
    Moreover, taking these issues seriously in the texts themselves is pedagogically important, because I can guarantee you that (some of) your students have noticed them. If I hadn’t had my questions about these issues taken seriously as real and reflected back to me as philosophical, when an undergraduate, I might be still left thinking as the student from the “What’s It Like” referenced in Helen’s post above: “It feels like I am not a philosopher–like my thoughts, feminine, worthless–will be forever excluded from the realm of the “lofty, the existential, the philosophical”.” Hell lots of days I am left thinking that, but I know philosophy is more than this.

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24. 

    Jack Samuel

    February 20, 2014

    I agree with your premise (that undergrad teaching ought not to replicate professional training/indoctrination) but not your proposal. Maybe one or two intro courses on critical thinking, basic logic, and statistics are a good place to start, but you can’t have a whole undergrad major about knowing how to interpret science in a changing world. And for the majors, the ones doing it because they are genuinely curious, I think nothing could be more important than teaching the canon (appropriately queered, of course).
    Seeing how big ideas were situated in their times and places, how each thinker was reacting to the previous one(s)—in short, how it all hangs together. I’d like to see this approach accompanied by plenty of meta-criticism of the institutional power relations embodied in the canon, not to mention trying to make the issues feel live and even important rather than of merely historical interest. But I wish that my undergrad major left me with a broad appreciation of how we got from Thales to Lewis, a critical stance toward race, sex, gender, and class, plenty of good material for reflecting on the existential-crises that I would face in my early-to-mid-20’s, and some novel and inspiring perspectives on the ethical and political life. Also soundness and completeness for modal logic and reading knowledge of German, Attic Greek, and Latin.
    It probably would have taken me 6 years to finish that degree, but even an abbreviated version of that sounds like an ideally enriching philosophical training.

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25. 

    Jonathan

    February 20, 2014

    It’s late and I’m tired after a long, wonderful day spent with the very interesting and intelligent graduate students and faculty of the English Department at Carnegie Mellon. So I’m going to short and simple. What gives you the right to discuss the intellectual content of the English major or work in literary study? Are you an English professor? Have you taken a class in an English department in the past twenty years? What would you think if I started pontificating about the decline of the philosophy major? I’m going to leave aside the empirical question about enrollments, where the evidence is at least very murk. The substantive intellectual part of your argument is based entirely on arm waving generalizations about what goes on in a discipline you are not trained in nor a member of. It’s as irresponsible as it is clichéd and tiresome.

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26. 

    Jonathan

    February 21, 2014

    The ease in which philosophers opine about the history and current state of English without knowing anything about either is frankly amazing. I’m a bit surprised to see it on New Apps, however. I expect this sort of thing from Leiter or Alex Rosenberg. But here it’s disappointing.

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27. 

    Jamie

    February 21, 2014

    Which of John and Jon’s claims about the intellectual content of literary studies – enrollment and major numbers aside – do you take issue with? If there is a substantive disagreement here, then you should express it.

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28. 

    Forner Leeds Grad Student, somewhat precariously employed

    February 21, 2014

    For Matt @ 2: You might like this paper, which discusses how Heloise might have contributed to virtue ethics, and also suggests that if we want to expand the canon to include more women, we may also need to look in unconventional places for examples of women’s philosophical writing.
    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09608788.2013.792237
    (Sandrine Berges – Rethinking Twelfth Century Ethics: the Contribution of Heloise, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2013)
    (Obligatory declaration of interest – I’m married to the author.)

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29. 

    Matt

    February 21, 2014

    Thanks, FLGS- that looks really interesting (and also the sort of thing I’m interested in, so doubly attractive.)

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30. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 21, 2014

    It’s early and I too am tired. I hope it will be a wonderful day. ..
    First, I’d be interested in what you have to say about Philosophy, and would not take you sharing your impressions as irresponsible or tiresome. Irresponsibility comes about when one fails to listen appropriately as an interlocutor. Please share where we are getting things wrong from your perspective and provide some links to help us get it right.
    I won’t speak for Protevi, except to note that (unlike me) he is joint appointed in a language department and (like me): (1) has served on PhD committees of students in English, (2) has students that have gone on to get PhDs elsewhere in English, (3) regularly has English PhD students and undergraduate majors in his classes, (4) is dear friends with English professors, (5) has by this point taught several thousand undergraduate students who take Gen Ed and elective classes from the English Department, and (6) has more than passing interest in what some people still call “theory,” and (7) continues to learn from the work of English professors.
    Surely our impressions are parochial, not being English professors or graduate students and not being at Carnegie Mellon. But it’s not enough just to point that out. Again, please tell us what we’re getting wrong and (most importantly, given this forum) give us some links to texts that will help us do better.*
    This isn’t just some excuse to put down other fields. Humanities professors in every field need to think very carefully what they are offering students and how they are marketing this to the culture at large. On this latter issue, I am pretty comfortable saying that Philosophy has done a better job than English in selling the degree. In addition to transferable job skills, we also tend to sell the importance of the actual content and the wonder-working power of canonical texts, whereas English people have tended to give that up and just sell skills like “critical thinking” and “writing well.” I think this is deeply mistaken because in an a-literate society students and parents can with some justification conclude that their kid can learn to critically think and write well enough while just getting a vocational degree. Moreover, I think that the incompetence that English professors typically manifest while selling their degree is to some extent a function of the canon wars (and I’m old enough to have lived through them, though I was an undergraduate at the time).
    Now maybe I’m importantly wrong about all of that, but (1) it would be deeply irresponsible not to check with people in other fields to see what is unique about your own offerings and how we can all do better, and (2) I write all of this as someone who in his heart of hearts cherishes fiction more than philosophy.
    [*My remarks are to some extent predicated on having read through the Theory’s Empire anthology (http://www.amazon.com/Theorys-Empire-An-Anthology-Dissent/dp/0231134177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392981893&sr=8-1&keywords=theory%27s+empire) with LSU English folk. I’ve also published on Stanley Fish and taught the works of Ruth Ronen and William C. Dowling multiple times. Please check out their great work! I’ve also edited one anthology of interdisciplinary work and two years ago started making an effort to go to at least one interdisciplinary conference a year. Thus far I’ve done one on Radical Theology, one on Theatre history and theory, and am about to go to one in Narratology.]

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31. 

    Gordon

    February 21, 2014

    Hi Jon, I’m afraid that comes across as parochial in the philosophy-in-a-bubble sense. You say: “In addition to transferable job skills, we also tend to sell the importance of the actual content and the wonder-working power of canonical texts, whereas English people have tended to give that up and just sell skills like “critical thinking” and “writing well.” I think this is deeply mistaken because in an a-literate society students and parents can with some justification conclude that their kid can learn to critically think and write well enough while just getting a vocational degree. Moreover, I think that the incompetence that English professors typically manifest while selling their degree is to some extent a function of the canon wars (and I’m old enough to have lived through them, though I was an undergraduate at the time).”
    Philosophy departments also have trouble selling their degrees – and that’s probably at least partly a function not (just?) of using too many big theory words, but of declaring that our canonical texts have amazing wonder-working power. It’s hard for a kid to explain why he [sic!] needs to read Hegel or even Plato when he’s focused mostly on getting a job. In the meantime, we also claim to teach “critical thinking” (having ceded “composition” to English departments – everybody needs their FTE’s), and maybe “ethics.” But those come across as luxuries to the sorts of students you’re talking about. When we have to sell the canon, we have to explain to our students why on earth they should be reading Leibniz. Say what you like about English, but students in most English departments can look forward to reading folks like Toni Morrison or Junot Diaz. Can reading Paradise or The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao be transformative? I’d argue it can. Sometimes they read these books in addition to the “canon,” sometimes not. Why is that a sales problem that’s unique to English?
    In the meantime, and not having read the Brandom book in the OP, there’s good reasons to be worried about Hegelian history – the effort to make connections that fit its internal logic gets pretty heavy-handed, and can very well foreclose the possibility of making meaningful connections b/t the students and the texts they’re reading. After all, Hegel’s own theory basically says that philosophy comes after history, and makes sense of the mess. The logic is one of selective redemption (he calls his philosophy of history a “theodicy” in so many words!). People who don’t fit the narrative get left out quite deliberately – see his dismissal of the nomadic peoples of Asia. I take it this is a central point of Robin’s example of the Clash: one virtue of the counter-history is that students see why the Clash are still relevant. The other big worry about Hegelian histories is that they’re totally depoliticized, and in particular they represent the development of whatever they’re talking about in internalist terms, which makes it impossible to see why (for example) early 17c philosophy is at least as motivated by the political meltdown of the late 16th century as anything to do with skepticism (the revival of which might, however, be plausibly tied to how crappy life in the late 16c and early 17c could be).

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32. 

    Jonathan

    February 21, 2014

    What I objected to–and still object to–are sweeping negative judgments of other disciplines based on no or extremely partial evidence. In the case, one’s vague sense that in the 1980s English caved into some horrible thing called “theory” and that expanding course offerings (canon revision) meant the wholesale displacement of the classics by works by minorities, on the findings by the NAS and a screed on the NY Times editorial page, and (as it turns out) on the essays in the very marginal and aggrieved volume Theory’s Empire. What all this amounts to is just a false and misleading picture of the discipline of English. No one I know balks at selling what you call “the wonder making” power of works of literature. We try not to sound cheesy, but we do talk about the value of the works themselves all the time to students. From my knowledge of the history of the discipline, we do that now as much as we ever have. That is, you might be fantasizing about some past when English professors trumpeted really loudly (“THIS MAJOR WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE”) that never really existed. Likewise, teaching works in their historical context doesn’t bury texts in detail that clouds the aforementioned “wonder making.” To the degree to which this is an important feature of the English major it’s simply intellectual responsibility, along with in fact a way to elicit the very “wonder making” power to which you refer (“look at how artfully Milton handles debates in philosophical materialism” or “let’s talk about how Pope criticizes the Prime Minister”).
    In any case, what’s remarkable to me about your post and comments and the recent essay by Rosenberg and accompanying comments by Leiter is how unrecognizable their picture of literary studies is to me and would be, I deeply suspect, to my friends and colleagues. I’ve been an English professor for almost twenty years (not at Carnegie Mellon by the way, I was just lecturing there yesterday. I teach at Hopkins; before that I was at Rutgers). Very little you and Rosenberg etc.have said seems to me to be an accurate take on either the intellectual content or practical pedagogy of the discipline. It sounds like you’re actually interested in good work in literary studies (although for what it’s worth for as fascinating as Narratology is, our major would plummet if we used it as the flagship to attract students). Why not just listen and look for a while before casting broad and baseless aspersions?
    p.s. Here’s some irony. I was colleagues with William C. Dowling for seventeen years. His work is very good, especially the book on the verse epistle. But he is not the person to go to for pronouncements on the profession.

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33. 

    r

    February 21, 2014

    I’m sympathetic to expanding the historical canon to include important historical women (and others). However, I’m skeptical that we need to make that historical canon, expanded or otherwise, the focus of undergraduate teaching. I’m just one person, obviously, but my own experience was that I was drawn to philosophy because I wanted to understand justice, logic, consciousness, evidence, and so on. I cared about the things themselves, not particularly what people hundreds of years ago had said about them–and I was not sold on the idea that reading what people hundred of years ago has said about them was the best way to get to the things themselves.
    Nor does it help that, say what you will about the centrality of Kant, I don’t think anyone would contest that his writing is incredibly difficult. I remember exactly how agonizing reading theoretical Kant in my undergraduate early modern class was; that was a class I could only bring myself to complete because it was a requirement for a major I was antecedently committed to. If philosophy had started for me in ‘architectonics’ and ‘subjects contained in predicates’ (contained? what does that even mean?) I would have dropped it immediately. The sheer difficulty of the writing makes it hard for a new student to extract the issues, and when it’s hard for a new student to extract the issues it’s hard for the new student to see the point. In other words: even if the order of being in philosophy is such that it all flows from and recapitulates Kant and Hegel, that still may be different from the optimal order of discovery for an interested undergraduate.
    It doesn’t help that historical authors often make what, to contemporary eyes, seem to be obvious blunders. Hobbes says: an absolute monarch will rule benevolently. Undergraduates in the 21st century, aware of history, roll their eyes. This makes it easier to dismiss the material as outmoded and useless, even on the supposition that it is actually no such thing. To the philosopher, his views on rationality, cognition, and normativity, and how they shape the political project, are super interesting. But the layman just sees the fact that all of the empirical claims he makes about how life will go under various governments are falsified by actually existing society, and asks: what could be less relevant to contemporary political life than some guy defending absolute monarchy?
    Similarly, the focus on historical figures can also give students the impression that philosophy is static and lives in the past, comparing especially unfavorably with vital, modern, and constantly-progressing Science ™ as way of actually figuring things out. Even if this view is on ultimate reflection totally naive, I think it’s nonetheless widespread in the culture–and hence forms part of the material conditions we need to consider when planning our teaching.
    These thoughts push me toward thinking that the best lower level classes will be ones the focus more on loosely contemporary readings, and less on historical figures, than is the current norm. Anyway, this may all be too far off topic; it’s just stuff I’ve been mulling over recently as I’ve been trying to develop some coherent view of philosophical pedagogy.

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34. 

    Jon Cogburn

    February 21, 2014

    Thanks for this! I find it really plausible and also think that what you’re saying here really nicely reinforces and develops what Carl wrote above.

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35. 

    DS

    February 21, 2014

    One of the major losses in focusing on contemporary readings results from the specialization of the field. Contemporary philosophical work often lacks the systematic and comprehensive approach of much historical philosophy.
    That approach (cue the Sellarsian “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”) seems to me to be crucial to the identity of the discipline (though I want to add that I don’t take it to be the sole identifying feature of the discipline). I suppose there’s a question here about whether or not we should be meeting the hypothetically Science ™ enamored students at that level. In other words, do we want to present ourselves more like Science ™ to be more popular? Is that a dishonest move? There are, of course, contemporary philosophers who have more comprehensive approaches but they often tend to be as technical and difficult as historical philosophy (Quine? Lewis? Sellars? They would be terrible to assign in a 101 class)
    There is value, too, in showing how the various features of our belief systems are interrelated. Historical, systematic philosophers provide good grounds for demonstrating this. Consider the relationship between Descartes and the scientific revolution of his time and note that the connections aren’t all distant from our contemporary scene: look at Descartes’ conclusions about non-human animals and our treatment of non-human animals in the practice of factory farming. Look at the tendency towards mechanistic efficiency in these practices, the reduction of non-human animals to material mechanisms of food production.
    Similarly, one can see how presuppositions can effect one’s general methodology. One can see how presuppositions about perception lead to or away from empiricist or rationalist methodologies. Why is that valuable? Because being about to step outside of one’s methodology and question it can be a very valuable skill. It’s easy to be unconsciously restricted to the practices we find ourselves in.
    Another issue is the role of temperament. I would have been bored to death (as would a number of my non-major peers) reading much contemporary philosophy. The prose is often dry, it frequently feels divorced from any broader context and so takes on the appearance of mere semantics. On the other hand, I was excited to read historical philosophy. The systems were fascinating because I could really dig into how this whole thing was operating, where its parts fit together and where the malfunctions might be. Without knowing the relative prevalence of the sort of preferences that lead one way or another, it’s difficult to decide which approach is best.
    Anecdotally, my experience of the undergraduate response to teaching contemporary readings doesn’t seem too different from the undergraduate response to historical readings (though different students tend to have different reactions). So I suspect there is another problem entirely in terms of pedagogy.
    Further anecdote: I know someone who is currently teaching a Philosophy 101 course. She has a graduate background in Education which she uses frequently in the class. She teaches a mix of historical and contemporary philosophy. Guess what? Students are consistently more engaged than I’ve seen them in any other lower level course. I suspect one of the major pedagogical problems in philosophy isn’t what philosophers or philosophy we teach but how we teach them.it. I suspect this derives from a number of factors: an overemphasis on research, some degree of arrogance about our own teaching abilities (or our ability to develop good pedagogy on our own), perhaps some lazy identification with Socratic method and probably a lot of other things.

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36. 

    Neal Hebert

    February 24, 2014

    This thread is a couple of days old, but I’ll bring it back from the dead with a quick comment speaking to John and Jon’s points on New Historicism/Theory.
    As some commenters and bloggers on this Web site know, I’m a PhD Candidate in Theatre History and Historiography; I’m trained in new historicist and Minnesota-style historiography. I’m not convinced that John Protevi’s points about there being a break or distance between theory and new historicism hold much water in terms of how we (being humanities scholars) approach this: New Historicism (and cultural materialism, if we’re going by its British name) is not, in my view, the best movement to demonstrate a slackening the hegemony of 1980s-style high theory in the humanities/arts.
    I like new historicism a lot, and some of my work (including my chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre) could be charitably described as new historicist – I would resist that, and cite the movement as an influence on the piece but I’d prefer it to be thought of as just straight up materialist – but in programs with which I’m familiar new historicism is presented as a continuation of high theory of the 1980s. It’s (to give a REALLY problematic gloss that I hope is nonetheless useful to readers unfamiliar with the movement) pretty much an appropriation of Foucault combined with a political commitment to researching non-canonical works of art. It’s awesome, it’s still hip even though it’s now an established discipline with 30 years of publications to its name, but it’s definitely of a piece with 1980s theory; in fact, it’s one of the things that helped cement Foucault’s centrality to every humanities discourse as a foundational theorist.
    I love reading Greenblatt and other practitioners of New Historicism; they’re legitimately fun to read and frequently produce work that’s among the most important humanities scholarship of the past few decades (Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” should be required reading in literature classes). But all of that being said, New Historicism strikes me and other humanities scholars I know (non-philosophers, of course) as an example of the enduring hegemony of the sorts of “high theory” approaches Jon is talking about rather than a counter-example.
    In my discipline, a better example of a threat or challenge to high theory’s influence would be cognitive science/cognitive studies; check Project Muse or JSTOR for Bruce McConachie’s work, and you can see what this looks like in terms of scholarship (spoiler: super cool, but really really alien compared to what humanities scholars normally do). But from where I’m sitting, any movement that is heavily derived from Foucault isn’t really the best poster child for an alternative to the sorts of theory that humanities/arts disciplines did in the 1980s.

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