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October 1, 2003
Gary,
You redescribe scholarship as certain way of doing philosophy. Perhaps that is the case. I don’t know. I think that it is getting up every morning and starting on the books, reading, rereading, puzzling over passages, taking notes, and so on. It doesn’t have to happen in the morning but you get my general drift. A religious hermit might also do this so I am not sure if it should be called philosophy, but if you insist on it then okay.
I am not sure I get your next point: the assumption that scholarship as a way of life is not part of a whole tradition of philosophy as a way of life. I don’t think I think that but perhaps it is some hidden consequence of which I am currently unaware. Nothing would surprise me. I think a philosopher is like a religious hermit: they do the same thing but to different sets of books.
I do think that the scholarship is different to the current practice, not just in academic philosophy but in academia generally. In fact there really is no such thing as philosophy in the modern university. To the extent that it exists it is merely a ghost of another era lurking in some shadowy dead-end corridor.
The University of South Australia doesn’t have a philosophy department and there is no grouping of particular staff because they are philosophers. The smallest administrative unit is larger than the department and it is not based on discipline. It is interdisciplinary, indeed it is non-disciplinary, it is post-modern. Although philosophers may occasionally still group together in the other two universities in South Australia, similar administrative moves are under way in them as well. I know philosophers up at Flinders who hang around with lawyers or people in the medical school as much as other philosophers.
The work loads of individual academics have significantly changed. They have much more teaching and many more students. This has to be coupled with a breakdown in disciplinary support. You can’t behave like a religious hermit under these circumstances. You’re no longer even certain of what books to read, that is if you still have much choice in the matter.
Some of the corridor ghosts still think of themselves as philosophers. By and large, they’re grouped together in clubs, which offer some collective support and control curricula. If you’re lucky you can be a scholar within the constraints they set and get paid for it. Whoopee!
I am not trying to argue for a philosophical position but just tell it as it is. There are some crazies out there in suburbia, shut away in their bedrooms, who still do the scholarship thing. If anybody ever again wants to know all the stories that constituted us, these are the people who know the scripts. The rest is archaeology, sifting through remains no one really understands any longer.
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