March 15, 2003
Dear Professor Swartz,
Your essay certainly rang some bells for me. I finished my doctorate at
Oxford in 1997, taught briefly at another UK university, then left
academia. The phenomenon you describe is particularly pernicious given
the battle young philosophy PhD's face in trying to build a career
against the background of an immensely competitive academic job market.
It's hard to maintain the confidence that one's own ideas are worth
developing when opportunities to discuss them are so often the scene of
brash confrontation, the objective of which seems generally to be the
boosting of the critic's reputation for quickness of mind.
This kind of ethos encourages a very particular kind of philosophical
temperament, in which raw mental muscle is rather more prominent than a
desire for truth. The analogy with the courtroom is apt; a lawyerly
disposition to seek victory comes to be far more important than it
should be.
I remember once seeing the late John Rawls take questions after a
lecture: he was honest enough to admit that he just didn't know how to
respond to a particular objection, and promised to get back to the
questioner once he'd had a chance to think about the matter. That's
just what I feel one should do in this kind of circumstance; it would
have felt like career suicide to try it in certain Oxford circles.
I was no Rawls, of course, and I also have some other doubts about whether I
really wanted to be a professional philosopher. But it was also true
that others among my peers, more talented than I, had similar
feelings, and they too eventually left the profession.
Thanks for expressing concern about this issue in a
public way: the promotion of this particular intellectual style ends up
impoverishing a profession which one might reasonably have hoped would
aim to protect calm, reflective discussion.
Yours,
Tom Runnacles
tom@trunnacl.org
|