Socrates Tenured: An Introduction, Robert

Frodeman and Adam Briggle

SERRC August 11, 2014 3 Comments
Author Information: Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas, frodeman@unt.edu and
Adam Briggle, University of North Texas, Adam.Briggle@unt.edu

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1Ap

Editors Note: Bob Frodeman and Adam Briggle were kind enough to share a draft (further
abridged) of the introduction to their proposed book Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of
21st Century Philosophy. The book is under consideration for publication in our Collective
Studies in Knowledge and Society series. A reply to their Frodeman and Briggles
introduction is forthcoming.

Introduction

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Thoreau

Think of organic chemistry; I recognize its importance, but I am not curious

about it, nor do I see why the layman should care about much of what concerns
me in philosophy. Quine

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the
problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers,
for dealing with the problems of men. Dewey

I.

I n 1917 John Dewey published The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy. This essay, a
nearly 17,000 word reflection on the role of philosophy in early 20th century American life,
expressed Deweys concern that philosophy had become antiquated, sidetracked from the
main currents of contemporary life, too much the domain of professionals and adepts. While
taking pains to note that the classic questions of philosophy make inestimable contributions
to culture both past and present, Dewey felt that the topics being raised by professional
philosophers were too often discussed mainly because they have been discussed rather than
because contemporary conditions of life suggest them.

Dewey soon traveled to China, where he delivered nearly 200 lectures on education and
democracy to large crowds across a two-year stay. In America Dewey commented on the
public questions of the day, a role that he inhabited until his death in 1952. Since then,
however, a different set of expectations has ruled. Professional philosophers have followed
Quines path in treating philosophy as a technical exercise of no particular interest to the
layman. While it is possible to point to philosophers who work with (rather than merely talk
about) non-philosophical stakeholders, among the mass of philosophers societal irrelevance
is often treated as a sign of intellectual seriousness.

Today we live in a global commons created and constantly modified by technoscientific

invention. We are surrounded by phenomena crying out for philosophic reflection. Indeed,
open your computer and you will find thoughtful exploration of issues as varied as the
creation of autonomous killing machines, the loss of privacy in a digital age, the remaking of
friendship via Facebook, and the refashioning of human nature via biotechnology. In this
sense, as Romano (2012) and Goldstein (2014) have recently argued, philosophy abounds.

But professional philosophers have remained largely on the margins of this growing cultural
conversation. It neednt be this way. Take metaphysics. Every philosophy department
teaches courses in metaphysics. But how is the subject handled? As evidenced by a sample of
syllabuses posted online, metaphysics classes are overwhelmingly exercises in professional
philosophy. Classes begin from the concerns of philosophers rather than from contemporary
problems. The same is true of leading textbooks. Consider as magisterial a source as
the Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Loux and Zimmerman, eds. Their introduction begins:

Its detractors often characterize analytical philosophy as anti-metaphysical.

After all, we are told, it was born at the hands of Moore and Russell, who were
reacting against the metaphysical systems of idealists like Bosanquet and
Bradley

The discussion is entirely framed in terms of the discipline of philosophy and only
20thcentury analytic philosophy at that. We find no reference to peoples actual lives, to the
metaphysical issues tied to the births and transformations and deaths that we all endure, no
acknowledgement that questions of metaphysics involve some of the most intimate and
transcendent questions of our lives. Instead, metaphysics is a tale told in terms of
professionals: Moore and Russell, Bosanquet and Bradley, Quine and Lewis.

The eight sections of the Handbook reflect this Olympian perspective:

Universals and Particulars

Existence and Identity
Modality and Possible Worlds
Time, Space-Time, and Persistence
Events, Causation, and Physics
Persons and the Nature of Mind
Freedom of the Will
Anti-Realism and Vagueness
Chapter titles are laden with jargon like Supervenience, Emergence, Realization,
Reduction and Compatiblism and Incompatiblism. This is not to say that the matters
addressed by such essays are not significant. But it takes an adept in philosophy to extract the
nut of existential meaning from the disciplinary shell. No wonder even the best students walk
away confirmed in their prejudices concerning the irrelevance of philosophy to everyday
life. [1]

Why do philosophers begin with insider topics when issues laden with metaphysics are in the
news every day? Todays (May 25, 2014) Washington Post describes a patient taking heart
pills that include ingestible chips: the chips link up with her computer so that she and her
doctor can see that she has taken her medicine. The story also describes soon-to-be marketed
nanosensors that live in the bloodstream and will be able to spot the signs of a heart attack
before it occurs. These are issues that fall under Existence and Identity, one of the sections
of the Oxford Handbook: at stake here are not just new physical instruments, but
metaphysical questions about the nature of self and the boundary between organism and
machine. Loux and Zimmerman miss the chance to frame this section in terms of our
increasingly Borg-like existence rather than solely in terms of scholastic debates.

This needs to change, for the health of our culture, and for the health of philosophy itself.
Unless professional philosophy embraces and institutionalizes an engaged approach to
philosophizing, working alongside other disciplines and abroad in the world at large, it will
become a casualty of history.

Nearly 100 years after Deweys essay it is time for another reconstruction of philosophy.

II.

Over time a domain of action previously accepted as given evolved into

something deemed worthy of sustained critical commentary, often in
association with particular social, economic, or political processes. Rinella

This wont be easy. To philosophize todayby which we mean professionally, in a salaried

position, at a college or universityis to live within a paradox. Now, one could claim that it
has always been so. A gap has always existed between the concerns of philosophers and our
real world philosophic problems. Everyone wrestles with how to live a rich and fulfilling
existence. Yet formalize the questionwhat constitutes the good life?and the topic tends to
ossify. People dismiss it as wool gathering. But the contradiction remains. People often
describe ethics as merely a matter of opinion, even while they also struggle to ensure that
their children are treated fairly. And they reject aesthetics as subjective even as they plan
trips to national parks and pour over the details of their kitchen remodel.

The tension between the language and concerns of philosophers and everyday philosophical
problems has been part of the Wests DNA since the milkmaid laughed at Thales tumbling
into a ditch. But Thales had practical chops, too, which he proved when he made a killing in
the olive market. The vexed nature of the relationship between philosophers and society was
demonstrated early on by Socrates fate. With one leg in abstruse contemplation and the
other planted in contemporary affairs, philosophy has alternately bored and irritated the
outside world. It is a tension that philosophers have often sought to lessen. Chief among
those complaining about the uselessness of philosophy have been philosophers themselves.
Thus Descartes scorned the abstractions of the Schoolmen and Marx said the point of
philosophy was to change, rather than merely interpret the world.

But if the relationship between philosophy and the polis has always been fraught, and laced
with perhaps more than a bit of subterfuge, it was also in the end a workable one. Until the
20th century, that is. Since then the tension has grown into a paradox, the gap into a
chasm. Socrates Tenured offers an account of how this chasm was created how philosophy,
the most relevant (if not the most efficient) of subjects, lost the creative tension between
contemplation and engagement and slipped into cultural irrelevance. But more than simply
critique, this book also proposes a way forward, describing how philosophy can regain a
relevant role in culture.

Our argument turns on the single greatest impediment to philosophys greater relevance: the
current institutional situation of philosophy. The early 20th century research university
disciplined philosophers, placing them in departments, where they wrote for and were judged
by their disciplinary peers. Oddly, this change was unremarked upon, or was treated as
simply the professionalization of another academic field of research. It continues to be
passed over in silence today. Like Molieres Gentleman, to whom no one had explained that
he had been speaking prose, philosophers seem innocent of the fact that they have been
disciplined, or that one might have reasons to object to this fact. And so even when their
subject matter consists of something of real significance to the wider world, philosophers
typically discuss the topic in a way that precludes the active interest of and involvement by
non-philosophers. Philosophers may have had much to say to their fellow citizens, but unlike
Nietzsches Zarathustra they no longer come down from the mountaintop to say it.

Philosophers view themselves as critical thinkers par excellence who have been trained to
question everything; but they have overlooked the institutional arrangements that govern
their lives. The department is seen as a neutral space from which thought germinates, not
itself the object of reflection. One finds no exploration of the effects that disciplining might
have had on philosophical theorizing, or of where else philosophers could be housed, or of
how philosophers, by being located elsewhere, might have developed alternative accounts of
the world or have come up with new ways of philosophizing. In fact, the epistemic
implications of the current institutional housing of philosophy are profound. For when
philosophers leave behind disciplinary standards, living and working elsewhere than in
philosophy departments, their standards for sound theoretical work change as well.

Philosophers once recognized that there is something problematic about treating philosophy
as simply one discipline alongside the others. It was once understood that in addition to fine-
grained analyses philosophy offered perspectives that undergirded, capped off, or
synthesized the work of other disciplines such as physics or biology, and then connected
those insights to our larger concerns. Such work lost favor in the twentieth century
dismissed as Weltanschauung philosophy by analytic philosophers, and as foundationalism
by continental philosophers. But reopen this perspective and questions abound: if philosophy
is not, or not exclusively a regional ontology, why are philosophers housed within one region
of the university? Why is peer-reviewed scholarship the sole standard for judging
philosophic work, rather than also the effects that such work has on the larger world? And
why is there only one social role for those with PhDs in philosophynamely, to talk to other
PhDs in philosophy?

Rinellas comment (2010) is drawn from an interview that Foucault gave to Paul Rabinow
shortly before his death. Foucault was concerned with what one could call the problems or,
more exactly, problematizationshow we decide what questions do or do not get asked
(Rabinow, 1984). Why, for instance, has the philosophy of science de facto consisted of the
philosophy of physics and not geology (Frodeman 2003)? Why has the philosophy of
technology, our reflection on the ways in which we modify our environment, not included an
account of the ways in which we modify our internal environment via drugs? Similarly, we
seek here to problematize the institutional aspects of philosophy, and the humanities
generally. We envision a wide range of theoretical, practical, and political consequences to
result.

III.

Philosophers may have ignored their institutional placement, but for other disciplines critical
reflection on the structures of knowledge production is par for the course. Perhaps the most
important site for such analysis is the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and
society studies (STS). One influential book in STSGibbons et al, 1994chronicles the shift
in late 20th century science from Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production. Mode 1 is
academic, investigator-initiated, and discipline-based. By contrast, Mode 2 knowledge
production is context-driven, problem-focused, and interdisciplinary. This framework is a
good rough sketch of our basic point: we are tracing and promoting the 21st century
development of Mode 2 philosophy.

Make no mistake: we are pluralists on this point. We believe Mode 1 or disciplinary

scholarship should continue to have a central place in philosophy. But this needs to be
counter-balanced by an equal focus within the philosophical community on conducting work
that is socially engaged. In part this is simply recognizing a new reality: increasingly society
is demanding that academics demonstrate their broader relevance. This demand has so far
largely skipped over philosophy and the humanities, but this is unlikely to remain the case
for much longer. Philosophy needs to demonstrate its bona fides by showing how it can make
timely and effective contributions to contemporary debates. We believe that this is best done
in a way that also shows that Mode 2 philosophizing is enriched by the insights of Mode 1 or
traditional philosophy.
It is instructive to extend some of the debates within STS and the related field of science
policy into the realm of philosophy. One of the central questions for science policy is; how
does scientific research translate into social value? Since the end of World War II, the answer
to this question has basically been serendipity. In a 1945 letter to President Truman,
Vannevar Bush (who had led scientific R&D efforts during the war), argued that basic
research is foundational to social progress. We know science will improve society, he
argued, but we dont know which research project will lead to which improvements. There is
no way to predict how things will turn out. So it is best to conduct as much basic research as
possible, trusting that somewhere down the line it will somehow pay off. This allowed
scientists to wall off a narrow domain of responsibility: their job was to conduct good
research as judged by their disciplinary peers and then throw it over the wall to society.
The later use of that research was not their responsibility.

This is the institutional form that philosophy also took on. What do we have in philosophy
departments if not, in Bushs words, the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of
their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity? There is the same guiding faith
that somehow, somewhere down the line those words in peer-reviewed academic philosophy
journals will pay rewards to society.

Increasingly, that faith is not good enough. At the federal level, budget cuts and a growing
animosity toward the public sphere have led to Congressional attacks on individual research
grants and even entire research programs. This has also led to increasing attempts to measure
the broader social impacts of research. Attempts at such measurement include bibliometrics,
patent analysis, Altmetrics, community-engaged research, and translational research. But
while such questions are a hot area of research across a number of fields, for the most part
philosophers and other humanists still plod along with the old serendipity model of mode 1
disciplinary scholarship. They have not yet seen this as an opportunity for interesting
theoretical work which also holds important practical outcomes.

Its time for a philosophy policy analogous to science policy, and indeed we believe that this
is already beginning to germinate. While Mode 1 philosophy is still the reigning orthodoxy,
there is a growing heterodoxy within the ranks of philosophers, sometimes lumped under the
title of public philosophy. We call our own version of Mode 2 work (which we describe
below) field philosophy. There are a number of similar approaches in areas such as
environmental justice, critical race theory, feminism, and bioethics that we recognize as
allies. We celebrate these diverse approaches to Mode 2 philosophizing, whether they go by
the name of public, applied, or by some other title. But we believe that the lack of thought
given to the institutional dimensions of philosophizing has limited the effectiveness of this
work. A new philosophical practice, where philosophers work in real time with a variety of
audiences and stakeholders, will lead to new theoretical forms of philosophy once we break
the stranglehold that disciplinary norms have upon the profession.

We have two audiences in mind for this book. First, for administrators, scientists, engineers,
and others who would benefit from the work of Mode 2 philosophy, our goal is to introduce a
kind of philosophy that shatters preconceived notions of philosophers as navel-gazing nook-
dwellers. Second, for philosophers, our goal is to open up new opportunities for theorizing
and for employment. Quite often, when philosophers follow the urge to engage in real-world
problems they wind up working through a set of thorny theoretical and practical issues with
no resources to help them cope. We hope this book serves, perhaps not as a set of best
practices but as a reference to help foster a community of practitioners. In the absence of
such a self-reflexive community, the various experiments in Mode 2 philosophizing will
remain a sequence of one-off attempts. Isolated individuals fed up with the disciplinary status
quo will reinvent the wheel of alternative philosophy anew each time. Lessons learned will
not be shared. Traps that could be avoided wont be, and alternative career paths for
philosophers will remain closed, because making a generational change takes collective and
sustained effort.

More importantly, it will take a community to institutionalize Mode 2 practices. As it stands

now, heterodox practitioners (however they may self-identify) exist on the margins and lead
professional lives that run against the grain. As the feminist public philosopher Linda Martn
Alcoff notes, many Mode 2 philosophers try to walk a fine line between responsiveness to
community needs and employment survival, pushing the boundaries of academic
respectability even while trying to establish their credentials in conventional ways (Alcoff
2002, p. 522). It is these conventional ways that must change. We have to invent a
philosophy where responsiveness to community needs (not just disciplinary interests and
imperatives) is an integral part of ones employment and is viewed as academically
respectable.

This is how to shrink the chasm between philosophy and society. In practice, this will require
many changes, from revised promotion and tenure criteria to alternative metrics for
excellence and impact. As these changes are implemented, it will be important to consider at
what point the chasm has been reduced to a suitable-sized gap. After all, we dont want to
eliminate the space between philosophy and society altogether. Socrates was engaged, but
still an outsider. He certainly was no pundit looking to score the most outrageous sound bite
and rack up the most likes on Facebook. We need a peoples philosophy that reserves
every right to be unpopular.

[1] But dont ethics textbooks, and classes, often take the tact that we are advocating? See
below, but we happily concede that our account applies to different degrees to different
aspects of philosophy. But even ethics classes need to do a better job of hooking onto the
world.

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