Philosophy

Who cares?

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden

There is a laugh waiting in "self-appointed inspector." An inspector makes sense within an institution of rules and standards and enforcement; a "self-appointed inspector" is a just a guy wandering around and noticing things, as silly as a one person baseball team. But for anything important in a community, there are no inspectors. There are, for example, plenty of inspectors to evaluate, in some terms or other, the quality of college and university programs. The goal of this inspection, people would say, is to safeguard the intellectual health of the community. But there is nobody asking about specifically the intellectual health of the community, how all these disparate institutions add up, what values are being preserved, what values neglected.

In the Twin Cities metro area, there are lots of institutions that teach philosophy. Each has a quite different cast of mind, and none of the departments keeps in active communication with the others, so far as I can tell. So nobody asks about the health of philosophy in Minnesota, even in this limited academic context. And no one I know is asking the bigger question: what is happening to central intellectual values -- like clarity, scholarly care, responsible intelligence, sympathy -- in the academy in general? I am confident that asking that question would bring to the surface some quite unexpected practical priorities in higher education.