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Friday, May 09, 2008
Friday3: Other Disciplines
Tim Burke had just gotten back from a visit to Maine’s College of the Atlantic and has blogged about it:
The college doesn’t have departments, and its faculty try very consciously to branch out and explore connections between different kinds of knowledge and methodologies. There is a lot of emphasis on guiding students towards independent study and in changing the curriculum to respond to new problems and shifting student interests. They focus on what they call “human ecology”, which I think is potentially specific enough to give the curriculum a clear set of boundaries while flexible enough that it doesn’t get stuck in a particular place and time or in a specific social or political project like a fly in amber. ... The students I met, as well as the faculty, also seem to have a very clear drive towards applied and practical uses of what they teach, though not at all narrowly vocational. The emphasis on student independence pays off, from what I can see: the students I talked to were among the most confident, uninhibited and yet non-snobby undergraduates I’ve met.
In praise of Deadwood: Alan Taylor reviews a comprehensive American history aimed at the general public: Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea. He finds it an inadequate antidote to American triumphalism:
To achieve his goals, Kluger needed to make a cleaner break with the tropes of Turner’s day. Indeed, he missed a golden opportunity to reform Turner’s frontier thesis--which can be rescued from its distorting character types. Although Turner got almost all of the details wrong, he knew where to look for the distinctive nature of American society. The frontier thesis rightly regards expansion as central to the development of American institutions and values through the nineteenth century. That expansion created this nation’s wealth, and its distribution of property and power, and much of its historical memory. But that distribution of property and power was profoundly unequal--it was, in other words, at odds with the democratic aspirations also generated by the frontier experience. Before HBO’s series Deadwood succumbed to David Milch’s rhetorical excesses, it brilliantly explored the tension between frontier illusions and realities--and particularly between the frontier ambitions of common people and the consolidating power of capital. Had Richard Kluger similarly illuminated that tension, he would have earned the pulpit to preach history to his readers.
Alan Wolfe reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007), a biography by Richard Reeves. "In contrast to both Continental and analytic philosophy, give me John Stuart Mill any day, and give me a biography as fascinating to read as the one written by Richard Reeves.”
I am no philosopher, so perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking that Mill has gotten a raw deal from those who are. For a book I have just completed on what we can learn from the tradition of liberal political philosophy, I read a good deal of Mill and came to value him, not only for his seductive writing but also for the relevance of his ideas to such contemporary issues as free speech, women’s suffrage, and the role that religion should play in a democracy. It therefore bothers me that Mill is not taken as seriously as he should be, either in philosophy or in my own discipline of political science.
Reeves calls Mill “unquestionably the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain — and perhaps even the world.” Such praise is too excessive, even for me. But I share Reeves’s argument that, as well known as Mill may be, he nonetheless deserves a rediscovery.
Comments
This is the second time in two days that I have read laughably wrong critiques of the analytic/Continental divide by people outside of philosophy. Not understanding the discipline that one is attempting to criticize does not produce a better criticism.
Whether or not Mill is as deserving of rediscovery as Alan Wolfe seems to think, the idea that “so much of Continental philosophy is devoted to dismissing the importance of human agency” is just plain wrong. Hello, Sartre? Merleau-Ponty? And suggesting that all too many flirted with fascism? The only one I can think of is Heidegger.
Also, I suspect that the reason that philosophy doesn’t set much store in biography is because the goal of philosophy is to do philosophy.
There’s something a little peculiar about suggesting that one of the most significant moral philosophers needs to be rediscovered. Should philosophy also try to rediscover Kant, or Aristotle?
Why does the Chronicle of Higher Education publish this sort of thing?