What's the use of philosophy? democratic citizenship and the direction of higher education

Educational Theory

Volumn 54, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 143-155

  Altman, Matthew C ^a  

^a CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249114170     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2004.00011.x     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 154.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 106.
3. In 1970-71, 8,146 bachelor's degrees in philosophy and religion were conferred, representing about 0.97 percent of the total number of bachelor's degrees that year (839,730). In 2000-01, the number of bachelor's degrees in philosophy and religion was roughly the same (8,600), but this amounts only to about 0.69 percent of the total (1,244,200). See U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2003, NCES 2003-067 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), 159 (Table 33-3).
4. American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession and Committee on Career Opportunities, Philosophy: A Brief Guide for Undergraduates (Newark, Delaware: American Philosophical Association, 1982), v-viii.
5. Plato, Gorgias, trans. W.D. Woodhead, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 462c-465c.
6. Plato, Protagoras, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Hamilton and Cairns, 318e-319a.
7. Plato, Gorgias, 466d-468e.
8. P.F. Kluge, "Life and Death at a Liberal Arts College" (address delivered at the annual meeting of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, San Francisco, California, November 2002). This line of criticism is developed convincingly and in detail by David L. Kirp in his Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
9. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 24.
10. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Perigee, 1980), 260.
11. Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 1.
12. Here I am following John Rawls, who (following Immanuel Kant) distinguishes the rational from the reasonable. I act rationally when I will the means to an end that I have adopted, whatever it may be. I act reasonably when I act rightly, in accordance with the principles of justice. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 48-54.
13. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 219. MacIntyre distinguishes the professional skills that help us to pursue particular things from the virtues that shape how we pursue the goods that unify the whole of our lives (205).
14. Plato, The Apology, in Five Dialogues, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 29a-b.
15. I recently attended a conference that hosted a panel on ethics and corporate America, focusing on ethics in accountancy. A large portion of the program was devoted to a description of the standards and practices established by members of the profession and codified by such groups as the Institute of Management Accountants, the Institute of Internal Auditors, and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The panel was composed of professors from the accountancy program rather than philosophers, and they judged recent corporate malfeasance against these conventions.
16. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993), 72.
17. Ibid., 77.
18. Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11-22.
19. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84.
20. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106.
21. Here my project differs significantly from the kind of rallying cry and defense of classical education mounted by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Although we direct our complaints at the same anti intellectualism, only Bloom's position presupposes a conception of the good and precludes the idea that the value of the liberal arts is itself open to question. For example, describing his first impression of the University of Chicago, he lauds its "dedicat[ion] to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself" (243). This raises the paradoxical but meaningful question of who decides what is intrinsically valuable. Bloom forecloses this sort of question, but I maintain that it ought to be encouraged equally with regard to the useful and the assumptions that underlie appeals to the so-called intrinsically valuable. Philosophy does not presuppose what the good is for us, but makes possible the sort of inquiry by which we can rationally commit ourselves to a set of values. For this reason, those who fight staunchly for a classical education share more than they would like to admit with those who define education in terms of job training. Both foist preexisting values on students rather than preparing them for the process of world-making (in the Freirean sense). Neither position is transformative, which is why Bloom's return to the classics is just as pernicious as the current emphasis on instrumentalism in education. 22. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987
22. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987