Dialogue re the Worth of Philosophy Grad School

I recently read and enjoyed this dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam. While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh.

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Ɔdɔfírinne: They’re trying to defund us, would you believe it!?


Grádwuma: I would, trusting sort that I am, but all the same I’d feel better if you’d tell me who they are and what they mean to defund.


Ɔ: Oh, cute — at least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on.

G: Working on my tight-five.

Ɔ: Well in the meantime, I just got back from faculty senate where I was told that in light of the general state of things the university is facing budget cuts! Worse, given that the Prominent Right Wing Politician mentioned us by name on their last TV-appearance, we’re clearly in for special treatment; it was said our department’s PhD programme specifically was unsustainable and will have to go.

G: That’s terrible! We’ll have to involve the union!

Ɔ: Well, naturally I threatened to organise a work-stoppage, but the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost simply laughed at the very idea of philosophers on strike, wondering how ever they’d tell the difference. The cheek!

G: Quite. 

Ɔ: It just makes me so sad to see they don’t recognise the value of what we do here.

G: Right! Our students do fairly well on the job market, we provide them a competitive wage; it’s a lovely way to spend one’s mid-20s — a real shame for future generations to be robbed of this!

Ɔ: Well… yes, I suppose so, but that’s not really what I had in mind.

G: Oh, you had in mind the subsidised housing? Because I actually think we stoppe-

Ɔ: No! I meant all the deep and important work answering fundamental questions about reality and our place therein.

G: … are we still talking about our grad programme?

Ɔ: Of course! You don’t think that characterises our work and that of our students?



G: Of course not! Though, I should say, I don’t mean to imply anything negative about our valued students in particular. It’s just — when was the last time you heard of a philosophical question of that sort getting answered by anyone, let alone any of us?



Ɔ: I’m sure there are plenty of cases, but I must ask: if you don’t think we actually address the questions we set ourselves to, why do you think it a shame that we stop training people in our methods of answering those questions?

G: It’s just as I said! We’re a cushy jobs programme for the idle-smart. I suppose it can also be said that by reducing competition for McKinsey internships, or whatever else these kids’d do for lack of us, we help boost wages in various upper middle class jobs, making the rich that little bit richer and incrementally widening inequality - you’d think the Prominent Right Wing Politician would thank us!

Ɔ: Can’t you be serious? If this were all we did then surely our esteemed Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost would be quite right to do away with us. If it’s not the case that we’re tackling questions that actually matter then surely there are better ways of employing people.

G: well my friend you talk a big game yet I can’t help but notice you failed to actually produce any examples of us answering these deep questions.

Ɔ: I didn’t really think it would be necessary! Are you really so cynical? Do you really doubt that questions about the nature of truth, beauty, scientific method, etc, are interesting and important?



G: it’s not the questions I worry about, it’s our answering them. How often do we actually answer those questions to the satisfaction of anyone beyond the author putting forward the claim? And even then one often doubts their conviction! You may think I sound cynical, but the benefit to young people of spending a few years cloistered in our little corner of academe is a real good we know actually accrues to people; I’m genuinely proud to have helped earnest young people spend a bit of their lives doing something they love. While you would rest the case for our programme on the viability of the latest attempt to avoid a counter-example to one’s preferred analysis of “knowledge”! I think, between the two of us, it is actually I who offer the stronger defence.

Ɔ: Come now, you over-state your doubts. Surely you’d agree that at least in the case of the greats — the Parfits, Lewises, Williamsons, or Nussbaums — surely then our little field has managed to produce answers of interest to more than just their authors?


G: which of the people you just named do you actually agree with on any of their characteristic positions?


Ɔ: … Ah, well. Nevertheless, after all, it’s more complica-

G: Right well while you think about that I’m going to go tell the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost about the median wage of our grads 5 years out of programme.

Ɔ: Look, even if I do not entirely agree with my honoured elders I still do think that them producing the answers they did is of more than parochial interest! And, more than that, I think it has to be if this is worth doing at all - if even at our best we do not produce answers worth coming to learn of then it really all has been in vain and we really may as well just shut the whole place down.


G: Why think any of this? In fact, why even conceive of philosophy in terms of “answers to questions”? It’s not so natural as you make it seem.

Ɔ: Because it’s the only plausible end towards which grad school may genuinely be a good means. There are plenty of ways of providing welfare to people in their mid-20s, most of them far more equitable and efficient than grad school. Unlike in some other fields, nearly anyone can ask our questions, and if all we cared about was the literary or aesthetic quality of philosophical musings then by the way we train students we’d probably be making the world worse. Generating philosophy teachers for undergraduates is a fine thing indeed but probably doesn’t require the lengthy, and failure-prone, process of also producing a full PhD as one is being trained to do so. And don’t get me started on “soft skills” arguments; if philosophy actually engendered “critical thinking” then no one would be taken in by the claim that in order to teach it one first requires a decade of tertiary education.

The only thing, the only thing at all, that we plausibly actually achieve best by having people specialise for the long period we do, is inculcating people into a method and tradition of answering questions in a superior fashion, and one that requires long immersion and rigorous training in order to master. 

G: I confess I have always been sceptical of inference to the best explanation as a mode of reasoning. But, if nothing else, I at least admire the chutzpah of an I.B.E. which takes as rock solid fact, in demand of explanation, that one’s job is very valuable and must be protected!

Ɔ: You impute your cynicism to me and thereby reverse the order of causation! It is because I believe it valuable that I sought the job, and for this same reason I now wish to protect it.

G: Huh. Fair enough. But, look, that merely shifts the register from comic to tragic when you admit you cannot actually name anyone whose produced answers to philosophical questions you think hold up to general scrutiny, that can credibly claim to settle the matters we purport to investigate.

Ɔ: Not so, Grádwuma, not so — my mistake before was to name our contemporary leading lights. Philosophy does not work on such timescales. I should have named the real philosophical high rollers: Aristotle succeeded in showing a logical system complete, Descartes invented graphs, and Newton made some noteworthy contributions to physics. Philosophers one and all!

G: oh gimmie a break! Yeah yeah we’ve all heard this one before - philosophy only seems not to succeed because whenever we generate unambiguous successes we break off the sub-discipline into its own department and are no longer credited with the win. Imagine if every time a sufficiently interesting theorem were proven mathematics departments subdivided, the thought goes, and everyone stopped thinking of at least one of the new things as “mathematics” anymore - surely in such a world the thing going by the name “mathematics” would seem less impressive than our world, even if overall that world had exactly the same record of achievement. I fully agree. And if we were concerned to defend the general reputation of “philosophy” per se then I would also agree this is a telling consideration - but we are here to defend philosophy grad school, and to that end it is quite besides the point.

I have nothing against the Greats you just named - some of my best friends are dead white men - but the fashions in which they were trained and addressed their questions are surely not representative of our training regimen. And nor would we want it to be! Or do you propose we divide our student’s time between propositional logic and Biblical numerology? Maybe have them snort mercury and take a brief stint invading the Czech Republic to see what inspiration it brings? 

Ɔ: how is it you just pronounced the capitalisation of “G” in “Greats”!?

G: don’t worry about it.

Ɔ: In any case, you undervalue our tradition. Of course we do not do exactly what our illustrious forbearers did before they achieved their eminence, but nor have we haphazardly innovated at random. It is not, after all, simply happy chance that we have retained knowledge of Newton’s means of predicting eclipses but let his means of predicting apocalypses fall by the wayside. We have taken what has worked, refined and adapted it to suit present purposes, and our current method in education represents a distillation of their wisdom - a wisdom we transmit to students, and from which we may plausibly hope to see similar or even greater results. 

G: You take much on faith. I agree that if we really had somehow distilled the wisdom of the ancients into our pedagogical practice then we could appropriately draw on philosophy’s big wins in defence of our programme’s continued existence. But I do not think we are anywhere near so thoughtful about either our pedagogy or relationship to tradition that we can claim as much with any confidence. I have heard, for instance, experimental philosophers complain that the relative neglect of their preferred empirical methods marks a real break with the classic tradition in philosophy, and likely to our detriment - a claim made plausible by your selection of past exemplars, I note. Likewise our comrades in the Continental tradition make related complaints of us, as far as I can tell. What makes you so sure they are wrong?

Ɔ: such objections themselves misunderstand how it is traditions convey wisdom! They do not require explicit theorisation or reflexive self-understanding to work their magic, and often in fact it is a sign of crisis or decay when such is felt needed. Perhaps I am taking things on faith, I grant, but the faith is just one in the basic common sense of philosophers — no, don’t give me that look, I mean it entirely seriously. It is a faith that on average and in the main people have done a tolerably good job at detecting what of the previous generation’s practices were worth retaining, and conveying that in turn to their students. So long as we are a bit better than average, and there is enough of us, I think it is quite reasonable to suppose that the outcome of such a tradition has something worthy of confidence. And if you will not even grant that degree of rational discernment to us then I would wonder why you are so sure you are an exception, and your own ability to make judgements on what is good in our programme is worth any more than mine, or indeed the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost’s.

G: Far be it from me to suggest any superiority in judgement to that of the Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost! Ok, so if I understand your claim it is this: the philosophy grad-programme is worth keeping around because there is a particular valuable thing it is uniquely good at, namely seeing to it that we answer important questions characteristic of philosophical inquiry - what is love, when and why are inferences valid, what is the nature of reality, so on and so forth. And we know we are doing this, despite our apparently paltry results, because if one looks on a long enough time scale one can see philosophy has actually been quite impressive in its intellectual accomplishments - and our pedagogical practices are the continuation of the tradition which generated such results.

Ɔ: Indeed! And, if I may, I would even supplement these reasonings with some points in a similar spirit to those you made earlier, namely — amidst all this we are both inexpensive and inoffensive. Our failures and mistakes are easy to ignore, our wages not so high in the grand scheme of things, our additional expenses amounting to a library card and the occasional Holiday Inn Express room when we attend conferences. So even where it all comes to nought little expense was put out, and the time spent cultivating our tradition far from onerous, and pleasant to those involved. So even if for all this it remains true that our hit rate is low and our progress measured in geological time, still we are cheap and cheerful enough to be worth it. Philosophy grad school is, dare I say it, one of the better investments one can make, seen sub specie aeternitatis. What’s more, I thi— oh, what’s this, I just got a text, hold on.

G: What does it say?

Ɔ: Huh. Well, it seems the Prominent Right Wing Politician got wind of our treasured colleague’s OpEd wherein they gave the scientific case against Despised Minority Group receiving Christmas presents. So now, far from attacking us, the Prominent Right Wing Politician is holding us up as one of the last defenders of free speech, objectivity, and Western Civilisation in the academy! The Vice-Dean-Chancellor-Provost has totally reversed their position; our funding is to be doubled!

G: oh thank God. Welp, back to work then!

Ɔ: indeed! 

Cosmic Garden by Kyoko Yoshimura