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Outside a university setting, telling people that I’m pursuing a career in philosophy can be a bit of a conversation stopper, argues David Egan, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at CUNY Hunter College in New York. He is the author of The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (2019).
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| Photo: 139904 from Pixabay |
This sort of befuddlement afflicts labourers in the humanities more generally. In contrast with the ‘hard’ disciplines of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), the humanities are often disparaged as ‘soft’. You don’t need an advanced degree to read a novel, the thinking goes, so why bother?
What do these adjectives ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ denote? The ‘hardness’ is often glossed in terms of difficulty, but there’s nothing easy about work in the humanities – as my students often learn to their dismay, after turning in the first essay in which they confidently claim that the topics we’re studying are ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’ and therefore not open to rigorous critical scrutiny. It might be closer to the truth to say that the ‘hardness’ of the STEM fields is owing to their more technical nature, even if the humanities disciplines also have their technical aspects, as anyone who’s taken a course in logic or struggled with scansion can attest. But that answer just invites a further question: what is it about the STEM disciplines that requires a greater density of technical apparatus?...
Consider the different kind of training you might expect from an acting coach and a violin teacher. Your acting lessons will start in medias res, as it were, teaching you to become more attuned to emotional processes you already experience and more precise in the verbal and physical expressiveness that you already possess. That training is sometimes highly technical, but it mostly hones capacities that we all have to some degree. The first thing a violin teacher has to do is get you familiar with holding the violin and bow, and feeling out for the first time what happens when you draw the bow across the strings.
There’s a similar contrast we could draw between a first class in philosophy and a first class in electrical engineering. I lead my students into philosophical questioning by starting with intuitions that they already hold and then applying pressure to those intuitions, asking them to take their reasoning farther than they’d normally take it. We all make claims to know things, for instance, and we all recognise that sometimes these claims are justified and sometimes not. But outside a philosophy class, we rarely press very hard on the question of what constitutes knowledge and how we might distinguish it from, say, a lucky guess...
So how is philosophy useful? The response I’ve learned to counter with is that the question being asked is itself a philosophical question. One of the things we do in philosophy is precisely to ask what’s worth doing and why.
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Source: AlterNet
