From a comment on the Leiter Report

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Grist for the mill (and confirmation of Ken Taylor’s remarks): the Jefferson Lectures sponsored by the NEH. In the 2004 lecture, by Helen Vendler, and the 2005 lecture, by Donald Kagan, you will find both hostility to and ignorance of philosophy. See

<a href="http://tlonuqbar.typepad.com/phfn/2005/05/history_old_hat.html">History: old hat or new wave?</a> and <a href="http://tlonuqbar.typepad.com/phfn/2004/05/vendler_on_the_.html">Vendler on the humanities</a> for details. I suspect that in both cases the hostility is to the kind of philosophy, less common these days, that treated history as bunk and that made æsthetics a poor relation. We are paying for the sins of the fathers (and a few mothers).

Concerning the theme of this thread, I must admit that when I read some analytic philosophy (and some history of philosophy too) I ask myself what anyone who wasn’t wholly immersed in the debate would find in it. The standard defense against that sort of jibe, as Garber notes, is to say that epistemology or whatever is a specialized discipline that, like physics or mathematics, has good reason to employ its own jargon and that has, as a pursuit, value in its own right; it need not justify its existence to outsiders. 

That’s all well and good. But physics and mathematics have striking, <i>stable</i> results and notable applications to back up their claim of value. What does metaphysics have to offer? Physicists, moreover, have done a very good job of popularizing even the more esoteric reaches of their science—think of <i>A brief history of time</i> or Brian Greene’s books. Is there any popularization of metaphysics as it is done now, or of epistemology, that compares to them? Would we value such a work if someone troubled to write it? Some of Dennett’s works have made the attempt recently; I’m hard pressed to think of others. 

It would be nice if people spontaneously agreed that figuring out whether second-order logic is logic is a good thing, worth investing in. But that’s not how it works, not even for the study of Shakespeare. That people more readily assent in the case of Shakespeare is owing first of all to the appeal of the plays and poems themselves (more accessible than the refined pleasures of logic), and second to two hundred or so years of promotion. If instead of Shakespeare you said Colley Cibber, the case would have to be made. In philosophy only ethics has a “spontaneous” appeal akin to that of Shakespeare’s drama. That is one reason why Wash U has a Center for Human Values (funded partly by the medical school) but no Center for Possible Worlds.

Part of the difficulty, I think, arises from the Janus-like character of philosophy. Parts of it align themselves with the sciences; but its home, and its money, is in the humanities. As emulators of science we haven’t much to offer, no cancer cures, no spectacular shots of the moons of Saturn. As humanists, we once had our place; we offered a secular guide to life. From the time of Montaigne, let’s say, who drew of course on the ancients, till now (if you include Heidegger, Sartre, and ?i?ek among philosophers), its purpose has been to propose, and to justify, practical decisions, a purpose it shares with the study of literature and the study of history, considered extrinsically. Nowadays, however, some philosophers, even some who work in value theory, studiously avoid offering advice, I think because they regard philosophy as “pure”, a “value-free” study.

There is, to be sure, an intrinsic value to knowing the past, understanding Chaucer, or working out a consistent theory of identity-through-time—a value, however, that requires a process of induction to appreciate. The question at hand—why don’t philosophers get a bigger share of humanities money?—is one of extrinsic justification, of deciding which of many <i>competing</i> pursuits, all intrinsically valuable by their own lights, is to be funded. The justification will be extrinsic because the panels that make the decisions, being representative of the humanities as a whole, are made up mostly of people from other disciplines. One may hope to give those outsiders some glimpse of the beauties seen from within, but by and large the argument must be based on the equivalent of “could lead to a cure for cancer” or the all-round appeal of Shakespeare. In metaphysics or epistemology, it is admittedly more difficult to come up with such equivalents (but no more difficult than the Anglo-Saxonist or the Byzantine historian). But practically speaking that is what must be done. Reciprocity arguments are not going to do the job.