THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

1. DISCIPLINARY GROWTH

The motive force of the transformation of American philosophy is manpower. For perhaps the most striking feature of professional philosophy in North America at this historic juncture is the scope and scale of its personnel roster. The discipline presently has more than 8,000 members, and the comprehensive Directory of American Philosophers for 2004-05 lists some 14,000 philosophers affiliated to colleges and universities in the USA and Canada, while in the late 1930’s, on the eve of World War II, the membership of the American Philosophical Association stood at some 750. And at that time there were some 20 philosophical societies organized on a topical or regional basis while by 2000 there were some 150 of them. This explosion in the scale of the enterprise has had a substantial array of portentous consequences.

The first and most obvious of these is an enormous growth on the literature of the subject. With the "publish or perish" syndrome at work in higher education, an increase in the volume of publication has kept pace with the growth of the philosophical community. For the fact is that American philosophers are quite productive. They publish well over 3,000 books per annum nowadays. And issue by issue they fill up the pages of over 175 journals. Given that some 7,000 philosophical publications (books, monographs, or articles) appear annually in North America, and a roughly similar number of papers for symposia and conference there is simply no way for anyone to "keep up with the field."

The size and scope of the academic establishment exerts a crucial formative influence on the nature of contemporary American philosophy. The driving force of more people and more publications, has so worked out as to effect a transformation in the discipline of philosophy itself by perfectly natural and readily understandable general mechanisms.

2. SPECIALIZATION, DIVISION OF LABOR, TECHNICALIZATION

Since there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much that a given individual can fit into their cognitive warehouse of thought and attention. But the domain of science and learning has been growing exponentially with ever new materials emerging in ever new categories. The inevitable result is the ongoing selectivity of specialization and division of labor.

Accordingly the individual’s unavoidable response is to accept an increasingly diminished focus in matters of detail. The only alternative open here is ongoingly to narrow the range of one’s concerns. The result is an ever more elaborate scrutiny of subtle differences and details. Deliberations become ever more tightly focused, more narrowly targeted on microspecifics. It becomes ever more difficult to see the forest for the trees, to keep the big picture in view. The field becomes increasingly specialized and technical. Inquiring disintegrates into a proliferation of cottage industries. The overall situation becomes one of specialists talking to other specialists.

And just this is what has been happening in philosophy. American philosophers nowadays by and large see themselves, accurately enough, as cultivating one academic specialty among many others—as technicians laboring at some specialty within the realm of ideas.

There is a certain irony in the entry of substantial specialization into the practice of philosophy. For by its very nature it is philosophy’s task to provide "the big picture" and to address "the big questions" about reality and our place within it. And this calls for generalism—for forming a synoptic view across a broad range of issues. Insofar as the present-day dynamics inherent in the practice of philosophizing makes for specialization and division of labor, it countervails against the versatility illustrated by Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, et al. In an era of limited expertise in specialized domains, the label "polymathic" is virtually one of derogation. And yet it is exactly this that is called for by being a philosopher rather than merely an ethicist, a logician, or an historian of philosophical ideas.

All the same, the prominence of specialization gives a more professional and technical cast to contemporary American philosophizing in comparison to that of other times and places. Philosophy historians are nowadays increasingly preoccupied with matters of small-scale philosophical and conceptual microdetail. And philosophical investigations make increasingly extensive use of the formal machinery of semantics, modal logic, compilation theory, learning theory, etc. Ever heavier theoretical armaments are brought to bear on ever smaller problem-targets in ways that journal readers will occasionally wonder whether the important principle that technicalities should never be multiplied beyond necessity has been lost sight of.

As more people crowd into a field of investigation with fixed topical borders (as in natural science) there will only be room for them by raising the level of the domain by means of more powerful technology—one has to erect skyscrapers as it were. But a field with moveable boundaries (such as philosophy, mathematics, and the human sciences) can expand outwards into virgin territory that has not previously been explored and settled. And the fact that those many hundreds of philosophers are looking for something to do that is not simply a matter of re-exploring familiar ground has created a substantial population pressure for more philosophical Lebensraum. New subfields and new problem-areas spring forth.

The rapid growth of "applied philosophy"—that is, philosophical reflection about detailed issues in science, law, business, social affairs, computer use, and the like—is a striking structural feature of contemporary North American philosophy. In particular, the past three decades have seen a great proliferation of narrowly focused philosophical investigations of particular issues in areas such as economic justice, social welfare, ecology, abortion, population policy, military defense, and so on. This situation illustrates the most characteristic feature of contemporary English-language philosophizing: the emphasis on detailed investigation of special issues and themes. For better or for worse, Anglophone philosophers have in recent years tended to stay away from large-scale abstract matters of wide and comprehensive scope, characteristic of the earlier era of Whitehead or Dewey, and nowadays incline to focus their investigations on issues of greater detail that relate to and grow out of those larger issues of traditional concern.

Agenda-enlargement is accordingly one of the most striking features of contemporary American philosophy. The pages of its journals and the programs of its meetings bristle with discussions of issues that would seem bizarre to their predecessors of earlier days and to present-day philosophers of other places. For example, one recent program of the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association included papers on "Is it Dangerous to Demystify Human Rights?", "Difference and the Differend in Derrida and Lyotard," "Animal Rights Theory and the Diminishment of Infants," "On the Ecological Consequences of Alphabetical Literacy," "Is Polygamy Good Feminism?", "The Ethics of the Free Market," "Planetary Projection of the Multiple Self on Films," "The Moral Collapse of the University," and "The Construction of Female Political Identity." Entire philosophical societies are dedicated to the pursuit of issues now deemed philosophical that no-one would have dreamt of considering so a generation ago. (Some examples are the societies for Machines and Mentality, for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking, for the Study of Ethics and Animals, for Philosophy and Literature, for Analytical Feminism, and for Philosophy of Sex and Love.) The turning of philosophy from globally general, large-scale issues to more narrowly focused investigations of matters of microscopically fine-grained detail is a characteristic feature of American philosophy after World War II. Its flourishing use of the case-study method in philosophy is a striking phenomenon for which no one philosopher can claim credit—to a contemporary observer it seems like the pervasively spontaneous expression of "the spirit of the times."

The inevitable result of this agenda enlargement has been a revolutionizing of the structure of philosophy itself by way of taxonomic complexification. The present-day picture of the taxonomic lay of the land in North America philosophy is thus vastly more complex and ramified than anything that has preceded it. The taxonomy of the subject has burst for good and all the bounds of the ancient tripartite scheme of logic, metaphysics and ethics. Specialization and division of labor run rampant, and cottage industries are the order of the day. The situation has grown so complex and diversified that one English-language encyclopedia of philosophy cautiously abstains from providing any taxonomy of philosophy whatsoever. (This phenomenon also goes a long way towards explaining why no one has written a comprehensive history of philosophy that carries through to the present-day scene.) Philosophy—which ought by mission and tradition to be an integration of knowledge—has itself become increasingly disintegrated. The growth of the discipline has forced it beyond the limits of feasible surveillance by a single mind. After World War II it becomes literally impossible for American philosophers to keep up with what their colleagues were writing.

And so one striking aspect of contemporary American philosophy is its fragmentation. The scale and complexity of the enterprise is such that if one seeks in contemporary American philosophy for a consensus on the problem agenda, let alone for agreement on the substantive issues, then one is predestined to look in vain. Here theory diversity and doctrinal dissonance are the order of the day. Such unity as American philosophy affords is that of an academic industry, not that of a single doctrinal orientation or school. Every doctrine, every theory, every approach finds its devotees somewhere within the overall community. On most of the larger issues there are no significant majorities. To be sure, some uniformities are apparent at the localized level. (In the San Francisco Bay area one's philosophical discussions might well draw on model theory, in Princeton possible worlds would be bought in, in Pittsburgh, pragmatic themes would be prominent, and so on.) But in matters of method and doctrine there is a proliferation of schools and tendencies, and there are no all-pervasively dominant trends. Balkanization reigns supreme.

4. INACCESSIBILITY

The prominence of specialization gives a far more professional and technical cast to contemporary American philosophizing in comparison to that of other times and places. Philosophers nowadays generally write for an audience of their fellow academics and have little interest in (or prospect of) addressing a wider public of intelligent readers at large. There can be little doubt that the increasing technicalization of philosophy has been achieved at the expense of its wider accessibility—and indeed even to its accessibility to members of the profession.

Its increasing specialization has impelled philosophy towards the ivory tower. And so, the most recent years have accordingly seen something of a fall from grace of philosophy in American culture—not that there was ever all that much grace to fall from. For many years, the Encyclopedia Britannica published an annual supplement entitled 19XY Book of the Year, dealing with the events of the previous year under such rubrics as World Politics, Health, Music, etc. Until the 1977 volume’s coverage of the preceding year’s developments, a section of philosophy was always included in this annual series. But thereafter, philosophy vanished—without so much as a word of explanation. Seemingly the year of America’s bicentennial saw the disappearance of philosophy from the domain of things that interest Americans. At approximately the same time, Who’s Who in America drastically curtailed its coverage of philosophers (and academics generally). And during this same time period, various vehicles of public opinion—ranging from Time Magazine to The New York Times—voiced laments over the irrelevance of recent philosophy to the problems of the human condition and the narcissistic absorption of philosophers in logical and linguistic technicalities that rendered the discipline irrelevant to the problems and interests of nonspecialists.

It is remarkable that this popular alientation from philosophy’s ivory-towerishness came at just the time when philosophers in the U.S.A. were beginning to return to problems on the agenda of public policy and personal concern. The flowering of applied ethics (medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, and the like), of virtue ethics (trust, hope, neighborliness, etc.), of social ethics (distributive justice, privacy, individual rights, etc.) and of such philosophical hyphenations as philosophy-and-society—and even philosophy-and-agriculture!—can also be dated from just this period. By one of those ironies not uncommon in the pages of history, philosophy returned to the issues of the day at virtually the very moment when the wider public gave up thinking of the discipline as relevant to its concerns. (To be sure, this occurred at a technical level at which "the general reader" may no feel altogether comfortable.)

The fact is that philosophy has little or no place in American popular (as opposed to academic) culture, since at this level people’s impetus to global understanding is accommodated—in America, at least—by religion rather than philosophy. Philosophical issues are by nature complicated, and Americans do not relish complications and have a marked preference for answers over questions. The nature of the case is such that philosophers must resort to careful distinctions and saving qualifications. And in this regard Americans do not want to know where the complexities lurk but yearn for the proverbial one-armed experts who do not constantly say "on the other hand." Technical philosophy leaves "the man in the street" cold. We are a practical people who want efficient solutions (as witness the vast market for self-help books with their dogmatic nostrums).

However, while philosophy nowadays makes virtually no impact on the wider culture of North America, its place in higher education is secure. To be sure, of all undergraduates in American colleges and universities, only about half of one percent major in Philosophy (compared with nearly three percent for English and over fifteen percent for Business and Management). But owing to philosophy’s role in meeting "distribution requirements" it has secured a prominent place in the curricula of post-secondary education. Unlike the United Kingdom, where post-World War II philosophers adopted a very technical and narrowly conceived idea of what the job of philosophy is—with the result of effectively assuring the discipline’s declining role in the educational system—in America philosophy has managed not only to survive but to thrive in higher education. It has done so in large measure by taking a practicalist and accomodationist turn. American philosophers have been very flexible in bending with the wind. When society demands "relevancy to social concerns" a new specialty of "applied philosophers" springs forth to provide it. When problems of medical ethics or of feminist perspectivism occupy the society, a bevy of eager young philosophers stands ready to leap into the breach.

With the exponential increase in the number of academic philosophers at large there also occurs an exponential increase in

But as one moves down this list the rate at which this exponential increase occurs becomes less and less.

Accordingly, consider the fraction

This might be called the attention-ratio of the work of a given philosopher. And the reality of it is that in a situation of exponential growth the general tendency is for this ratio to diminish steadily. On the whole and in general, the percentage of the profession literature at large that is devoted to the work of a given contributor is bound to diminish in a situation of quality retardation. In such a situations attention become more widely diffused over the range of contribution and contributors. An ongoingly smaller share of attention will accrue to the benefit of work among given contributor.

With the exponential expansion of any scientific or scholarly field in point of its membership there will be less attention devoted to the work (however good) of any given individual. The situation is depicted schematically in Display 1, and might be characterized as the diffusion of attention. In a setting whose structure is as depicted, however important a given individual may be in comparison to other individuals in relation to the community as a whole has stature will shrink.

Display 1

Number (N) of scholars Number of scholars citing

(important) individuals

100 50 50%

1,000 400 40%

10,000 3,200 30%

100,000 25,000 20%

5. THE FADING OF "THE GREAT MAN" THEORY

In the past, the philosophical situation of academically developed countries could be described by indicating a few giants whose work towered over the philosophical landscape like a great mountain range, and whose issues and discussions defined the agenda of the philosophizing of their place and time. Once upon a time, the philosophical stage was dominated by a small handful of greats. Consider German philosophy in the 19th century, for example. Here the philosophical scene, like the country itself, was an aggregate of principalities—presided over by such ruling figures as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and a score of other philosophical princelings. But in North America, this "heroic age" of philosophy is now a thing of the past.

In the philosophical environment of the past, the role of the great figures was more prominent, and the writings of philosophers established a balance of indebtedness to "big names" as against "modest contributors" that tilted much more in the direction of the "big names." For better or for worse, we have entered into a new philosophical era where what counts is not just a dominant elite but a vast host of lesser mortals. Principalities are thus notable in their absence, and the scene is more like that of medieval Europe—a collection of baronies. Scattered here and there in separated castles, a prominent individual gains a local following of loyal friends or enemies. But no one among the academic philosophers of today manages to impose their agenda on more than a minimal fraction of the larger, internally diversified community. Even the most influential of contemporary American philosophers is simply yet another—somewhat larger—fish in a very populous sea. The extent to which professionally solid and significant work is currently produced by academics outside the high-visibility limelight is not sufficiently recognized. The smaller fish play an increasingly prominent role simply because there are so many more of them.

Until around 1914, it was religion that exerted the dominant influence on philosophers writing in America. During the 1914-1960 era natural science served as the prime source of inspiration. But over the past generation the sources of inspiration have become greatly diversified. The fact is that at present philosophy is a garden where 100 flowers bloom. In recent years the source of influence has fragmented across the whole academic board. Some look for inspiration to psychology (especially to Freud), others to economics (from Marx to von Neumann), yet others to literature, or to law, or to . . . The list goes on and on. Contemporary American philosophy does not have the form of a histogram with a few major trends; it is a complex mosaic of many different and competing approaches.

And so the Great Man Theory no longer holds; a faithful picture of the work of the entire community simply cannot be conveyed by considering the work of its three (or ten or hundred) greatest members. The only way to give an accurate account of the community as a whole in its present configuration is to proceed not personalistically via individuals but holistically via statistics. An account in terms of representative Great Men no longer works. Of course there will indeed still be giants but their role in the overall scheme of things is increasingly diminished. Strange though it may sound, the role of important individuals (so considered in the relation of others) becomes of ongoingly diminished importance in the overall scheme of things. As the points grow the big fish play an increasingly diminished role. The three (or ten or hundred) biggest of them constitute an increasingly diminished part of the pond as a whole.

The fact is that those bigger fish do not typify what the sea as a whole has to offer. Matters of philosophical history aside, some of the salient themes and issues with which American philosophers are grappling at the present time are

None of these issues were put on the problem-agenda of present concern by any one particular philosopher. None arose out of a preoccupation with fundamental aspects of some already well-established issue. None arose out of one particular philosophical text or discussion. They blossomed forth like the leaves of a tree in springtime appearing in various places at once under the formative impetus of the Zeitgeist of societal concern. The nature of American philosophy today is such that for the most part new ideas and tendencies have come to prominence not because of the influential impact of some specific contribution or worker but because of the disaggregated effects of a host of writers working across a wide frontier of individual efforts. In many and indeed perhaps most instances the principal recent innovations in philosophy—its salient programs and projects—can no longer be identified with the inaugurating individual of any of the contributing "greats." Philosophical innovation today is generally not the response to the preponderant effort of pace-setting individuals but a genuinely collective effort that is best characterized in statistical terms.

6. DEMOCRATIZATION

The descriptive account of a field of intellectual endeavor confronts two key questions:

In philosophy these two issues have traditionally been conjoined in a way that enables the response to question (1) be developed by way of responding to questions (2). This is, in effect, the classic model of philosophical historiography. But it is the characteristic argument of the current transformation of American philosophy that this is no longer the case. The experience of the discipline has had the result the addressing the question (2) regarding its key problems is no longer an adequate approach to handling question (1) regarding the state of the discipline as a whole. The traditional Great Man Theory of historiography is no longer available in relation to American Philosophy.

It is the salient thesis of this discussion that this Classical model of intellectual Historiography no longer applies to American Philosophy in its contemporary configuration. The discipline has expanded to a point where its scope and diversity is such that an example of the work of its leading practitioners is no longer able to give a faithful picture of the development of the whole.

A century ago, the historian Henry Adams deplored the end of the predominance of the great and the good in American politics and the emergence of a new order based on the dominance of masses and their often self-appointed representatives. Control of the political affairs of the nation was flowing from the hands of a cultural elite into that of the unimposing, albeit vociferous, spokesmen for the faceless masses. In short, democracy was setting in. Exactly this same transformation from the preeminence of great figures to the predominance of mass movements is now, one hundred years on, the established situation in even so intellectual an enterprise as philosophy. In its present configuration, American philosophy indicates that the "revolt of the masses," which Ortega y Gasset thought characteristic of our era, manifests itself not only in politics and social affairs but in intellectual culture also and even in philosophy. A cynic might characterize the current situation as a victory of the troglodytes over the giants. The condition of American philosophy today is a matter of trends and fashions that go their own way without the guidance of agenda-controlling individuals. This results in a state of affairs that calls for description on a statistical rather than biographical basis. It is ironic to see the partisans of political correctness in academia condemning philosophy as an elitist discipline at the very moment when philosophy itself has abandoned elitism and succeeded in making itself over in a populist reconstruction. American philosophy has now well and truly left "the genteel tradition" behind.

The decline of elitism in American philosophy is illustrated in a graphic way when one considers the production of Ph.D.'s in the departments of high prestige universities. Of the five traditional "ivy league" institutions (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania) only one (viz. Columbia) currently figures on the roster of North American philosophy departments most productive of Ph.D.’s. From the standpoint of Ph.D. training, the most prominent contribution is made by the big U.S. state universities (Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin), and by the large Catholic institutions. At present the biggest single producer of philosophy Ph.D.’s in North America is the University of Toronto.

If such a perspective is indeed valid, certain far-reaching implications follow for the eventual historiography of present-day American philosophy. For it indicates a situation with which no historian of philosophy has as yet come to terms. In the "heroic" era of the past, the historian of the philosophy of a place and time could safely concentrate upon the dominant figures and expect thereby to achieve a certain completeness with respect to "what really mattered." But such an approach is grossly unsuited to the conditions of the present era. For the reality of it is that the "dominant figures" have lost control of the agenda. To accommodate the prevailing realities, the story of present-day American philosophy must be presented in a much more aggregated and statistically articulated format. Treatment by substantial trends must replace treatment by dominant individuals, with individuals figuring at best in the role of exemplars. For insofar as single individuals are dealt with as such, it must be done against a vastly enlarged background—they must now be seen as representative rather than as determinative figures, with the status of those individual philosopher selected for historical consideration generally downgraded into a merely exemplary (illustrative) instance of a larger trend.

7. THE DIMINUTION OF PHILOSOPHY

In the meanwhile, the whole story that is being recounted here with respect to philosophy is being retold at another, higher level of scale and comprehensiveness. For philosophy does not exist in isolation. The size-explosion that has affected it is something that also occurs in the world of learning, science, and culture at large. Just as any given field of philosophy occupies a smaller fraction of the whole, so philosophy at large has becomes a smaller and less significant and influential fraction of the intellectual domain.

In terms of a geometric analogy, it is clear that if as restricted domain is a subsector of another larger one and—as per the situation of exponential growth—the rate of increase of a domain is proportional to its size q (so that the larger domain increases faster than the smaller), then of course this smaller (however fast it grows) will be a proportionally ever diminishing subsector of the larger. In warrant experience exactly this principle holds for any given branch or problem area of philosophy in relation to the larger whole. But it also holds with respect to the relation of philosophy to the world of learning at large.

And so it becomes only natural to ask: Do American philosophers exert influence? Here, of course, the critical question is: Upon whom? First consider: upon other philosophers. We have already remarked that the extent to which even "the leading philosophers" manage to influence others is highly fragmentary—in each case only a small sector of the entire group being involved. Turning now to the wider society at large, it must be said that the answer is emphatically negative. American philosophers are not opinion-shapers: they do not have access to the media, to the political establishment, to the "think tanks" that seek to mould public opinion. Insofar as they exert an external influence at all, it is confined to academics of other fields. Professors of government may read John Rawls, professors of literature Richard Rorty, professors of linguistics W. V. Quine. But, outside the academy, the writings of such important contemporary American philosophers exert no influence. It was otherwise earlier in the century—in the era of philosophers like William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana—when the writings of individual philosophers set the stage for at least some discussions and debates among a wider public. But it is certainly not so in the America of today. Philosophers (and academics in general) play very little role in the molding of an "informed public opinion" in the USA—such work is largely done by publicists, film-makers, and talk-show hosts. American society today does not reflect the concerns of philosophers. But to a very large extent the reverse is also the case. By dwelling in the comfortable confines of the Ivory Tower, American philosophers to a large extent repay the nonconcern of society in kind.

8. SUMMARY

The present deliberations have canvassed a series of these six significant phenomena characterizing the status of contemporary American philosophy.

What we have here is, in effect, an explanatory cascade: a series of phenomena of such a sort that the reason for being of each item depends on the operation of the aggregate of its predecessors. So we here are confronted not with a set of isolated, randomly conjoined phenomena, but with an integrated process consisting in the coordinated operation of factors joined in a sequentially connected explanatory rationale.

In the end, the upshot of these deliberations is that the quantitative growth of American philosophy in people and publications has transformed the discipline in a way that renders traditional historiographic approaches—with their exclusive focus on particular individuals—unable to give a faithful account of the discipline.