when I see how philosophers respond to academic matters having to do with issues like hiring standards and or judging the quality of each others work I see no signs that they are better equipped than lay people to address such daily issues.

Better to address “the citizens” rather than “the taxpayers”, I would say.

I don’t think we should completely disregard the point that philosophy departments are well-suited to offer classes that bring into relief the general characteristics of good reasoning. Undoubtedly students learn how to reason well in other classes, but philosophers are well-positioned to talk about (and not merely in logic classes) why good reasoning is good. I agree, though, that this is unlikely to be wholly satisfying. My sense is that, ultimately, philosophers have to say that the reason philosophy in the university deserves public support is not merely because it teaches students to think about any old thing, but because it offers students the opportunity to learn how to think about its subject matter, i.e., philosophy. Two points in this vein come to mind, though I’m sure there are more. First, much of philosophy is concerned with normative aspects of what we ought to do (ethically, politically, legally) – it gives serious attention to these questions, in ways not mimicked in other disciplines. In a democratic society, it seems important both that there is a recognition that serious attention to normative matters (as such) is possible, and that people know how to reason well with respect to normative matters. Is equality a threat to liberty? What kind of equality do we owe each other? If the people are responsible for ruling, it is at least valuable that there is a sense of how to think about these questions. Reading economics alone will not help. Second, concerning philosophy more generally, public universities have egalitarian functions: they offer access to learning that would otherwise be unavailable. Many students attending public universities could not afford a private one. Many students, not just the financially privileged, wonder about what the mind is or how consciousness is possible, the freedom of the will, how and what we can know, what it is for an act to be right or wrong, a thing to be good or bad, etc., etc. Many students think these are very important questions (consider that there are many popular intro. to philosophy classes). Philosophy is the discipline that takes these questions seriously. Without public universities supporting philosophy, we would live in a society in which a significant part of the populace would have quite limited to no opportunity to learn how to think well and seriously about fundamental questions which they regard as important.

This is a great question, and one that everybody who has ever written a grant application will (hopefully) have thought about. On a very general level society benefits from the research and teaching done in STEM fields by being given the means to attaining various ends: whether it’s curing your headache by taking some painkiller, or talking to a friend overseas by using a cell phone. I can’t speak for other areas of philosophy, but as far as my own research is concerned I think the answer is identical: we study means-end relationships. In STEM areas these means-end relationships are often causal relationships that are established experimentally. In philosophy these means-end relationships are often logical relationships that are established by proving a theorem or, more generally, by providing an argument.

Ask not what philosophy can do for you, but what you (dear citizen / taxpayer) can do for philosophy…!

Seriously, though. Philosophical (and other intellectual) inquiry is an intrinsically valuable human activity, and it would be a debased society indeed that placed no value on enabling and encouraging such scholarly pursuits. It enriches our culture, as ideas percolate in the academy and perhaps eventually “trickle down” into the general public’s understanding of the world and our place in it. It enriches the lives of students who get to partake in this distinctively valuable human activity — though, admittedly, some of them will appreciate this more than others. Some subdisciplines (e.g. applied ethics) have significant instrumental value (i.e. instrumental to bringing about morally better outcomes) in addition. All at no significant cost. What’s not to like?

I agree with many earlier comments that this is a really important subject to discuss, and that the terms in which it’s posed matter a lot.

Briefly on the topic of teaching “how to think,” I would contend that “think” here doesn’t mean the same thing as “reason.” It also involves, among other things, the ability to identify unstated assumptions, formulate and compare competing explanations, draw novel connections among concepts, and restate arguments for conclusions with which you disagree. Drawing a justifiable conclusion from given premises is also important, but I don’t think logic covers everything that fits under “thinking.” Philosophy isn’t unique in teaching other thinking skills, but I think it does so particularly well.

On a broader issue, most of the comments so far have focused primarily on teaching as the valuable service that philosophy offers. I think that’s mostly correct and that any attempts to justify philosophy research activities on strictly return-on-investment grounds are probably ill-conceived. But I wonder if there’s another way to make the case that goes something like this: America is a great country. Great countries ought to produce great ideas (along with great art and great social achievements). Funding philosophy research is one good (although obviously not perfect) way to encourage the production of great ideas. Therefore, we should continue to pay people to do philosophy research.

By “great” in this argument I mean something like either “of world-historical importance” or “intrinsically valuable.” If we frame the hypothetical interlocutor as “citizen” or “patriot” rather than “taxpayer,” I think a version of this argument has some chance of being persuasive to some of them at least. One obvious shortcoming of this argument is that I think it comes off as kind of elitist, and Americans are well-known for our democratic tendencies. But in response to this, we might emphasize that in America, as a great *democratic* country, supporting the development of great ideas through public funding is especially appropriate (as opposed to most times and places, where great thinkers were either aristocrats or had aristocratic patrons). Not to mention that Americans are also well-known for our exceptionalist tendencies as well.

I’m not sure if this is a promising argument or not (practically speaking). I’m not even sure whether I’m convinced by it. But I think if you frame it in the right way, such as, consider how much we as a society spend on philosophers compared to say, iPad games or machines that let you exercise indoors, it can be persuasive. From a public choice perspective, I don’t think the case can be made that philosophy research is a necessary investment, but if you point out to people that most things we spend social resources on aren’t investments either, I think the argument that we can afford philosophy becomes easier to make.

In any case, I don’t know of any other good arguments in favor of public spending on philosophy research, so this one seems worth pursuing.

Philosophical problems (often) aren’t all that special. They *are* the problems of the business and STEM fields, but these problems are the ones that can’t be solved using the established methods. If we did a better job at showing where our problems came from, in some sense their philosophical genealogy, then it would ground the philosophical work in a larger, more accessible program of research.

Following up on Jason Brennan’s skepticism about the intrinsic value argument, I’m just not at all sure that the ‘trickle down intelligence’ theory of the public value of philosophy holds much water at all. I think what we get instead when some pressure is applied to this line of thinking is a picture in which those who have the opportunity to make a living doing philosophy are bettered–perhaps ‘intrinsically,’ whatever that might mean–while those who are paid to do things that actually move the levers of our everyday lives have to make due with ‘mere’ extrinsic benefits.

It just strikes me as so unlikely that we’ll be able to get a strong case going for why what academic philosophers do is at all important to almost anyone but themselves. And that might be okay. But perhaps on someone else’s dime. To those working outside academic, it then shouldn’t be a surprise that tenure looks like a sinecure.

This discussion can go in many different directions, as evidenced from the variety of comments given above. I also have lots of opinions about this, but I’ll restrict myself to just replying to Justin’s worry in the original post.

“It seems to me that the strongest challenge to philosophy’s spot in the university curriculum is not from those who seek to indoctrinate college students, but rather from more seemingly practical courses of study, such as STEM fields or business majors. Further, it is silly to think that the professors in those fields are not teaching their students “how to think.” The study of sciences and business areas are full of challenging and surprising ideas that play a role in teaching students how to think. While it may be true that “an education in philosophy gives a person the tools to reflect critically, think logically, [and] make rational decisions,” I think philosophers should guard against pretending they are the sole providers of these goods.”

Here’s an argument by analogy. It is likely true that one can improve one’s athletic conditioning by solely participating in a particular sport. However, in spite of this fact, almost all serious athletes participate in activities that are focus particularly on athletic conditioning. STEM fields and business majors are to sports like football and basketball as philosophy is to activities like weightlifting and running.

If the analogy holds, then it relegates philosophy to a role that is supplemental to other intellectual activities. Philosophers are “personal trainers” of the mind. It may not be a particularly attractive view, and I personally hold philosophy to be intrinsically valuable, but if you’re encountering a demographic that is already hostile to the humanities in general and philosophy in particular, then this may be about as good as it gets as far as acquiring an entry point in the discussion.

And this thread is itself Exhibit A of the need for people – including philosophers in other fields – to read more political philosophy, both contemporary and historical. I like a good dorm room bull session as much as anyone, but Prof. Parsons and many of the commenters above are acting as though there isn’t already a huge literature on these issues. I guess it’s not surprising that people engaged in a discipline fundamentally shaped by the taxpayers of Athens deciding that they strongly disapproved of public philosophizing would be out of practice at engaging with the public, but reacting to the latest crises in higher education without drawing on the work of Mill, Dewey, and others in this long history of thought makes our responses shallower, less rigorous, and less persuasive than they should and need to be.

I always wonder why giving people an opportunity to understand their civilization and the ideas it is founded upon is seen as frivolous. If we think that, we peel away about 95% of the humanities. Is there no point in learning history? Is there no point in reading literature? Is there simply no point in anyone being broadly educated at all? Do we want to preserve and share the best products of our civilization with that portion of the young who are becoming citizens? It seems that the idea is that there should be this special class of citizens–apparently those attending elite private schools where the taxpayer is not thought to pay-and the rest of the citizens who will have a bare bones education sufficient to please a corporation looking for a very precise set of skills. The starting assumption is that we do not as a society benefit from this diverse group of people with many different parts of knowledge who live together but instead we only benefit when people are given some particular skill for some very particular task, determined by the corporate needs of the moment. And everything’s radically changed in the world since whenever it was thought to be a good idea to establish universities to educate the populace–for some reason, no one quite says why–but there is some implication the internet is the change or some other type of technology. But so far most of what we have built society was built in a situation where many people were given these more robust educational options–and quite a lot of the journalism, technology, entertainment, art and science we want and depend on–was done by people with this education. And surely this relationship between their education and their abilities to create these things we want and need is not an accident. But for some reason: There is no point to whatever it is they learned and we should just scrap the whole project. No one says why. We can google everything? And google is like magic–it produces its own content?

Let us note that the complaint is not against philosophy but philosophy as it is taught in our universities. One has to wonder how effective and useful this form of teaching and learning is when it leaves itself open to this sort of criticism. It’s a criticism many philosophers would want to make and it does not represent a criticism of philosophy, just a particular approach to it that has turned out to be a dead end.

Perhaps one way of remedying that is to increase teaching duties and remove motivation to publish. For the overwhelming majority of academics (and this goes for non-STEM fields in general) articles written vanish into the ether, never to impact the field.* Skillfully teaching a class reaches a lot more people and causes a lot more good than writing an article revisiting Aristotle’s notions on virtue in print. Maybe base tenure decisions on a combination of classes taught and some sort of qualitative assessment of one’s teaching ability?

* Actually, that’s true for a sizeable number of STEM academics, too.

Philosophy (in at least some of its areas) is a meta-discipline in which we reflect upon our capacities for knowledge and action. Such reflection can sometimes occur in the other disciplines themselves, but for the most part these other disciplines are usually busy teaching competences for attaining knowledge and performing actions rather than reflecting on these competences, their conditions, and their implications. Self-reflection of the kind philosophy pursues is a way in which people (and society) take themselves seriously by attaining some degree of self-understanding about knowing and acting. Surely, such self-reflection is a public good.