This is the third installment in the occasional series, Philosophy Department Survival Strategies. In this post, our topic is about philosophers working with members of other departments at their university or college. [This post will be pinned to the top of the main page for a couple of days.]
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How many of your colleagues in other departments at your university actually know what you and other philosophers do?
How many of your colleagues in other departments at your university would be negatively affected if most or all of the philosophy faculty were laid off?
I think the most common answer to both these questions is something like “not many at all.” And that’s not good.
Ignorance and indifference are risk factors for philosophy departments. If other faculty on campus don’t know much about what philosophy is, it will be harder to make the case to them that philosophy is valuable. And if people don’t see philosophy or philosophers as relevant to or important for their work, they’re going to be less likely to care about, or join in action to fight, cuts to philosophy departments.
These risk factors that can be ameliorated, though. We can overcome ignorance about and indifference to what we do among our campus colleagues by working with them. Ideally, by the time the axe is raised, philosophers are so significantly a part of the work life of our colleagues across campus that the idea of cutting philosophy would seem to many of them a tremendous loss to the university.
Even though faculty governance appears on the wane, professors across campus are likely going to be instrumental in helping philosophy departments survive, not just as concerned colleagues, but as members of the faculty senate, as appointees to the committees that play a role in budgeting and restructuring, and as current and future administrators.
And of course such interdepartmental cooperation can be quite valuable apart from its contribution to the mere survival of a philosophy department.
The value of collaborating with colleagues across campus is something that some philosophers and philosophy departments have long appreciated and acted on. Philosophers have been co-principal investigators on interdisciplinary grants with campus colleagues in other departments. They have co-authored with non-philosophers, and participated in multi-disciplinary events and reading groups. They have established interdisciplinary centers and programs, etc. Yet, as reflected in the answers to those questions near the start of this post, it seems like there is much more we can do.
Please use the comments as a space for sharing ideas about valuable collaborations between philosophers and our colleagues in other departments on campus. Examples of what you have done, or what your department or school has done, are especially welcome, as are new ideas and the brainstorming of possibilities. Reflections on how interdepartmental collaboration by professors is or should be recognized by evaluation criteria is also welcome.
This has been really effective for us at Rochester. Basically every member of our department has significant research or teaching collaborations with members of other departments – off the top of my head, political science, math, computer science, linguistics, education, psychology, several natural sciences, public health, and the med school. I’m not sure I have tried and true methods for how to do it (we’ve been all over the place – some of us are on grants, some of us have developed majors with other departments, some of us closely co-supervise grad students, some of us have developed co-taught courses), but the thing that I would say unifies all of the things we do collaboratively is that they are things that we have sought out because we’re genuinely excited about them. I think that has allowed us to shine. At risk of bragging, I think that we’re the internally best-regarded department in the university among the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
(I’d say this has also bled over into another strategy that has been talked about here – raising enrollments. We have I believe *twice* the average undergraduate enrollment of any other humanities or humanistic social science department, and part of this is absolutely due to professors in other departments liking us and respecting us and encouraging their majors to take our classes.)
Embedded ethics programs – like our own at Toronto, but also at Harvard and elsewhere – are a very actionable way of cooperating with other departments. There is some demand in other departments to have philosophers teach or co-teach ethics modules in their classes. This can be initiated by those departments, as happened here, or by philosophy departments themselves.
These programs get fantastic exposure and outreach for philosophy in other disciplines. For example, our program gets philosophy in front of 10,000 undergraduates a year outside of philosophy classes.
Computer science and statistics are natural audiences for embedded ethics modules, and often can contribute resources, but we have also had success in piloting embedded ethics in disciplines as varied as evolutionary biology, geography and actuarial science. I’ve taught Frankfurt on autonomy to machine learning students, the naturalistic fallacy to evolutionary biology students, and Elizabeth Anderson to actuarial science students. It’s easy enough to start with one module in one class with an interested instructor and grow from there.
I’m happy to answer anyone’s questions about embedded ethics – feel free to e-mail me.
I don’t know how much use this would be in an American context, but at Otago in New Zealand we have had a lot of success with a PPE major in addition to the ‘straight’ Philosophy major. The PPE major has been running for 25 years now and though it hasn’t secured us from all shocks I think it has kept the Department relatively safe from cuts as well as giving us a certain amount of clout in the councils of the university. We generally have about 90 Philosophy majors listed at any one time and over 200 PPE majors. The Philosophy major, like other single subject majors, is 9 papers out of the potential 20 for the bachelor’s degree. The PPE major, by contrast, is 16 papers out of 20. Some specialisation is allowed (though less than in other PPE programmes) but this tends to even out between the three constituent disciplines, meaning that a PPE major is on average worth about 50% of a Philosophy major to the Philosophy Programme (as also 50% of a Politics major to Politics and 50% of an Economics major to Economics). This is however complicated by the fact that PPE majors very often do double degrees (frequently a BA/LLB) which means they won’t be doing their full complement of Philosophy papers (or Economics papers or Politics papers) in any given year but (for example) a suite of Law papers. Although the evidence is a bit equivocal, there is some reason to think that we are not just sucking away students from other courses and programs at Otago but are attracting students to the university who might otherwise have gone elsewhere.
An important feature of the major, introduced after a review of the programme in 2015, is the compulsory keystone course PHPE201 Political Economy. This is a team taught interdisciplinary course in which professors from each of the three departments are typically in the class at the same time and are licensed to comment on, or disagree with, one another. (This requires a certain amount of intellectual robustness on the part of the participants, since some lecturers find their dignity affronted by the threat of contradiction from a colleague. The core team for the last few years has been willing to take the risk of being challenged and shown to be wrong.) There are two two-hour sessions each week; the first featuring a lead lecture by one of the professors, with plenty of opportunity for questions and objections, and the second being a discussion class in which the students divide into groups to address a range of questions derived from the initial lecture and on which they will already have written a short response. The professors circulate between the student groups, helping to facilitate discussion with a wrap up in which the representatives of each group present their conclusions to the class as a whole. In the last couple of years we have devoted the final sessions to a role play game in which the students are assigned identities from early 19th Century Manchester with the object of making good given their starting-positions in society. The atmosphere is very informal. We are Charles, Lisa, David and Trent to our students not Professors Pigden, Ellis, Fielding and Smith. Teaching into this paper (having been the lead lecturer for about 25% of the sessions) has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life and has forged especially strong relationships with my colleagues in economics (one of whom has a BA in PPE from Oxford, the other BAS in economics and biology from Stanford.) PHPE201 has helped pull the students together and to give them a PPE-ish esprit de corps which perhaps was formerly lacking. Student numbers in the major have more than doubled since its inception.
The major is, and is intended to be, tough and challenging, designed to give students a decent grounding in all three disciplines, with a slight bias towards Economics. (Students have to do two economics papers at 100-level as opposed to one each from Philosophy and Politics.) It is interdisciplinary all the a way up since you can’t get away without doing at least one paper in each subject at 300-level. Perhaps, for this reason, it tends to attract high-fliers. Our best honours and MA students in the three disciplines are often (though, of course, not always) PPE majors rather than ‘straight’ Economics, Politics or Philosophy graduates.
More generally I would echo Justin’s preface. “The value of collaborating with colleagues across campus is something that some philosophers and philosophy departments have long appreciated and acted on. Philosophers have been co-principal investigators on interdisciplinary grants with campus colleagues in other departments. They have co-authored with non-philosophers, and participated in multi-disciplinary events and reading groups.’ This is certainly true of the Otago Department, and though again it hard to quantify, I think that this has stood us in good stead from a political point of view. Philosophy at Otago has a tradition of interdisciplinary teaching and research going back for something like seventy yeas. I remember meeting a very old lady at a U3A talk who enthused about a team-taught course on Hume from the 1950s featuring the then-resident philosophers and and J Y T Greig, Hume’s biographer, who was teaching in the English Department. We teach into non-Philosophy courses such as Environmental Studies, Bioethics and Politics. and one member of the (8-member) department has a joint appointment with Religious Studies. We have publications (sometimes written in collaboration with non-philosophers) on Climate Change, Aviation Policy, Carbon Taxes, Conspiracy Theories, the Milgram Experiments, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Sea-Level rise, Evolution and Religious Belief, Biodiversity and Pandemic Policy as well as more more traditional topics in Philosophy. Currently we have a Professor Physics doing a part-time MA with us on the Philosophy of Time, and in the past a Professor of Pharmacology (who died recently at the age of 100) who not only did an MA with us but regularly attended the departmental seminar, making surprisingly astute comments, even though he was towards the end so very deaf that he could only catch a fragment of the talks. A lot of the credit for this goes to our former departmental chief Alan Musgrave who was appointed as the Professor of Philosophy in 1970 at the age of 29 and built an outward-facing department with an emphasis on Popperian Philosophy of Science. More recently I would mention my colleague Elisabeth ‘Lisa’ Ellis, who really is Professor Interdisciplinary. She started out as a German Scholar and is as much a political theorist as a philosopher with a couple of books Kant’s politics, but she has been an inspirational chief for the PPE program and has done a lot of of work in the general areas of Climate Change and sustainability, much of it in collaboration with non-philosophers. This sort of thing raises the Department’s profile and gains us friends amongst other academics. But I would also echo Rosa Terlazzo :’ The thing that I would say unifies all of the things we do collaboratively [and I would add the interdisciplinary things that we do off our own bats] is that they are things that we have sought out because we’re genuinely excited about them’. Quite so. The political kudos that we derive from our interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts is a side-effect rather than the aim of our endeavours. We do all this stuff because we think it is interesting and important not because we are trying to win friends and influence people, even though we are happy to bask in the resulting friendship and influence. The late Robert Paul Wolff complains in his autobiography about the ‘This is not philosophy’ attitude of some of his colleagues when confronted with his intellectual adventures. The answer to this when it comes to interdisciplinary and collaborative projects is a) ‘You need a more inclusive conception of philosophy’ and b) ‘Who cares? It’s worth doing anyway.’ But this is the sort of thing that you cannot fake. If you have interdisciplinary and collaborative interests you can win friends and influence people. But if you only want to win friends and influence people, you can’t do it by faking an interest in interdisciplinary and collaborative projects.
Consider offering a somewhat interdisciplinary pre-law major. Here at New Mexico State University, we’ve developed a second major in addition to our (classical) philosophy major: Justice, Political Philosophy, and Law—our pre-law program. Most of the courses required for that degree are philosophy courses (including Philosophy of Law), but those students also take Government courses in Constitutional Law, the US Supreme Court, Law and Society, Civil Rights Law, and Political Thought, and History courses on the US Constitution. And I’ve developed an internship program with local attorneys for our students. My colleague is responsible for developing the new major. We have more majors now that we have ever had in the history of our department. We need another professor: We’re on the verge of not having enough faculty member to service our majors properly. Our department isn’t under threat (for now).
I have not been to university or college and remain in ignorance to fully understand what it truly happening to philosophy. It seems to me that science is taking over because science can present evidence that induces people to believe something as a fact. The truth will always remain buried if we believe in what is not true and remain in ignorance of philosophy. A philosopher will think deeply and find truths that cannot be backed up with with evidence because others remain in ignorance of what the philosopher is thinking deeply about. Philosophy cannot be ignored.
I was suffering with mental ill health until I started to read philosophy. A scientific fact that shows evidence that it was the chemicals in my brain that was causing my mental ill health is not the truth. The tablets that are created by science did not help me, the words created to put a name to my mental ill health only gave me a disorder. Philosophy helped me.
Philosophy got me thinking so deeply that I discovered what true reality is and I believe what I am thinking to be true. True reality is what would still exist if mankind did not exist. Like Plato described in the Cave, we are born into a reality and believe that this is reality. It is what it is today because we created it and maintain it. The reality that we live in today only exist because we exist. If mankind did not exist the animals would continue to maintain true reality and remain in ignorance of what we believe we know. Knowledge creates reality inside our minds and we then project our internal realities into the physical world and create reality itself. Our perception of reality stems from what we know and believe to be true and we are only consciously aware of what we know. Philosophy needs to survive and people need to believe philosophy is needed. I have massive amounts of ignorance and find myself sifting through knowledge on the internet trying to figure out what is true and what is false. While science believes that the universe is expanding, I believe that the universe is only expanding because we are looking to know more. Truly should we be looking into the universe or should we be creating equality on Earth and a better way of living. While one child is learning new beliefs and making choices based on their beliefs another child is learning different beliefs and making choices from different beliefs, the truth always remains the same. We choose to create in this physical world what we believe to be true and the world is in turmoil. We could create heaven on Earth to be experienced but we choose not to as we argue over what is true and what is false. While one government believes we should live a certain way another government believes in something different. In true reality food is free and water is free as proven by the dinosaurs and the wild animals. It is mankind that have created a reality where there is a cost to living. It is mankind that have created words and created rubbish. An apple peel or an orange peel it’s not rubbish. Truly if mankind became extinct tomorrow roads would not exist and cities would not exist, only what is true would exist. The more mankind creates the more mankind wants what is created because we know it exists. If something is not created then it would not exist to be known and would not be wanted. Science creates what should not exist and philosophy seeks the truth. I know that I know nothing.
Very proud to be part of an interdisciplinary “laurea magistrale” (master’s degree) at University of Milan. PPPA (politics, philosophy and public affairs) was specifically designed to exchange knowledge among the political and philosophical environment and helped me a lot to think out of the box. I’m a PhD student nowadays in the department of Political Science and my focus is on Political Philosophy and Bioethics.