A Way Analytic Philosophy Is More Accessible than Other Humanities?
Philosopher Samantha Brennan (Guelph) is the daughter of bakers who emigrated from Northern England to Canada, and who never went to college.
[“Bread” by Richard Artschwager]
I entered university not knowing much about upper-class backgrounds and I often felt like I was above many things richer fellow students valued. My undergrad aesthetic was 80s punk, and the rejection of nice cars, summer homes, and warm winter vacations all seemed part of the package. I felt it was my academic and political commitments, not my class background, that separated me from richer students. But likely, it was a bit of both…
That was the other big difference: working. I worked close to full-time throughout my undergraduate studies and studied hard. I didn’t once attend orientation week. Why do that when you could work and earn money? I also never lived in residence as it was too expensive. My experience differed from that of my classmates from wealthy families but I was never convinced that their experiences were better. My parents were so proud of me and so happy. Their parents nagged and exerted lots of pressure. I developed an excellent work ethic, some very good habits, and really enjoyed my studies. Time spent reading and doing school work felt like a treat. Often, the rich kids seemed anxious and miserable…
Graduate school felt positively luxurious. I was all in once I learned I’d get paid for studying and for being a TA.
Brennan then comments on class and the accessibility of analytic philosophy:
In a way, I think I lucked out, falling in love with philosophy. Of all the humanities disciplines analytic philosophy is probably the one that relies the least on one knowing the music and literature of the upper classes. I liked the idea that we read small amounts of things very closely. The kind of abstract thought that philosophy rewards doesn’t rely on a knowledge of social codes and cues. I no longer think that the best philosophy is abstract in this way but it made for an easier point of entry. It’s even acceptable, within Philosophy, to be scornful about upper-class things. I think, as a result, that Philosophy is more friendly to people from a working-class background, even if by accident, than say English or Art History.
You can read Brennan’s piece here.
Discussion welcome.
It’s also worth remembering that philosophy attracts the neurodiverse, even if philosophy isn’t self aware of its neurodiversity.
I’ve had multiple students who are neurodiverse talk to me about how much they enjoy philosophy compared to other fields because it just makes more sense to them or that they felt other fields thought to be more accessible lacked the ability to speak to them.
We often talk about philosophy being inaccessible, where accessibility is thought to be accessible to all. And sometimes the suggestions I see to make philosophy more accessible also potentially makes it less attractive to the neurodiverse.
Can you elaborate on what you said in the last paragraph about philosophy being talked about as inaccessible?
Also, what are some people doing to make philosophy potentially less attractive to neurodiverse individuals?
I’ve made the same observation. It’s something I really noticed when working in a neuroscience institute: post-docs might have working class accents and were more likely to talk about football then literature (and were predominantly women – football in Australia is not strongly gendered). My hypothesis is that STEM is less reliant on what Bourdieu calls cultural capital: the sort of easy familiarity with the ‘right’ art or movies (and also food and wine) that those with more privileged upbringings absorb from their environment.
This observation led me to reflect on my own education. I did my undergrad in English and cultural studies. Unsurprisingly, they’re far more reliant on cultural capital than is philosophy.
I think Brennan is already hinting at this, but it is interesting to note that this very feature of Analytic Philosophy (its detachment from particular cultural forms) is also taken to be one of its primary weaknesses. That is, it may arrive at a culture-free, let’s-just-chew-on-the-propositional-transformations space by trying to exclude all cultural particularities from the conversation. The result is potentially more egalitarian, but the process may not be entirely virtuous…
one nice thing about training in analytic philosophy is that it equips one to detect a willful misreading that slides from “not steeped in references to upper-class culture” to “not steeped in references to culture”
Apparently, however, it does not train one to spot the difference between an addition to a conversation and a “reading” of an existing text.
Sadly, though it does train one to think of oneself as a “detector” of fallacies and misreadings, rather than as an interlocutor with a person in a conversation.
It’s not a willful misreading to interpret this bit:
‘The kind of abstract thought that philosophy rewards doesn’t rely on a knowledge of social codes and cues.’
as implying that analytic philosophy is not steeped in upperclass culture because it is not steeped in any particular culture at all.
No process carried out by large numbers of people (such as the formation of any academic discipline) is “entirely virtuous”. There may be a question of how it could have gone that could have been entirely virtuous, but it seems to me that there is a more practically-relevant question of how to help cultivate the aspects of the field that are helpful to people (even if they ended up in the field through a vicious history) and curtail the aspects of the field that are hurtful (even if they ended up in the field through a virtuous history).
For what it’s worth, I had something like the opposite experience as an undergrad and grad. There were gatekeepers on all sides, but ‘analytic’ philosophy was not particularly more friendly to those, like me, coming from a more modest working class background. The students interested in analytic philosophy often seemed even more obviously to come from top schools with parents who pressured them to excel in STEM. The texts often seemed to pretend to be clear and rigorous while actually requiring that you be inducted into the particular culture of the authors and their way of thinking. There are still a lot of myths about the virtues of ‘analytic’ philosophy.
I couldn’t agree more with this important point.
But I think the question is whether that particular culture and way of thinking is distinctively upper-class-shaped. If there are barriers surrounding that particular culture and way of thinking, do those barriers tend to be superable only by those with upper-class backgrounds? And I genuinely don’t know the answer.
One thing I have noticed in papers from the last fifteen years or so, however, is a pattern of using pop culture examples in places where previous generations of analytic philosophers would use more aristocratic ones. But these pop examples are so out of place that they appear more theatrical than anything — as though the author is trying very hard to portray themselves as being “of the people.” It makes me wonder why the author thinks it’s so important to come off that way. Especially when in the very same paper the author tacitly presupposes the obvious correctness of one or another strain of that liberal (and often progressive) moral taste which is strongly correlated with one’s belonging to the caste of privileged, economically comfortable higher-ed professionals.
I suppose the relatively recent prevalence of pop culture examples could also be bound up with a rising “poptimism” among the wider caste of privileged, economically comfortable professionals in media and entertainment. Among other unstated but perfectly palpable sentiments shaping poptimism is that if you don’t get the pop music certain poptimists get, you’re racist, misogynist, etc. And carefully avoiding accusations of various isms is a high priority with members of this caste.
Whether this poptimism and use of pop culture examples would constitute some kind of barrier, though, is something of which I’m quite unsure.
Just thinking out loud.
I think that’s right. Much of contemporary analytic philosophy (especially social epistemology and metaphysics, political and social philosophy) assumes a familiarity with the social norms, aesthetic preferences, and cultural codes of the NPR bubble, which have a time and place and cater to a particular audience that’s not exactly blue-collar working class.
You’re absolutely right. I haven’t put my finger on exactly what it is, but there is something that strikes me as a form of upper-class elitism about certain fundamental assumptions behind most of what is considered ‘analytic’ philosophy. The kind of pop examples you mention would definitely fit there.
To be clear, I think there are upper-class elitisms on all sides of academic philosophy. But ‘analytic’ philosophy is just as affected by it as anything else. Even the insistence on the traditional analytic-continental distinction, to me, reeks of a certain kind of academic prejudice that is the vestige of the older ‘analytic’ upper-classisms that others here have mentioned.
For what it’s worth, I insert little jokes and references because referee-proofing is a dreary thing and I need to amuse myself somehow. I’m not sure they are “pop” and even less sure they are funny for anyone except me. But more people should know what the Borg are.
The aristocratic examples likely served a very similar purpose for the ones who included them. They probably didn’t perceive them as aristocratic, just as amusing. Dickens was just “pop” back then.
I’d think this shows nothing more than that analytic philosophy, like everything else under the sun, is a cultural product that exists in conjunction with the surrounding culture.
Whether or not they are perceived as aristocratic, it may be a good idea for people inserting cultural references into their work to think about whether the increased familiarity these cultural references will give to some readers are worth the alienation they will cause to others – particularly those born after the work is written, whose culture we know nothing about. (And when I say to think about it, I really mean it – just because something is alienating to some audiences doesn’t mean it is all-things-considered bad! Though it might be.)
I see your point, but I’m not specifically aiming at familiarity or away from alienation. That’s not a tradeoff I’m concerned with at all.
I find little jokes, no matter how high minded or low brow, second-person addresses to the reader, cultural references, pleas, apologies, dry wit, or a slightly mean edge quite charming. I enjoy them as much in Plato (where I need a historical supplement to find and appreciate them), as I do in Hume or in contemporary work. It makes for pleasant reading and gives me a little pang of satisfaction when I get it, unlocking a tiny piece more about the work and author.
The closest anyone has come to actually reaching the ideal of impersonal style might be the “all passive voice” style in physics. I shudder at the idea of philosophy in that style. I’d neither want to read nor write it.
So, ultimately, I have entirely personal aesthetic desires to which I feel compelled to respond. Familiarity comes into it as little as alienation does.
And if I may be starry-eyed for a sentence, if my work is interesting enough to outlive me, I’d rather have a piece of my personality survive with it. Perhaps too much personality reduces the chances of that happening? Maybe. But I’m also not particularly invested in entering the canon and wouldn’t pay boredom as an entry fee.
Extrapolating this thought: it’s not just cultural references that we might want to think twice about, but any specific example at all would seem to suffer from the same risk of alienating some readers.
Perhaps a heuristic in mitigating that risk is to use specific examples that have withstood the test of time: if x is an example that’s still familiar to many people after a couple hundred years or more, then that may be reason to think x will be familiar to more readers over time (say, the next 100 years) than whatever pop-phenomenon y is in fashion right now.
And the examples that survived the test of time seem to be from “aristocratic” or “upper-class” cultural references, especially from literature, music, and art. For instance, I’m more confident that future people will be more familiar with Shakespeare than with Stephen King, or with Botticelli than with Banksy—they have longevity that no 20th or 21st century writer or artist has.
But to get away from class issues, if desired, we could use generic examples about x, y, z and A, B, C. The tradeoff, though, is this lacks the rhetorical effect and efficiency of using specific examples.
Or if we’re not worried about our legacies and how far into the future our work might still be relevant, we can just use whatever examples we want, e.g., those that best resonate with readers who exist now.
Also a first-gen college graduate, and I also recently realized this (as I’ve been dipping my toes more into non-analytic philosophy, mostly just to try to be more widely read)!
I can buy that, at least for some areas of analytic philosophy. But for others, like political philosophy or aesthetics in the analytic tradition, they still rely and draw upon things one might associate with the upper classes, from Voltaire to Van Gogh. Even in philosophy of language, Mr. Pickwick and other high-brow literary characters make a lot of appearances.
As suggested by others here, what can be a feature to some—to perform logic-chopping in any field without needing domain knowledge—is a bug to others. They would focus more on the lack of content or domain expertise, and they don’t appreciate the value of the analytic process as well as an outsider’s perspective.
And that may be partly why philosophers can have such a bad rap. For a defensive in-group, they can be unlearned, presumptuous critics. As Ernest Hemingway reportedly put it, “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors.”
I don’t see many philosophers do that anymore, who now largely understand they should pick up some domain knowledge in order to be more credible. But I do see that from time to time in technology ethics, where the technical learning curve can be steep and the emergence of new risks and philosophical problems can be sudden.
(ChatGPT was introduced on 30 Nov 2022 and started to profoundly disrupt many things overnight. Some think AI is upending philosophy itself, bringing us toward a “philosophical rapture.”)
So, the danger of this kind of content-free “accessibility” is that it might look dilettantish. Yet there’s still a role for the dilettante, or generalist, amateur, outsider, or whatever you want to call it. Both process and content matter in developing an argument or thesis, just like procedural problems in law can doom a case regardless of its merits or substance.
One note about analytic aesthetics: while there’s no doubt that historically, examples in aesthetics have presupposed a great deal of upper-class cultural knowledge, I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore (or even if it is, it’s to a much lesser extent). While some classic examples are still used often (looking at you, Guernica and “Erlkönig”), I see contemporary pop media examples all the time. And, contra Animal Symbolicum above, I don’t register it as theatrical; at least in aesthetics, it seems to have been a natural shift over the past two decades.
Of course, because aesthetics is just chock-full of examples, they’re often from such a diverse range of sources that I’m still having to look things up just as much as I had to with the upper-class examples that I was unfamiliar with in older papers, but that at least seems like a good feature of the discipline.
I think the charge is pretty much true, but that’s because the subject of aesthetics is artworks and artistic practices–just as you’d have to know something about science to write on the philosophy of science. (So: it’s not just a matter of examples, but of content.)
But, as you observed, there’s widespread recognition in the subfield today that the purview of art is much broader than just the Old Masters (or the New York art scene), so there’s plenty of work on art that isn’t High Art too.
I like your remarks on the way that analytic philosophy might be more accessible to the neuro diverse. I think that might be true, but I think it’s true in a way that may not be sociologically neutral. Analytic philosophy does, after all, rely on a good deal of formal logic, and learning formal logic is very expensive in terms of time taken to learn it and the mathematics that it depends on. But there are a lot of people who get engaged with philosophical issues out of a sense of the human failure of the present political institutions, and how do we engage with them? The old left wing political consensus engaged very well with many people’s desires and aspirations: how do we carry that forward in a way that takes account of, for example, neurological diversity?
Not all analytic philosophy relies on a good deal of formal logic. Derek Parfit allegedly couldn’t really grasp logic and I think he did fine. I too don’t really grasp logic very well and I’m doing fine. I am sure there are many other examples.
It’s a good article. She’s self-aware enough that things are not the same as they were in the 90s.
A tenure-track job at a Canadian university straight out of grad school is basically unheard of now. Unless your well-connected in a way first-gen students usually aren’t, or benefitting from a DEI target at a school. I’m also a first-gen student, and drowning under the weight of earning nothing in endless temporary jobs. Let’s not kid ourselves; philosophy is incredibly hostile to first-gen students who are not rich or have rich partners.
Ah yes, the only people with jobs in philosophy are *checks notes* DEI targets. That’s definitely what my eyes tell me.
Perhaps check an ad for a job at a Canadian university. Here is Trent University on PhilJobs:
“Preference will be given to candidates from underrepresented groups including women, Indigenous People (First Nations, Inuit and Métis), persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities or racialized groups and LGBTQ2+ people.”
We can debate the merits of preferential hiring for members of equity groups, but denying that Canadian unuversities endorse a policy that they explicitly advertise is just silly.
I agree with Canadian Post-Doc that philosophy is very unfriendly to first-generation/working-class/poor students. I have studied hiring practices in philosophy, especially Canadian philosophy, for close to two decades in order to discern the mechanisms and strategies that facilitate the (continued) exclusion of disabled philosophers, especially the exclusion of Canadian disabled philosophers.
Notwithstanding the agreement that I note in my initial sentence of this comment, however, I think that Canadian Post-Doc is terribly uninformed about how hiring in Canadian philosophy actually ensues and thus why they themselves are in their present predicament. Here are a few things that they might consider:
(1) The most important credential to get short-listed and get a job in a Canadian philosophy department is a degree from an American or Oxbridge university (Don’t believe me? Check some Canadian department faculty rosters, starting with UBC that–last time I checked–has one Canadian PhD on its large faculty);
(2) Following on (1),Canadian Post-Doc’s assertion according to which it is “silly” to deny what Canadian universities “explicitly advertise” is naive: for example, Canadian departments repeatedly and routinely get around the claim in their respective ads that they will give preference to Canadian citizens. (I’ve even seen Canadian philosophers post their job ads on Facebook and “explicitly” advise their colleagues to ignore this clause in their ad!);
(3) DEI in Canada has really only been directed at and benefitted nondisabled white women, though a few Canadian universities have introduced cluster hires to recruit Black and Indigenous faculty and faculty of colour;
(4) Following on (3) and other previous remarks, Canadian philosophy departments continue to reject disabled job applicants regardless of their accomplishments. Indeed, some of these departments seem to breathe a sigh of relief when one of their faculty members comes out as disabled because they seem to think that my widely publicized charges about their exclusionary practices with respect to hiring disabled philosophers are thereby refuted. But who would think that a department has good hiring practices and representation with respect to LGBTQ+ philosophers because one of its faculty members came out as queer months or even years after they were hired while identifying as (and maybe passing as) straight?
If you, dear reader/listener of Daily Nous, are a disabled philosophy student in Canada or a precariously employed disabled philosopher in Canada, I recommend that you read/listen to some of the writing that I have done about how Canadian (and other) disabled philosophers are excluded from permanent employment in philosophy. Much of this work is available (open access) on my PhilPapers/PhilPeople pages.
Of note in this regard: my article, “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability” (2013) Shelley Tremain, Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability – PhilPapers; my article, “Field Notes on the Naturalization and Denaturalization of Disability in (Feminist) Philosophy: What They Do and How They Do It” Shelley Lynn Tremain, Field Notes on the Naturalization and Denaturalization of Disability in (Feminist) Philosophy: What They Do and How They Do It – PhilPapers; my monograph, _Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability_ (2017).
Also, consider checking out this recent Dialogues on Disability interview in which Robert Chapman and Mich Ciurria interviewed me and in which I discuss these and other things that you should know about philosophy’s hostile and exclusionary relationship with disabled people in general and disabled philosophers in particular, especially Canadian philosophy’s relationship to us: Dialogues on Disability: Robert Chapman and Mich Ciurria Interview Shelley Tremain (Tenth-anniversary Edition) – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Re. (1): Yes, if you want a job in Canada, don’t attend a Canadian grad program. The attitude for a long time was (and may still be), ‘We need world-class intellects, and anyone who decided to stay in Canada for a doctorate can’t possibly have one.’ (It’s odd that Canadian applicants for Canadian jobs long had to travel to another country to interview at an APA meeting.)
‘What’s that? Someone with a disability might find it difficult to study in another country with less reliable medical coverage? That’s none of our concern.’
Re. (2): Some levels of the Canadian bureaucracy select administrators based on their skill at circumventing requirements imposed by other levels of the bureaucracy. Universities, in particular, have excelled at this.
I see three Toronto PhDs at UBC philosophy. So, about 10%. Canada produces about 10% as many PhDs per year in philosophy as the US, so at least this department doesn’t provide any evidence that Canadian PhDs have a harder time getting Canadian jobs. (There are also a handful of PhDs at UBC from other places, so the Canada/US comparison is just a rough first pass.)
It may well be that other departments are different — I’m certainly not going to sort through the sixty-odd biographies at U of T. And it wouldn’t exactly be surprising if philosophers with PhDs from NYU, Rutgers, and Princeton had better chances of landing a Canadian philosophy job than others.
Here is an excerpt from a post I wrote at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about how prestige bias operates in Canada:
“Discussions about underrepresentation and diversity in philosophy tend to cover over how the factors that influence the demographics of the profession at large can vary, in some cases quite dramatically, from one geopolitical arena to another.
In previous posts, I have drawn attention to how underrepresentation of certain constituencies is produced in Canadian philosophy departments, in part because many philosophers (including many Canadian philosophers) seem to take for granted that the situation of groups underrepresented in U.S. philosophy departments and the strategies developed to ameliorate this state of affairs in the American context can be straightforwardly implemented as a template for diversity work in the philosophical communities of other countries.
In a provocative post, Helen De Cruz demonstrated that prestige bias largely determines hiring decisions in U.S. philosophy departments at present, pointing out (among other things) how this bias exacerbates the biases that members of certain underrepresented constituencies in philosophy already confront.
Prestige bias also significantly influences hiring decisions in Canadian philosophy departments: most of the philosophers hired in Canadian philosophy departments got their degrees from universities in the U.S.
In other words, Canadian philosophy departments do not hire philosophers with degrees from most Canadian universities, an important determinant in the homogeneous composition of Canadian philosophy departments.
Philosophers employed full-time in philosophy departments in Canada do what they can to avoid discussion of this way in which prestige bias manifests and is reproduced in the context of Canadian philosophy departments. Understandably so: most of them took their degrees from American universities, Oxford, or Cambridge.
Nevertheless, one Canadian feminist philosopher, Christine Daigle, has repeatedly drawn attention to the ways in which this production and reproduction of prestige bias disadvantages Canadian graduates. In a recent University Affairs article entitled “The Value of Where You Earned Your PhD,” Daigle writes:
Listen to/read the entire article by Daigle here.
My BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post is here: Prestige Bias in Canadian Philosophy Hiring Practices (reprised) – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
I actually think you’re largely right, Shelley. I didn’t get into the prestiege bias issues. A foreign PhD or one from UofT is massively more likely to be hired in Canada.
Dreier’s comments drives this home. I once spoke to someone at a conference who presented on hiring rates at Canadian schools. Among hires in the humanities in Canada 25% were from UofT, 25% from all other Canadian PhDs, and 50% foreign PhDs (mostly U.S.). So, pointing only to a few hires from UofT as evidence is unintentionally revealing. When UBC starts hiring PhDs from McGill, Dalhousie, or UBC(!), let me know. The best graduates from those programs are at least as good as the average UofT grad, but good luck getting a job.
FYI UBC okanagan is technically part of UBC Vancouver, and the philosophy department there has recently hired a UBC PhD…(who is Canadian…)
I mean, okay, but there are roughly 30 faculty at UBC. One person at a satellite campus is pratically a rounding error.
What do you think it reveals?
I was responding to the claim that you can’t get a Canadian philosophy job with a Canadian PhD, with BC as the supposed case in point. I (intentionally) revealed that the claim is not true.
That doesn’t show a bias against Canadian PhDs. It shows a bias in favor of Canadian PhDs.
One of the three people that Jamie Dreier identified was hired in the last couple of years. Margaret Schabas was the only Canadian PhD on faculty at UBC for years.
It reveals that you’re blind to the prestiege bias disadvantaging Canadian PhDs. The claim was that it’s hard for Canadian PhDs to get jobs, and you resplied that 3% of UBC’s faculty are Canadian – all from one program. That’s a hilariously low number. You seem to be pretending that we claimed it was strictly impossible for Canadians to get a job, rather than that they were disadvantaged.
But hey, plenty of Americans these days seem to think we Canadians don’t deserve our own institutions. I guess we should be happy that our imperial overlords permit us even 3% representstion at our universities.
Well, I may be, but your own statistic ‘reveals’ the opposite. Canadian PhDs in the humanities have an advantage, not a disadvantage.
I definitely did not.
.
Not at all. I’m saying the evidence given, including the evidence you gave, supports the opposite.
Oh, I didn’t realize 50% of faculty at American institutions are trained outside the U.S., and another 25% all come from one U.S. school. This must not be remarkable at all. I’ll inform all those unemployed grads from Alberta that this makes sense.
You claimed that because three faculty at UBC have PhDs from UofT somehow Canadians are not disadvantaged on the job market. But that’s such a transparently bad argument you’ve decided to focus on how numbers are marginally better in the humanities generally. I wish Canadian PhDs could argue this badly and get jobs at Ivy League schools.
I’ve already explained this.
There are about 10% as many Canadian PhDs in philosophy as there are US PhDs. There are also a bunch from other countries, obviously. So the fact that 10% of Canadian philosophy faculty have Canadian PhDs shows that Canadian PhDs have a somewhat better chance of getting a job in a Canadian philosophy department than other PhDs have.
I’m not going to explain this again. You are either really, really bad at arithmetic, or you’re arguing in bad faith.
So, one person in the big UBC Vancouver dept obtained their position apparently on the strength of a Canadian doctorate.
Another person there holds a Toronto doctorate but spent much of their doctoral and postdoctoral time at schools in the USA and Europe, obtaining letters of recommendation from luminaries there — I very much doubt the Toronto letters alone would’ve got them so far in the days when they hit the job market (though their own merits and early work certainly warranted a position in Canadian academe).
The third Canadian doctoral product held an Oxford posdoc and presumably had letters of recommendation from there. Who knows how far the Toronto letters on their own would’ve advanced their career? Again, a brilliant person who should be teaching in a big grad program, but I don’t see evidence he would’ve got that far on the strength of a Canadian doctorate.
Then, if we look far inland to an affiliated undergrad campus, we can find another Canadian doctoral product.
The percentages being adduced might show that Canadian grad products are not underrepresented if we treat North America as one big hiring zone that ignores the Canada-USA border, but then should we expect to find a higher percentage of professors trained in Canada at USA departments?
But this ahistorical approach is frustrating. Up into the 2000s (relying my ‘lived’ experience and what I’ve heard from many, many students and profs), it was common practice for professors in Canada — the same ones who sat on hiring committees — to advise their students to go to the USA because that’s where the best programs were, and you couldn’t get far in academe without a stamp of approval (letters of ref) from south of the border or certain European schools. Toronto students were steered towards Pittsburgh, and students in my Dalhousie M.A. program were directed to UNC Chapel Hill. The professors at any given dept were plugged into certain USA networks, and that determined where they’d steer their promising students.
Oh sure, Canadian job ads would say (by law) that preference would be given to Canadian applicants, but those applicants were mainly educated in the all-star USA schools. If such were in short supply in the applicant pool, it took the hiring committee maybe two seconds to declare an absence of any qualified Canadian applicants (yep, the grads from Canadian programs were universally assessed as not even qualified), which then allowed them to go to the second list, the list of international applicants.
Exceptions: Yes, the word was that you could get further if you’d specialized in history or ethics at Toronto or phil of science at Western.
This pressure to spend much time in another country (with uncertain health care) tended to privilege many already privileged Canadians.
Okay, I have no information at all about other training the UBC philosophers have, and you seem to have a bunch (and you also seem reliable).
I don’t exactly understand your point about North America being one big zone (or not being one big zone).
Just fyi: although the US has very bad public health insurance, grad students typically do get good health insurance from their universities.
Still, I take your (and Shelly’s) point about philosophers with disabilities.
But in two of those cases, the philosophers distinguished themselves by studying at universities outside Canada during or after their Canadian doctoral work. Working as a visiting student in another country while enrolled in Toronto or doing postdoctoral work outside Canada can help students from Canadian programs overcome the stigma of their Canadian pedigree. That stigma seems to fade in other countries — European universities seem to respect Canada PhDs more than Canadian schools do, often granting Canadian-program students prestigious post-docs. But I doubt the people in question could have advanced so far in Canada if they had only their Canadian doctorates (or Canadian post-docs) to rely on. Full credit to them, but, again, people with disabilities are less able to move to the USA or Europe to supplement their Canadian doctorates.
Below I have copied an excerpt on this matter from my Dialogues on Disability interview:
“I made it through the B.A. with little institutional support. I stayed at McMaster for my M.A., in turn entering the Ph.D. program in philosophy at York University as a full-time student. No one had taken the time to explain the Ph.D. application process to me nor to advise me about departmental rankings. A working-class disabled student, I was not expected to continue my studies, nor expected to succeed at them. Regardless, it would have been very difficult for me to attend university somewhere beyond southern Ontario. A recently disabled student, I needed my support network of family and friends to live and thrive in an ableist society.
When hiring departments in Canada do not consider these circumstances with which many disabled students must contendꟷthat is, when Canadian philosophy departments diminish and discount degrees from Canadian universities (as they uniformly do)ꟷthey actively discriminate against us. Furthermore, when hiring departments expect doctoral degrees to be completed in four years and jobs to be obtained in short order, they actively discriminate against us. Let me underscore that disabled philosophers are almost entirely excluded from employment in Canadian philosophy departments, regardless of our accomplishments. Both (1) the prestige bias according to which hiring departments in Canada venerate degrees taken from American and Oxbridge universities over degrees taken from Canadian universities; and (2) ableist expectations and requirements about time spent as a student and job seeker are (3) instrumental in the reproduction of this exclusion.”
The entire interview can be found here: Dialogues on Disability: Robert Chapman and Mich Ciurria Interview Shelley Tremain (Tenth-anniversary Edition) – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Even setting aside the merits of the DEI hiring part, that’s not at all what Canadian postdoc wrote.
“*checks notes*”
Stop saying this.
The broadly “ahistoricist” orientation of analytic philosophy as it’s taught (yes – also aware that this is changing) hasn’t always been great, but I always did think it does have the broadly egalitarian *attitude* – that one can, in principle, “reason” one’s way to the truth without regard to authority, whether that be positionally or even historical texts (whether this is true in practice of course depdenent on class and race and etc questionable). That is: analytic philosophy, in theory, gives everyone a place at the seat of the table qua reasoners. In that sense, it – unlike other humanities disciplines or philosophy sub disciplines that require mastery of traditions methods and texts – some aspects of analytic philosophy allow for internal criticism by those on the outside looking in – that, in unconsciously allowing for subjective aspects to seep in judgment, it fails to live up to standards it nominally sets up for itself. This essay I think nicely highlights that, for all that’s bad about “analytic philosophy” it does contain the grounds for it’s possible renewal
I remember discussing the same few Quine essays for the third consecutive class session and realizing that no one else in the room, including the professor, got the joke about “the author of Waverley.” Analytic philosophy’s reputation for being culturally dislodged might for a large part derive from its readership rather than its actual content.
Like the Pickwick example someone else mentioned, I think that this is partly a generational thing. By the time they arrived at university, the average reader of Russell or Ryle in the 1900s-1930s would have read a vast quantity of English literature, and would certainly not consider facts about Scott or character names from Dickens to be challenging or obscure examples of it (quite the opposite). Same with Biblical references, which in my experience are lost on most students today (even the Christian ones) but where the vast majority of students until relatively recently, regardless of class background, would know Ahab from Captain Ahab.
(Ryle story, reported by John Wisdom: Isaiah Berlin was leaving a concert at the Sheldonian theatre in Oxford. Berlin, a man of deep culture, had as usual been profoundly affected by the classical music. For someone like Berlin, such a concert was like a trip to the Vatican for a devout Catholic. It was an opening up of the most important and inexpressible parts of human life.
Ryle passed him in the street and asked Berlin if he’d “been listening to some tunes again?”)
Another generational example: more than one of my students thought that Wilt Chamberlain was a character that Nozick just invented. Once I explained to them the details of his basketball career and how his brilliance changed the very rules of the NBA, it was obvious that he was too implausible to be a random example…
You’re probably right. My story is from the late 90s. It certainly didn’t seem to me at the time to have to do with class — college is where I first encountered young adults who weren’t wage laborers. They were the vast majority of students, probably over 90%, compared to less than 10% at the high school I’d attended. My off-campus co-workers, most of whom didn’t attend college at all, generally had a wider range of cultural references and would have been more likely prepared for Quine’s joke (because familiar with the Waverley authorship episode).
Interesting!
I’ll add that, as a Scot, I am very much aware that Scott was a Scot. I was using “English literature” to refer to literature in English, since I had the language divide on my mind. In this sense, Mark Twain is part of English literature, despite being American.
For example, it’s possible that Dickens or Scott would be familiar to some non-English speaking philosophers / students in the 1930s, but they weren’t Ryle’s main audience.
I guess analytic philosophy’s obsession with being original is what I like about it. It’s the only discipline where you can write the most original thought instead of just writing about some book or poem. In both philosophy and other humanities, you need to know the canons but most people in philosophy are more interested in your ideas than if you remember every argument made past philosophers. There’s a valuation of individuality when it comes to (analytic) philosophy that I enjoyed. These are just my experiences though.
As a working-class scholar myself who studies both philosophy and anthropology I could not disagree more. I have always found philosophy divorced from working-class realities whereas anthropology has a focus on low-theory/low-culture.
A lot of analytical philosophy is not written for working-class nor is it largely written by working-class folks. I’ve always seen academic philosophy and what I term ‘folk’ philosophy as being almost diametrically oppositional. Most philosophy profs too aren’t interdisciplinary and so they honestly just lack so much knowledge about the world around them.
Not long after going to uni, I began to see academic philosophy as elitist. Was introduced to anthropology through the work of David Graeber and switched to a double major in my second year. Anthropology, not prone to criticism either btw, is like philosophy with the people in it as a paraphrase of Tim Ingold. I genuinely hold the same opinion. I think the two go hand in hand but philosophy on its own reeks of privilege and, at times, can be extremely harmful. The amount of male “rational” philosophy students I had to put up with was nauseating.
Re. “divorced from working class realities,” you might not be completely disagreeing. She, too, is saying analytic philosophy is at some remove from the lived experiences of particular classes or groups. You can do it without knowing what it’s like to be in this or that cultural or economic context. She just finds this feature beneficial in certain ways.
I have a friend I grew up with who, unlike me, went into anthropology (we were the only two peers we knew going into academia), and she started to develop hip, folksy-sounding ways of describing her background, relating it as often as possible to her work and her (new) persona in academia. I’m sure it sounded super authentic, gritty, but she put it perfectly in just the terms that bohemian grad student circles use to describe what they see as her brand of “adversity,” terms she never used before.
I never minded her doing this — I think I understood, and it wasn’t exactly deceptive — but it made me grateful to be in an academic setting where it wouldn’t benefit me to sound like I “lived” anything in particular.
It’s the people whose ‘lived experience’ is underrepresented in academia who are most likely to ask, “Why not just say ‘experience’?”
I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with a comment on this site more.
Very interesting.
As someone with a working class background, this post really resonated with me. I find it particularly ironic that many other humanities (including continental philosophy) view themselves as having “better politics” than analytic philosophy, the latter being an apologist for “neoliberalism”, or whatever. Riffing off that famous G.A. Cohen book, I often wonder about these other disciplines: “if you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so unintelligible?”
From George Orwell, “Propaganda and Demotic Speech”:
When recently I protested in print against the Marxist dialect which makes use of phrases like “objectively counter-revolutionary left-deviationism” or “drastic liquidation of petty-bourgeois elements,” I received indignant letters from lifelong Socialists who told me that I was “insulting the language of the proletariat.” In rather the same spirit, Professor Harold Laski devotes a long passage in his last book, Faith, Reason and Civilisation, to an attack on Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom he accuses of “writing only for a few.” Now Eliot, as it happens, is one of the few writers of our time who have tried seriously to write English as it is spoken. Lines like—
“And nobody came, and nobody went,
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent”
are about as near to spoken English as print can come. On the other hand, here is an entirely typical sentence from Laski’s own writing:
“As a whole, our system was a compromise between democracy in the political realm—itself a very recent development in our history—and an economic power oligarchically organised which was in its turn related to a certain aristocratic vestigia still able to influence profoundly the habits of our society.”
This sentence, incidentally, comes from a reprinted lecture; so one must assume that Professor Laski actually stood up on a platform and spouted it forth, parenthesis and all. It is clear that people capable of speaking or writing in such a way have simply forgotten what everyday language is like. But this is nothing to some of the other passages I could dig out of Professor Laski’s writings, or better still, from Communist literature, or best of all, from Trotskyist pamphlets. Indeed, from reading the Left-wing press you get the impression that the louder people yap about the proletariat, the more they despise its language.
A common charge against the ‘analytiques’ amongst a certain strand of left-wing philosophers in France was (and maybe still is) that they are Trojan horses of American imperialism, apolitical henchmen of capitalism, or something like that. One such philosopher is Alain Badiou, a Maoist revolutionary not noted for the lucidity of his prose. Indeed, there seemed to be an inverse relation between how revolutionary the work was supposed to be and how indecipherable it was. With Badiou, the revolution requires that you master Mallarmé’s symbolist poetry, the atonal music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, set theory and abstruse mathematical formalisms, and some avant-garde theatre and cinema for good measure. That’s how you talk the proletariat!
*decipherable
One needn’t come from an upper-class family to know things about art, literature, and other forms of “high culture.” One needs only to be curious. The world is full of autodidacts.
Being an autodidact still takes time, which the wealthy have more of (if they choose to trade excess money for time). Having exemplars of cultural education and achievement is also more likely in wealthy families and neighbourhoods (especially when considering private schooling, and discrepancies in public school funding due to the local tax base). While it is possible to “beat the odds” in terms of cultural self-enrichment, the odds are more important than the existence of such exceptions when assessing accessibility at the scale of a society.
I’m sympathetic to Brennan’s main point, but analytic philosophy’s early leaders seem to have been super-upper class. Russell was an aristocrat and grandson of a UK PM. Wittgenstein was from one of the wealthiest families in Austria-Hungary. Ayer’s mom was from the family that founded Citroën. Ryle’s family were landed gentry, and his brother was King George V’s doctor. Quine’s father was a wealthy factory owner. Moore and Austin with their only upper-middle-class backgrounds seem like paupers by comparison.
I don’t know how this compares to other academics of their day, but there was a lot of money and class privilege behind some of analytic philosophy’s early movers.
I wrote a quote-of-the-week post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY documenting the thread below that addresses how Canadian philosophy departments devalue Canadian Ph.D.s. You can find my post at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here: Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Hiring Practices and Dirty Laundry – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
“ Of all the humanities disciplines analytic philosophy is probably the one that relies the least on one knowing the music and literature of the upper classes”
Those humanities that actually involve knowledge of music and literature usually include the study of this music and literature, at least from secondary sources. And analytical philosophy has its analogues “music and literature of the upper classes”; lots of stuff like that by the way.