The essay as a whole, with its nostalgia for more "well rounded" philosophers less locked into narrow research niches, made me think about Max Weber. Consider this passage for example:

>>Behind all the present discussions of the foundations of the educational system , the struggle of the "specialist type of man"against the older type of "cultivated man" is hidden at some decisive point. This fight is determined by the irresistibly expanding bureaucratization of all public and private relations of authority and by the ever-increasing importance of expert and specialized knowledge. This fight intrudes into all intimate cultural questions.<<

(Gerth and Mills, "From Max Weber", 243)

I'm still trying to make up my mind about Weber’s thinking on rationalization and the “iron cage” of modernity. Nevertheless, I’m convinced Weber can help us address the questions that Lyons raises in her essay.

5/5

#Philosophy
#SiobhanLyons
#MaxWeber

A certain kind of cultural conservative will react to all this by urging those in higher education to focus their attention on "Great Books".

Far be it from me to cavil against anybody reading Aristotle, Hobbes, or Adam Smith, yet I am against this type of conservative approach for two reasons.

In the first place, the "Great Books" canon is irresponsibly narrow. How can we claim to be educating students if we are not helping them grapple with Fanon, for example? I know this kind of objection has been made a million times before over the past thirty years, but it still bears repeating! ( I'm not a Fanon fan, in case you're wondering, but he is an important source for anticolonial thought).

My second objection to the conservative Great Books approach grows from fear that it cuts students off from so much twentieth and twenty first century work in philosophy and intellectual history.

Reflection about the the possibility of a scientific understanding of human society or what Aristotle, Hobbes, or Adam Smith were actually claiming should be informed by recent scholarly work in the disciplines I mentioned.

4/5

#Philosophy
#SiobhanLyons #GreatBooks

I don't have a lot of time for Alain De Botton, and much less still for attempts to portray some psychopath with an MBA as a Nietzschean ubermensch.

Yet I wonder if we should be quite as dismissive of philosophy presented as self help. After all, many of the philosophers of antiquity, whose works the author is unpleasantly surprised to find shelved with self-help books in stores, thought of themselves not as scholars working on problems or even primarily literary artists but as searchers after a better way of living.

i have not yet read Pierre Hadot's book "Philosophy As A Way Of Life", but it might well be relevant here.

3/5

#Philosophy
#SiobhanLyons
#PierreHadot

The author's view of philosophy today as divisible into narrow specialization on the one hand and vapid pop philosophy on the other seems misleading to me.

In fact, you can find philosophers teaching future managers whether they should consider the interests of shareholders alone rather than those of stakeholders, future health professionals the ramifications of informed consent, and future army officers ways to think about "proportionality" and "necessity".

In short, philosophers today practice in spots other than the ivory tower or the market place.

2/5

#Philosophy
#SiobhanLyons