Your anecdote about the guy at Princeton and MIT appalls me, though sadly it does not surprise me too much. I don’t think you’re justified, however, in assuming that weaker-stronger correlates with more-less emphasis on the history of philosophy. It might be true that weaker-stronger correlates with less-more freedom to choose one’s specialized course of graduate study. From my experience that seems much more likely – there is intense pressure to have graduates be really polished in their area of specialization, whether that’s ahistorical discussion of the metaphysics of space-time points or Spinoza’s political philosophy. If the graduate faculty at a place with few or no required history courses includes a strong contingent of philosophers whose work is historically informed, then it’s a stretch to say that the program is anti-historical, even if one can get through the PhD program with few historical classes.

Those examples notwithstanding, there are still top 15 graduate programs that require a more thorough grounding in the history of philosophy. I hope they’re not a dying breed. But in any case nothing about that establishes what you claimed at the outset: that philosophy 101 should have works from Plato in the syllabus exactly as often as the Biology 101 syllabus has Aristotle in it.

Given that you don’t intend to be drawing a bright line, I wonder how you think your view can avoid having liberal education entirely dependent on the intellectual fads of the moment. I presume that you acknowledge that there are fads like that? Granted, not everyone who reads Aristotle is going to be able to propose a rehabilitation of his ethics like MacIntyre did, but notice that people who were studying Aristotle all along weren’t subject to the tunnel vision of the early-twentieth century OxBridge tunnel vision on ethics. So even though they weren’t as erudite or perhaps as leisured as MacIntyre, they avoided having an intellectual fad rob them of reading a most important author. Even the fact that this happens sometimes is a big difference from the sciences. Do you think it’s a live possibility that someone might tomorrow revise the impact laws such that physics students will have to go back to Descartes’ Principles? I take it you don’t. But returns to the past for philosophical (rather than antiquarian) reasons is a recurring pattern in philosophical study. Given that, it seems foolish to take the risk of being too blinded by what the field thinks is hot at the moment. (That, incidentally, is why I hope that grad programs with history of philosophy requirements are not a dying breed.)

2. I didn’t go to Rutgers, so I’m not sure how far they take their anti-historicism. What I meant by my comment is that the better programs place *less* emphasis on historical works than the lower-quality ones; i.e. only one or two history requirements and only minor coverage of historical material in the other required classes. I know someone (anecdote alert) who did his undergrad at Princeton and is now obtaining his philosophy PhD at MIT. He has yet to take a single history of philosophy class. Obviously, that’s unusual for a philosophy undergrad, but it’s at least possible. Contrast that with a weaker program where around half the required classes (and all of the introductory ones) are history of philosophy courses, and where much of the material taught in the non-history classes is still mostly historical in nature.

As an empirical matter, your suggestion that the top departments don’t have a historical approach is just wrong, I think. Rutgers is an example in your favor, but Oxford is not – NYU has Don Garrett and Beatrice Longuenesse; Michigan has Louis Loeb, Ed Curley and now Tad Schmaltz (trending towards history of philosophy rather than away from it); Princeton has plenty of people in history; at Harvard even people in contemporary ethics like Korsgaard are very interested in studying Kant and Aristotle. Turning to texts, one of the more important contemporary books in its field is Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, which is chock-full of discussions of the history of philosophy and philosophical implications drawn out in part by framing questions in a historical way. There’s lots of work right now on contemporary philosophy and mind and Spinoza, as another example.

I don’t intend to name-drop for name-dropping’s sake here, but it is crucial to realize that lots of contemporary philosophers think that philosophy is not just a conversation among contemporaries. Notice that your claim is stronger than saying that philosophy can be done in a purely contemporary idiom with no reference to classic texts – even that would be rejected by lots of people at top departments, as long as we’re talking about top departments – but you’re saying that using classic texts is really a waste of time, at best an inefficient way to do something that can always be done in isolation from those texts. That’s an extreme view, as judged by the preponderance of contemporary academic philosophers – even in the Anglophone world. On the Continent it would would be far more promptly rejected.

Again, I bring this up not to argue by authority, but to point out the problem in your case: in effect you want to defer to the expertise of the contemporary state of the field, but your conclusion is not shared by a consensus of contemporary practitioners in the field, so the view falls apart.

You’re right that I don’t give a clear dividing line such as pre- or post-Frege logic, nor do I mean to. There is certainly a great deal of grey area out there concerning relevance, and I think some level of diversification across syllabi is okay. But, to rehammer an example, to read The Republic or Utopia but leave no time for A Theory of Justice or Anarchy, State and Utopia is a mistake.

Sometimes, as you suggest, returning to an idea originally articulated in an old work can yield fruitful results. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue largely drew on Aristotle to reintroduce the viability of virtue ethics into modern thought (though I must admit, I’m not convinced). And, if people had infinite time on their hands, I would recommend they read every influential work ever written. But we don’t have infinite time, and so some tough choices have to be made. (Note: Tenured professors may have near-infinite time, so the calculus shifts for them).

This is particularly the case for undergraduate courses, where students may only have one class to expose them to the problems of political philosophy. In such circumstances, I believe their time would be better spent on questioning whether true equality involves a redistributive welfare state or not than that they spend time arguing about the divine right of kings. But sadly, it’s in the introductory and undergraduate courses where historicism is MOST prevalent. That seems backwards to me.

Obviously, things aren’t as clean-cut in philosophy as the difference between, say, Aristotelian and Newtonian mechanics. So maybe as an empirical matter, these paradigms don’t exist in philosophy. But it’s unclear to me why Kuhn’s theory can’t be generalized to other fields (though it’s been a while since I’ve read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Finally, as for Rutgers and a number of other programs, I think their approach to philosophy is the correct one. Disproportionately, the top programs focus on the problems of philosophy as people now understand them, while the bulk of programs across the country (albeit lower-ranked) have more of this history of philosophy approach to philosophy.

Matt, I think you misinterpret a number of my positions. First, I am not saying that we should categorically refuse to read anything written before some arbitrary date. There are parts of Hume’s Treatise that I think are sufficiently well-written and well-argued to merit inclusion on a modern syllabus. Perhaps the same goes for Kant’s Groundwork, but for the horrible writing it exhibits. This suggests that, even when we want to introduce the original idea, perhaps it’s worth using a different vehicle than the original text–quality and clarity do not always go together.

I also don’t mean to disdain the intellectual contributions of historical thinkers. Plato pushed philosophy forward in unparalleled ways and is surely a greater overall influence than, say, a Joshua Cohen. The same could be said, though, about Aristotle’s influence on Physics versus the work of some modern day physicist. But the modern day physics professor knows more about physics than Aristotle did, and when trying to learn the subject, we look to the modern figure. This isn’t intended to impugn Aristotle’s influence, but we do need to be practical about these things.

You challenge that I haven’t demonstrated that Plato’s Republic is wrong. Fair. Though, after all, it was a blog post, not a dissertation. Just to drop a couple objections, his recommendations on sexual engineering are disturbing, and his “philosopher king” ideas simply do not comport with common (reasonable)notions of individual autonomy or the basic equal value of persons.

I will finish with a question: would you assign Darwin in Biology classes or Das Kapital in Economics classes? If so, I think you’re nuts, but you’re at least consistent. If you would not, I need a good explanation of why they don’t make the cut but antiquated works by Plato or Aristotle do.

In my 12:59 comment, the sentence should read:

“But let all that be; Mr. York does NOT offer an argument of this form at all.”

Philosophy, as conceived by most who pursue it, aspires to tackle questions that dog humanity in every time and place. That is, it purports to deal with questions arising from the most general and universal features of our language, experience, and grasp of the world. The experimental sciences conspicuously do not purport to do this, powerful as their consequences may be for such general questions. In fact the story of the Scientific Revolution is largely the story of natural philosophers learning how to bracket, as much as possible, the biggest questions, so that they might make progress on more delimited and defined questions. This is of course related to what Kuhn tried to get at with the notion of a paradigm. It may seem paradoxical that the sciences that produce the most consensus are dealing with more narrow questions, but that is the case. Physicists, in their research, simply are not asking the same questions as Aristotle was asking about motion and the void, for example – except perhaps at the most general and abstracted level, where theoretical physics intersects with philosophy of physics and the metaphysics of material things – but that is precisely the part of physics that cannot afford to neglect its history, and that is precisely where historically informed thinkers make a significant contribution. Einstein is a good example here – certainly one doesn’t have to have read Descartes or Mach to understand the Lorenz transformations, but in order to figure out how to rejigger our concepts of time and space, Einstein was, by his own admission, helped by an approach to the historical development of physics that he took from Mach, who was a historian of science as well as theoretical physicist.

I submit that Mr. York’s suggestion does not sit well with this bit of history of science and philosophy. If philosophy were to follow, by stipulation, the example of the experimental sciences in this respect, it would either have to give up on tackling the universal questions it has most often taken itself to be tackling, or it would simply be drawing an arbitrary temporal line, with contemporary philosophers on one side – relevant by stipulation – and earlier philosophers on the other – irrelevant by stipulation.