my own views on the Philosophical Gourmet

First, a word or two about Leiter. If he’s not the most unpleasant public figure in academia today, I’m not sure who is. Just take a look at his comments and his responses to the responses in that Protevi thread. They speak for themselves.

Second, I think he’s his own worst enemy. I see him ending up like Joe McCarthy or Woody Hayes, eventually doing something so extreme that his inexplicable support evaporates overnight.

Third, one of the reasons I’m happy to be a continental philosophy outlier is because I don’t have to care about the rankings, unlike the graduate students I’ve met from analytic programs who are terrified of the man and his shadowy ranking power.

What I’m driving at with point three is this. I’m glad that Protevi and others keep the pressure on his ranking system. But in the end, isn’t asking for continental programs to be included kind of like begging to be invited to a party where one is not welcome?

I’m already on record as disagreeing with the repeated assertion that the analytic/continental distinction is “meaningless,” or whatever. It’s not meaningless at all. They are two utterly different cultures that value completely different authors and completely different human talents. There is some overlap, but let’s face it– the overlap is not all that extensive. As Rorty once put it, many (not all) Ph.D.’s from analytic schools have read no continental figures, or maybe short selections by a handful. And many Ph.D.’s from continental schools have read no analytic figures, unless a bit of Wittgenstein, maybe a handful of articles by Russell or Quine just out of curiosity. If you do more than that, then great. And once in awhile you meet someone who’s read widely from both. But it’s the exception, not the rule.

If you decide to pursue continental philosophy in the United States at one of the heavily continental departments, the price of admission is that you’re more or less excluding yourself from the elite Anglophone Departments of Philosophy. You can do as I did and work in a different country and build unusual readerships. Or you can go into some other department that isn’t named “Philosophy” while still doing philosophy. Or you can be happy with the landscape of continental philosophy departments as it is and try to work within it. Or maybe you can try to push back a bit, as Protevi seems to do.

But as I see it, you’re simply not likely ever to do anything that consistently earns the approval of most analytic philosophers. It would be like a Catholic seminarian trying to get a job in the Methodist Church. Why would they ever hire such a person? I probably wouldn’t hire a hardcore analytic philosopher either– not out of conspiratorial motives, but simply because I find much of that stuff to be dull, nail-filing, over-specialized tax auditing. (Some of it is not, but plenty of it is.)

And in the long run, whether or not your work makes an impact doesn’t hinge on where your department happens to be ranked in the Philosophical Gourmet.

That said, I really enjoy the Gourmet! It’s like checking in on the soccer table of some foreign league that I don’t care about all that much. Wow, Borussia Dortmund just shocked the Bayern in Munich! Wow, NYU leads Pitt and Princeton! It’s fun to read these stories, and they’re of approximately equal relevance to my work. Despite my low estimation of Leiter as a thinker and a person, I have to hand it to him for organizing that very influential rankings system. It’s made academic philosophy a lot more fun.

These people are never going to respect you, so why care? That’s how I look at it. I would never have wanted to do that sort of philosophy, and I only have one life. So I’ll gladly pay the price of my choice.