>>DOUG ANDERSON: In 1903 James gave a talk at Stanford called "The Ph.D. Octopus".
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: There's this wonderful paper by William James called "The Ph.D. Octopus"
in which he was concerned about what would happen.
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>>DOUG ANDERSON: And, his issue there was that he had a student who was exceptionally
gifted as a teacher
Very smart guy
But couldn't get a job at another, lesser university, because he didn't have a Ph.D.
But the question is
You know, just how many professional, big "P" philosophers does the universe or the
United States need?
So when you ask the question, is Margaret Fuller, does Jonathan Edwards, does Emerson,
do any of these folks think of themselves as Philosophers, the answer is yes and no.
And the -- Jonathan Edwards understood that he was engaged in philosophical, not just
theological dialogue, when he was working with the question of free will.
Emerson identifies himself occasionally with philosophy.
He never says, "I'm a philosopher".
But the only person identified with philosophy, for Emerson, is Plato.
In an essay called "Plato, Or The Philosopher" and then he has a follow-up version to that
essay.
And what's interesting about that is he attempts to redefine, reconstruct what a philosopher
would do in the world by going back to Plato and saying that Plato didn't just develop
rational systems.
He talks about the culture.
He writes poetically.
He engages in dialogues and so that the philosophical task might be quite different than what someone
might normally construe to be professional philosophy.
Thoreau is ironic of the story of the philosopher or philosophy.
I was gonna say cynical, but it's not cynical, it's -- he uses irony to talk about philosophers.
And he sets up genuine philosophers in his texts against the philosophers of Harvard
College and so on and tries to play out the differences.
The real philosopher is just the ordinary thinker who engages in questions about the
conduct of life.
The other philosophers make you sit in class and listen.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: I mean sometimes people don't realize that the whole idea of the Ph.D.
and graduate education is only an import from Germany in the latter part of the 19th century.
James didn't have a Ph.D. Peirce didn't.
Dewey is the first, one of the first to get the Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins.
>>DOUG ANDERSON: So this brings us forward to something like James' Ph.D. Octopus in
which we've created an environment that's quite different.
We have become card-carrying Ph.D.'s without which you cannot get or sustain a job teaching
philosophy in the United States.
Now how many are really philosophers in the Thoreauvian sense?
I don't think, probably,
Many of the professional philosophers see themselves that way.
I think there are lots of folks who, in American culture, might see themselves as kind of Thoreauvian
philosophers.
Someone like Wendell Berry, for example.
Is a kind of a Thoreauvian philosopher who writes and does other things.
And I think we find a number of texts.
Norman McClain's Young Men and Fire or A River Runs Through It.
In Thoreau's world or Emerson's world, those are very philosophical takes, or texts about
the way the world is.
Whereas we professional philosophers, who are either doing history, as I do, or extreme
logical issues as some of my colleagues do or are worried about other histories.
In their professional life they may be from a 19th century American view less philosophical
than they are in the ordinary side of their lives.
>>RICHARD RORTY: I think when James wrote "The Ph.D. Octopus" he was afraid of American
universities adapting (sic.) the German pattern, the philosophiesteinewissenschaft attitude.
And his predictions of what would happen to the American academy in the Ph.D. Octopus
came true.
On the other hand, it seems inevitable.
I mean if you have the kind of huge higher education system that America developed in
the 20c, of course you're going to have to use the German model; you're going to have
to give up on the gentleman scholar and Mr. Chips and develop the kinds of people whom
James satirized in that essay.
He refers to our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s publishing in the Philosophical Review who
never confuse esthetique with erkintnesstheorie.
This kind of professionalism was something that James foresaw and regretted but I don't
think that we should regret it.
It was an inevitable concomitant of the rise of the great American universities.
>>JOHN LACHS: It's inevitable that in a very populous world, highly organized, institutionalized
in many important ways that in such a world all knowledge gets institutionalized.
And then of course little groups of people grab hold of little chunks of this great material
of human knowledge and they obstruct the access of other people to it.
They, in effect, make it into a guild.
You can only get there if you are properly credentialed.
[sigh]
That's inevitable and it's a good thing in certain respects because certainly we train
philosophers better today then they were trained a hundred or two hundred years ago.
I think that much is clear.
But.
It's also something that's problematic.
It's problematic because it focuses one more time.
As I said earlier, it focuses the mind on the means and not on the end.
The means of doing philosophy is all the wonderful skills that we learn as graduate students
and exercise as young professionals.
But that's not the end of philosophy.
The end of philosophy has got to be something different.
The end of philosophy has got to be a greater understanding of this very puzzling world
in which we find ourselves.
A better understanding of what to do and what not to do.
A better understanding of who we are and how we can be a little bit better.
All of that I think philosophy has important insights to offer.
>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: But I think it's a very important article.
It's James at his best.
He thinks there that do you mean that the quality of a person's mind can be determined
by a few tests and is it a matter of prestige and the most prestigious universities?
Is it a matter of being stamped?
He says in one place, does mere personality and character mean nothing?
This isn't a matter of being instructed and say you're being, being a journeyman plumber
or being a journeyman computer programmer where you can be stamped, yes, I know Adobe,
I know this and that.
What goes into making a good philosopher?
I don't think anyone.
He didn't believe that anyone really knows.
He somehow got to be a professor of philosophy by starting out in physiology, his only degree
was M.D.
Then he went into psychology for the psychology department for a few years and he quite soon
discovered that he couldn't do his empirical psychology without actually confronting critically
certain assumptions made by the natural science of psychology, assumptions that were essentially
Cartesian and that he did his best in his last years, after illness, struggled in his
last years to repudiate Cartesianism and became a professor of philosophy and quite a good
one although he leaves us with, as Whitehead said, with work to be done.
And he, himself, used the metaphor that he had left, the arch he left was built up on
one side and had to be completed.
But he was really struggling with real philosophical issues and is alive today in some of us.
The whole professionalization of philosophy, getting the degree, Ph.D., being stamped,
authorized, endorsed by others who have been stamped or maybe stamped three or four times,
like Quine, that's become paramount and the question of what it means to be a philosopher,
the question that Socrates raised long ago, or Hegel or Kant or James or Peirce or Royce
has been pretty well dropped in careerism.
I've tried to expose this in a number of my works such as the moral collapse of the university
in 1990, but then I operate within what appears to be a rather domain, a bubble of, a bubble
of our own.
And it doesn't have much.
Apparently it doesn't have much effect although none of us know just how far out the ripples
from what we do extend.
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