Daily Dialectic

As a philosophy student, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, you probably have a ready answer for ‘what will that get you?’ since you’ve been asked this every.single.time you met someone at a party. Sometimes that answer is diplomatic and informative – you will typically be called a waste of taxpayer money afterwards. Sometimes that answer is a raised middle finger, and ugh, you just seriously harshed the atmosphere at this party. Maybe you should leave.

Philosophers – just like researchers in pretty much every single humanities discipline and a sizeable portion of the sciences – are frequently called on to justify the existence of their professions, whether it be at parties, at departmental level, or at policy level when the funding pie is being divided up (granted, they don’t get much of a say in the latter matter). Some experimental scientists can point to the practical benefits of their work, and theoretical scientists can skate by on their association with their clearly useful colleagues (I am looking at you, string theorists). The output of most humanists, philosophers included, cannot really be benchmarked in the sort of way that would satisfy a middle-class slightly-right-of-centre oh-no-muh-taxes capitalist, or a high-level administrator who desperately needs to make a crumbling institution look valuable to the politician who needs to appeal to the aforementioned partygoer.

I will make three short, poorly-backed, angry arguments – that academic benchmarking of universities that are becoming more and more vocational will probably kill philosophy (soon), that demonstrating what philosophy is good for requires more than just describing what it does (as analytic philosophers are prone to), and that philosophy has changed not only as a practice but as a discipline in such a way that means we can’t hang out by the fireplace in a dressing gown anymore, but a lot of us are still trying to.

You’ve best to take advice from Snoop Dogg and ‘drop it like it’s hot’. No, don’t start dancing in a sexually provocative manner – drop academic philosophy and pick up other skills. Brick-throwing skills. I promise I will explain, but probably not to your satisfaction.