Philosophy and the professional Image of philosophy

Philosophy is an academic discipline whose practitioners are subject to forces of professionalization. These forces shape the discipline in ways that often go unnoticed. I present an analysis of the currently dominant image of philosophy that working philosophers have, one that focuses on philosophy's formality, fundamentality, and the widespread use of intuitions, showing that it is partly determined by the history of the professionalization of the discipline. I argue that readings of historical philosophers that are informed by this image tend to obscure the thought of those philosophers. In particular, John Dewey's work in logic is misunderstood when it is evaluated according to the now dominant conception of logic as the study of validity; and the moral writings of John Dewey and Henry David Thoreau are neglected because they do not engage in the contemporary project of grounding normativity. Finally I propose that thinking of philosophy as a practice can help to recover lost historical insights at the same time that it can appropriately focus our attention as philosophers on institutional problems that currently bedevil the discipline.

Author dc:creator

• Doyle, Thomas

• Philosophy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11299/167067

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:conservancy.umn.edu:11299/167067