Milinda’s Questions

Returning visitors to this site will notice that it looks quite a bit different. (Anyone who happened to be prowling around here in the wee hours of the morning night before last would have noticed that it changed appearance radically every twenty minutes or so.) Explanation: I started with the intention of tweaking my sidebar slightly, and in the process made an accidental discovery: when using CuteFTP, a certain combination of mouse clicks will delete a remote file toute suite, without even one of those “Are you sure you want to delete this file?” messages. I made this discovery by accidentally deleting my entire “Themes” folder, which is what determines the appearance of this site, and decided that, lo and behold, it looked better the other way (i.e., in the default format.) Turned out, though, that Default Format had deficiencies of its own, which led me into another exploration of the world of Wordpress Themes. (The choice of a theme isn’t purely aesthetic, since some themes permit accommodate technical features that others don’t.) The one I finally selected is called blog.txt, and it was designed by Scott Allan Wallick of Plaintext.org.

As for the changes I’ve made — lemme just tell you what I’ve done, ’cause if I get started on why I did it I may never finish this post. I’ve restocked my sidebar with links to other sites, divided into three categories: those to be visited every day, those to be visited once a week, and those to be visited once a month. And, for reasons my astute readers can probably figure out, I’ve chosen seven once-a-week sites, and thirty monthly sites. Some folks may find my list of sites to visit daily rather short and/or unimaginative; I kind of regard it that way myself. My only justification is that those three are the sites that I find myself checking every day. Some of my blogespondents may be irked that I’m only committing myself to visiting their blogs on what they will regard as a far-too-infrequent basis. I’m apologetic on that score, too; my only defense is that by being modest in ambition I’m likelier to stick to my plan than I would if I cast my Netnet wider.

So: it’s the 17th of the month, which means this must be the Leiter Reports. Originally a solo project of UT law and philosophy professor Brian Leiter (and I’m not sure how it evolved out of the print and online versions of his Philosophical Gourmet), it’s now a group blog. A few days ago, Jason Stanley put up an interesting post that started out with a quotation from Gerschom Scholem in which he reminisces about his undergraduate days as a student of, among others, Gottlob Frege. In his comments, Stanley makes the following interesting observation:

It is scarcely conceivable today that an American historian (or cultural anthropologist, or literary theorist), even of Scholem’s stature, would write that groundbreaking work on mathematical logic “fired her imagination” as an undergraduate, much less evince such startlingly acute judgment about what philosophical work was likely to bear future fruit (indeed, it is unlikely that the typical contemporary American humanist has even been exposed to mathematical logic as part of his undergraduate education). This accords with my suspicion that the uniquely American attitude in the humanities towards philosophy has much more to do with the very different conception of the humanities prevailing now in the United States than it does with the putatively changing nature of philosophical inquiry.

David Hyder has the following response:

I’m not convinced that this tells us too much about the difference between “European” and “American” humanism. It does tell us something about the difference between turn-of-the-century German intellectual culture and our current one . . . The difference is roughly this: Hermann von Helmholtz gave lectures on Goethe, his student, Heinrich Hertz, learned Sanskrit and was a passionate reader of Kant. . . . To paraphrase: “It is scarcely conceivable today that an American scientist (or mathematician, or chemist), even of Hertz’s stature, would write that Indian poetry “fired his imagination” as an undergraduate.”
. . .
As has been discussed before on these pages, American philosophers have scarcely been better than their humanist colleagues in bridging disciplinary gaps.

This leads Stanley to say this about what it means to be “interdisciplinary” these days:

There is an Orwellian use of the term “interdisciplinary” in the humanities, whereby being interdisciplinary means studying Deleuze and Guattari and a small group of other (mostly French) theorists, and applying it to various facets of contemporary culture or literature surrounding topics of identity. In this sense, philosophers aren’t very “interdisciplinary”. But that’s an absurd sense of the term. In the sense of *bridging disciplinary gaps* between distinct disciplines, philosophy are clearly the most interdisciplinary of the humanities. I’m in three different departments (philosophy, lingiustics, and cognitive science), and can chair dissertations in all of them. In that regard, I’m not unusual for a contemporary philosopher. Philosophers are regularly jointly appointed, or are associated faculty, in many different departments or schools, such as classics, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, computer science, engineering, law, medicine, political science, statistics, and so on. . . . It is true that philosophers are less likely to be part of the discipline that is called “interdisciplinarity” in American humanities today. But in the sense of “interdisciplinary” where it means “knowing and applying the contemporary literature of multiple distinct disciplines in one’s work”, philosophers are very successful at being interdisciplinary.

To which Hyder responds,

Having said that, it seems to me that the sense of “interdisciplinary” that you do endorse - “knowing and applying the contemporary literature of multiple distinct disciplines in one’s work” – is not the sense that’ll get us more grants. It ought to read: “producing work which is known and applied in multiple distinct disciplines”.

As one who’s been away from the academy for a while, I can’t comment on this last claim other than to ask “Have things really gotten that bad?”

And since the point of this new stratagem is to try to post more frequent, albeit shorter posts, I think I’ll leave it at that.