
Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? - crocus
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=cjtGhcnt3vYPDhDdjtvfySgdzkqpzShC
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parenthesis
"Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in
economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy"

Modern academic psychology and economics aim at being scientific; the works of
Freud and Marx fall very short in this respect, according to contemporary
standards.

Both are, of course, very important in the history of ideas. And their _ideas_
are not necessarily irrelevant to the psychologist (childhood traumas _can_
cause persisting psychological problems) or economist. But their actual works
probably are irrelevant to the work of most psychologists and economists.

Hegel expelled from philosophy? First, his works are particularly difficult to
read and understand (and difficult to translate into English). So he isn't
popular with philosophy undergraduates. So not many courses are offered on his
work. (But some are:
[http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/ug_study/ug_honours/documents...](http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/ug_study/ug_honours/documents/EarlyContinentalsCourseOutline.pdf)
)

Also, Hegel fits on the 'continental' side of the 'analytic' vs. 'continental'
philosophy binary opposition. That is probably the main reason for his lack of
presence in English-speaking philosophy departments, which are overwhelmingly
analytical in bent.

~~~
smalter
yes, you make the good point. the author of the piece is a historian. he's not
only bemoaning the eradication of freud, marx, and hegel from their respective
disciplines, he's bemoaning the scientific-ization of those disciplines
themselves, ya dig?

take economics, for example. it didn't always have such a "rigorous"
mathematical foundation. and though economics has sought to be more and more
scientific, it's unclear whether that's the "true" nature of the discipline of
economics. in other words, the way, say, undergraduates are taught intro
programming might have more to do with contemporary trends, e.g., object
oriented programming, rather than other important things endemic to the
discipline of computer science.

from my point of view, economics/psychology/philosophy (maybe less so) seek
legitimacy in the present moment through the scientific-ization of their
processes/thought. i'm with the author of this piece that history of thought,
as in philosophy, is an important part of the discipline if not the discipline
itself.

~~~
akkartik
History shouldn't be a single subject in school; it should be an aspect of
every subject.

~~~
gregwebs
Does that mean you are actually going to test on history? I was pretty mad
when the physics professor actually put in a question about history on the
exam. Its fine if they want to put sidebars in the textbook, but really if it
is not tested it is going to have to be up to the student to take on an
interest in the history and learn it.

~~~
akkartik
Ack, I'm talking about education, not literacy and certainly not about
_passing tests_. Let's get a little bit idealistic here. If you had a child
what would you want it to know by the time it left high school, and what's the
best way to teach it those things? I want my child to know not just about the
major theories and processes and so on, but the historical context that caused
them to arise.

What you think of some test is hugely about implementation details. Would you
be less mad if you didn't have to deal with history as a separate subject? If
the notion of tests didn't exist, and there were more positive motivations for
students to study? If you already knew a more wide range of human history than
most grad students today by the time you entered college, so you didn't have
to study history anymore?

------
mdasen
To be a little bit snippy, why isn't Genesis taught in evolutionary biology
courses? I mean, Darwin wrote "On the Origins of Species", but Genesis was
there before Darwin and wrote about the origins of all life on earth so
clearly Darwin should be put in that context. How can someone understand
Darwin without knowing creationism?

As the anti-intelligent-design folks would say, science is a harsh place for
ideas and ideas need to prove themselves over and over and be verifiable. You
don't get to be taught just because you wrote about something earlier.

There are places where these things should be taught - because they are
important to our history and culture. They don't belong in the sciences
anymore for varying reasons. Freud wasn't scientific in his studies (meaning
things like double-blind, verifiable results). He has influenced a lot, but
the field has moved past him. Marx worked under economic assumptions that were
held as true by economists of the time that were later proved false (and which
greatly affect his outcomes).

However, there are some things that have held up over time. Ricardo's
Comparative Advantage (from the 17th century I believe) is still taught. The
Pythagorean Theorem from over two millenia ago is huge in math. And I believe
both Newton and Einstein still hold in their fields. At the same time, as we
learned about the universe, Plato/Aristotle went from astronomy (they did
write a lot about what was in space) to philosophy - because they were simply
wrong. Thinkers who thought the earth was flat might be mentioned in a history
course, but not in a science one.

And sometimes there is still value there. I'm a religious person myself, but I
think it would be stupid to teach it in a history or science class - its ideas
just have no place there. Maybe they did at one point in human history, but
not today. Likewise, I think a lot of psychology today is going to fall into
nothing as we learn more and at that time, the authors of today will cease to
be taught in psyc.

Science moves forward. It's unforgiving. Once something has been proved false,
it can remain, but more in the "history of ideas" way.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Er -- philosophy is not science. It's outside of science. So it cannot be
wrong. It either is more or less appropriate for various circumstances (just
like science, but we won't go there)

So Hegel is not wrong. Heck, Freud and Marx weren't even scientific, so they
really can't be wrong either.

I know what you're saying -- we wouldn't take time in chemistry to go over
alchemy -- but there is a difference between a person, a time, and the best
way of thinking for that time and the current state of the scientific model.
Lots of times we can use heuristics and methods of thinkers who ended up in
wrong spots in current problems. Likewise, not being aware of old ad beaten-
to-death canards like Marxism means we end up going over the same old ground
again.

Or looking at it from another angle: wouldn't you want to remember Carl Sagan
a thousand years from now? Even if he appeared no smarter than a primitive
cave man worshiping the sun? You see, everybody wants to throw away the old
guys -- they're so obviously wrong. It's much harder to take the good with the
bad.

To ignore thinkers from another age because the current scientific belief has
changed deprives the current generation of everything else those thinkers had
-- their powers of deduction, observation of human nature, the ability to put
various disparate pieces together in synthesis, etc. It's throwing the baby
out with the bath water. Over and over again we see thinkers trashed and the
later parts of what they had turn out to be extremely useful. Plato missed the
boat in certain ways, but who the heck could predict forms would turn into
OOAD?

This is not a boolean question. (to quote another dis-remembered scientist who
eventually gave us something useful) In most human affairs, there is a give
and take of ideas, a dialectic. But there I go again.

~~~
pg
_It's outside of science. So it cannot be wrong._

p and ~p

~~~
DanielBMarkham
"Wrong" does not apply to extra-scientific statements.

"Ice Cream is nice" is extra-scientific. It is, strictly speaking, nonsense.
"There might be a methodology for association various ice creams with personal
tastes, and this methodology might hold up to the scientific method" is the
beginning of an area of study for science. Philosophy generates science -- it
moves from quasi-true and tenuous connective statements into fields of further
study that can be joined with better-defined and more rigorous logic.

Hegel made some great observations. Some of which are provable and might
involve some creation of a scientific discipline at some time, and some not.
Some were along the lines of "ice cream is nice". Since nonsensical statements
have no logical evaluation, any formation of predicate logic is non-
applicable.

Or maybe I missed something. Seemed like you were being flip.

~~~
mlinsey
You're using the word "philosophy" in it's everyday sense. My life philosophy
might be to take risks, live it to the fullest, and enjoy ice cream, because
ice cream is nice. Those are extra-scientific statements.

Philosophy, the discipline taught in academic departments, is something else
entirely. It's a bit ironic that you contrasted philosophy to "better-defined
and more rigorous logic", because the formal study logic is a sub-discipline
of philosophy. At least at my college, if you're a math major and want to
learn about logic, you take a course listed in the Philosophy department.

Now, sometimes philosophy does rest on premises which are either extra-
scientific or which should be scientifically testable but are not proven
rigorously by a philosopher. For example, I could make an argument about
whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In doing so I might
make some assumptions about "free will" and the nature of mind which probably
should be sanity-checked by a neuroscientist sometime down the road. But those
are just problems with my assumptions: whether or not my argument is good
Philosophy depends on how well I make the argument, in other words whether it
is valid, in the technical sense of the term. Hagel and other Continental
Philosophers get a bad rap for being light on rigor, and we can have a whole
separate debate about that _, but to say that philosophy consists of quasi-
true statements that can't be logically evaluated is just insane.

_ (I'd be particularly interested in which of Hegel's arguments you thought
were "nonsensical" or "along the lines of ice cream is nice"! Although I admit
I only have any familiarity with Philosophy of Right, anything I know about
his other works is secondhand)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
No. I am using philosophy in its historical sense. The heavy use of predicate
logic is a very recent occurrence dating to early in the last century or so.

Hegel's a bit thick for me, but I'd make the argument that Popper did with
Marx that Hegel failed to provide a bold, falsifiable prediction. From what I
understand, he made some great observations about how spirit evolves, but
there was nothing you could hang your hat on -- not enough definition to make
useful predictions or prove one way or another. No matter what happened, it
could be explained as part of the historical dialectic. Hey that's great
philosophy, but it's not science. It is not provable in any fashion.

You're right that the use of predicate logic has grown so in philosophy
departments that one would think that philosophy is based on it. The jury is
still out, in my opinion. The problem of induction (particularly Nelson
Goodman's take) raises questions about whether predicate statements like if-
then or a or ~b have real, applicable meaning.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the point I am making -- that a knowledge of the
people and history of a subject bears direct relation to current problems in
the field. That by saying "oh we don't teach X anymore, he was wrong." --
especially in philosophy -- we're acting a bit foolish.

------
menloparkbum
Hegel is still studied if the philosophy department requires a historical
survey of Western Philosophy. It is hard to understand the historical context
of Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard if you don't know anything about Hegel. Not
many schools approach it this way anymore. Coursework now is more pick and
choose. Medieval thought and the 19th century are the first to be ignored.

The reason Hegel is not taught in depth in philosophy departments anymore is
because he was an intellectual fraud. In other news, medical schools no longer
teach leeching or phrenology. Consider it progress. However, if you disagree
with progress, you can still get leeched from an alternative medicine quack or
pick up Hegel from the literary criticism department.

~~~
lg
Agreed. There are very active communities of philosophers that work on non-
fraud 19th century thinkers; Leiter's blog is probably the center of
philosophy on the web, and he's a Nietzsche expert. Anyway, it seems like
criticism of "logic-chopping" always evaluates to "why do these philosophers'
papers make me think so hard instead of just spouting the politicized nonsense
that I expect from 'intellectuals'?"

------
ComputerGuru
For the same reasons that universities stopped teaching Fortran and Pascal:
They've been replaced by newer, better alternatives.

~~~
jackdied
You are too kind. Two of the names he listed, Freud and Marx, were wrong. His
third "forgotten man" is Hegel and while you can't call a philosophy wrong he
certainly is harder to read than similar alternatives.

The author might have had more luck finding Marx if he hadn't been looking for
him in the Economics Dept.

~~~
mlinsey
Agreed with the rest of the replies here about Marx and Freud, but what's with
the detraction of Hegel because he's "hard to read"? Lisp is pretty hard to
read too when you've only read C-style syntax before.

And I think you can most definitely call a philosophy wrong, philosophers do
it routinely! At its core philosophy is simply making good arguments,
something that HN posters should be striving for. And while it's hard to
"prove" a philosophy wrong in the sense one can prove that an algorithm
doesn't work, you can certainly prove its arguments to be unsound.

There is the ongoing strict separation between "Continental" and "Analytic"
philosophy, which is both relatively new and quite tragic. I will say that in
a discipline like philosophy, which when it is at its best treasures
subversiveness and independence just as much as entrepreneurs do, it's all the
more important to read thinkers from different schools of thought. Hegel is
not just any "Continental" philosopher but one of the most important pillars
of the field

------
jfarmer
For that matter, I don't know of any biology classes that teach Darwin or
economics classes that teach Adam Smith, except in a passing, general sort of
way.

I'm sure everyone knows about Darwin's finches and Smith's reasoning about the
butcher's benevolence but that's a far cry from making a detailed study.

Fields move on. Ideas are refined and re-expressed in terms not available to
the originators of those fields.

These texts are all valuable as historiography but it shouldn't be surprising
that students learning the material don't go to them first. More often that
not they were wrong about a great many things, Smith and Darwin included.

------
gaius
_Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in
economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy_

I don't know much about Hegel but there's a simple reason that Marx and Freud
are not taught anymore: because we know that they were _wrong_.

~~~
gruseom
_because we know that they were wrong_

About everything? Or just something?

What about thinkers who are still being taught? Was Descartes "wrong" or
"right"? How about Nietzsche?

~~~
gaius
Well, for instance, Marx believed that all history could be understood in
terms of conflict between the working, middle and upper classes. But that
simply isn't the case. Freud believed that a persons personality was shaped by
their relationship with their mother. We now know that that is only one of
many variables.

Time will tell on Nietzsche :-)

~~~
gruseom
So they were wrong about something. By that definition, who isn't "wrong"?

Edit: Since my point seems not to have been obvious, let me make it explicit.
Putting a binary label of "right" or "wrong" on the entire work of Freud,
Marx, or anybody else is so crude as to be useless.

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DanielBMarkham
This is an interesting question. I think the main reason is time --
universities only have so much time. But yet these were major icons on the
world stage: surely some classroom time should be given to them.

As another possibility, it may be the way humans think of science that is at
issue. If we believe that science is always progressing forward towards some
idealistic picture of reality and that exceptions are rare, what's the point
in studying old dead guys who were obviously wrong? If, however, we believe
that science is always progressing forward towards some idealistic picuter of
reality and that exceptions are NOT rare, then we should pay attention to each
little turn in the road we took -- we may have to go back to there.

I hear a lot of Marx in the political arena -- lots of times by people who
have no idea they are channeling him. It might be useful for our universities
to at least provide students with a good background on Karl. Likewise, to fail
to understand historicism and the dialectic of the spiritis to miss out on
some great ideas -- even if Marx took those ideas way too far later on.

