
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities - cribbles
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Trying-to-Sell-the/243643?key=m1JvRRyygNd0EHj5AaFoO0ti00iCHCUA2K5ZxC8dMYxDxHtupVA2vVdwCkhaYR63dmtqcHlDbzFCVllkSGhIczZsMXBNMGRlUVpJWFdFUjRSR1cxNS01VnN2SQ
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qntl
I’m sympathetic to the idea that philosophy as its own focus/major should be
shuttered. If you’re doing “philosophy” and you’re being careful and
intellectually honest, then you can probably do it in the math department.

~~~
eindiran
I disagree with the claim that philosophy could be shuttered/migrated to the
math department without something being lost. Part of why it is useful to have
different academic departments/fields is that those fields teach a different
set of tools and approaches to a problem, even if they look at overlapping
problems. The way of thinking about logic taught in philosophy departments is
quite different from that taught in math departments, at least in my own
experience.

In philosophy, Tarski (a logician) feels adjacent to Montague (a logician who
studied semantics), and Montague feels adjacent to Austin (a philosopher who
studied semantics). If we were to shutter philosophy, the math department
would lay claim to Tarski, the linguistics department to Montague and Austin.
I think its useful to have them in conversation with each other.

But ultimately I think its very hard to argue that philosophy has got enough
new work being done; my metric is whether or not a discipline's "2017 in
<discipline>" page on Wikipedia has a greater number of accomplishments than
deaths, and philosophy's is not looking so good in that regard:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_philosophy)

