Of What Use is a Philosophy Department?

I have only recently discovered the joys (and frustrations) of Google Reader, an app that delivers summaries of recent website activity. I used it to subscribe to a few compilations of feeds in a few areas of interest, including several philosophy feeds. One of the feeds includes Brian Leiter’s “Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog” which contained a link to this article at “Crooked Timbers”, which linked back to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which prompted me to add a new category called “Carthago delenda est”.

The phrase is attributed to Cato the Elder (~234-149 BC), although there seems to be some dispute over its exact wording. Following the Second Punic War (218-201 BC), Cato the Elder served in the Roman Senate and was reported by several sources as ending every speech with the phrase "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" (“Moreover, I advise that Carthage must be destroyed”), or words to that effect, whether the subject of the speech was Carthage or not. In the end, Cato got his wish. Rome went on to wage the Third Punic War in 149 BC and Carthage was completely destroyed in 146 BC. In English, the phrase is commonly rendered as “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”) and is taken as a repetitive call to action to the point of being an obsession. All of which leads back to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article and my new category.

Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with, “By nature, all men desire to know.” I will accept the statement as axiomatic. Everyone wants to know something, even if it’s just the current time or what’s for dinner. I believe Aristotle would not have put it quite so frivolously, but the germ of the idea is intact.

If everyone wants to know something, then they must invariably turn to someone else to satisfy that want. I include self-education in this because such endeavors must include surveying the extant knowledge to see if the desired knowledge exists. In general, people do not want to reinvent the wheel. Educational institutions, of whatever sort, are simply more formalized ways of turning to someone else for the desired knowledge. So, at their core, schools have become the common method of formally imparting knowledge on a mass scale (one-to-many as opposed to one-to-one, such as with a parent and child).

As most people perceive it, the purpose of a school (kindergarten, high school, college, university, whatever) is to educate its students. But when you start asking about why they do this, you will get a variety of responses. Here are a few, copied liberally from teachersmind.com:

“The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.” ~Eric Hoffer

“No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.” ~Emma Goldman

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.” ~Ayn Rand

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.” ~Bill Beattie

“The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~Bishop Creighton

“The central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each student.” ~Carol Ann Tomlinson

To add a cynical note to the whole thing, “What gets measured, gets done” (attributed to more people than I can remember), so the purpose of education must be to pass tests.

To my mind, the question that has yet to be answered by anyone is whether the purpose of a university is primarily to educate or train. In other words, do students go to a university primarily to learn how to do a particular job well (or better)? Or do they go to a university primarily to become more well-rounded human beings? I tend to fall somewhere between Beattie and Creighton on that spectrum of opinion, but I am still working on being able to clearly articulate the reasoning behind that position (a subject for a later post, I’m sure).

If the aim of an education is to produce people who can perform certain tasks well, then the “justify your existence” approach has some degree of merit. The idea being that the marketplace demands people with certain skill sets and those skill sets change over time. For example, there isn’t much demand for people who can use Morse Code these days, but there is certainly a demand for people who understand and can use TCP/IP. Since universities and similar educational institutions are a major supplier of those skill sets, they must remain sensitive to the demands of the consumers and must occasionally weed out programs which are not providing the currently demanded skills. In primarily utilitarian economic terms, it’s the greatest good for the greatest number and the loss of anything else is just a cost of doing business in that marketplace.

If, however, the aim of an education is to produce well-rounded people, then the “justify your existence” approach does not make much sense. It does, however, open a nasty can of worms over the value of knowledge (whatever that may be). The fact that people are willing to pay to obtain knowledge would suggest that it does. But does knowledge have a value only relative to this particular culture at this particular time or does knowledge have some absolute, universal value? If the former, then we must probably return to the utilitarian paradigm.

Rephrasing the question somewhat, does knowledge has some absolute intrinsic value (is it an end in and of itself) or relative intrinsic value (good only under certain conditions or in certain circumstances) or is it merely a thing that has value for its instrumentality (a means to some different end)? That’s a monumental question and one which, I think, has no answer upon which everyone will agree. But the last time I checked, trying to answer those kinds of questions was the the thing with which Philosophy concerns itself. And that, my friends, is the use of a Philosophy Department.

Granted, the idea I have presented assumes infinite resources to provide an infinite number of courses of study, among which people may pick and choose the things that they wish to learn, guided by what seems best to them at the time. The reality is that the resources available to any educational institution are finite and must, of necessity, be allocated in a manner that best promotes its overall mission. The fly in the ointment is that until there is some general agreement over what that missions is (“know how” versus “know that”) there will be disagreement over how those resources are allocated.

I find compelling arguments on both sides of the absolute vs. relativistic arguments, so I do not presume to propose a solution to the problem. What I do propose, however, is an attempt to find a general agreement as to the purposes and aims of a post-secondary education, hence “Carthago delenda est”. Carthage does not need to be destroyed, but the question must be answered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 16 March 2010 at 12:15 and is filed under Carthago delenda est. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.