Thinking in Good Company

tags

Philosophy

Christine Korsgaard reflects on a long career in philosophy

Notes

At the point when I was applying to graduate school, the job market in philosophy was considered bad— although it is much worse now

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I did not finish my PhD until 1981, but in those days it wasn’t difficult to get a job before you were finished.

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I have spent my life being perplexed and frustrated by the fact that more women do not go into philosophy, and that conscious efforts to identify and overcome the problem have met with so little success.

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the position of women in philosophy has changed enormously, but the percentage of women in the profession has not changed very much at all.

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in graduate school I met with much more class bias than sexism

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Some brilliant intellectuals nevertheless fail to attract students; some seem to overshadow and cripple them; some demand that their students sign on to their own research program, and produce clones.

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Rawls was neither of those things. He was like someone from the future—it really did not seem to make any difference to him that a student was a woman.

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One of philosophy’s old ambitions, the ambition to make headway with questions about what is just and good and right, was suddenly alive and kicking again.

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“We are not going to criticize these thinkers, but rather to interpret their positions in ways that make the best possible sense of them, and to see what we can learn from them.”

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Rawls had seen in the history of our subject a resource for dealing with contemporary philosophical problems.

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I think there is a core set of philosophical concerns that all of the books we recognize as philosophy are engaged with

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A complex philosophical system is not primarily a set of dogmas. It’s a living, breathing, evolving entity with a certain point of view, and its own distinctive method of solving problems and adapting to new circumstances as it goes on, in much the same way a living creature does. And the moment at which the philosopher who originated that system stops working on it—because he or she dies, or gets ill, or just runs out of steam—that moment is usually arbitrarily related to what’s going on in the philosophical system, in the same terrible way that death is so often arbitrarily related to what’s going on in a creature’s life.

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In most cases, they didn’t stop working when they did because they were done, they stopped working because they were interrupted.

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We held over-professionalization in contempt, as something vulgar, and told our graduate students not to think about publishing, but to concentrate on making their dissertations as good as possible. Maintaining this position involved fighting a constant war against deans who measure things in terms of quantity and tend to take books as the unit of achievement, but we fought that battle successfully for a fairly long time. But for some years now we have been losing that battle, and the cost is very high.

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Because the sheer mass of the literature is growing exponentially, people draw the boundaries of their specializations more and more narrowly

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Big, systematic philosophy of the sort we find in Kant and Aristotle, philosophy that is responsible to the ways in which one’s views in one area fit in with one’s views about everything else, has become nearly impossible

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Peer review can be used as a way to enforce a kind of conformity that is not appropriate to our subject.

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young people in philosophy right now feel that they are not being allowed to find and express their individual voices.

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in their questions to me, many of these philosophers seemed more imaginative, more speculative, more playful in their thinking, than they appeared to be in print.

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much philosophical writing is defensive

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write something that is clear, and striking, and makes an immediately vivid impression on the mind, so that the reader can get hold of it. Then you can add the qualifications later.

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the opposite is true. If your reader knows that what you say needs qualification, he now has a narrative expectation.

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the referee probably really is looking for reasons to accept or reject your paper, and not just trying to understand you.

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Our proper audience in philosophy is a reflective human being who is puzzled and confounded by her own condition, and who seeks understanding, meaning, and moral clarity.

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the most heartbreaking feature of the contemporary philosophical landscape is that some very talented young people are leaving the profession, or being driven out of it, because they want to produce work more slowly and reflectively, and to produce work more truly their own than they can under current conditions.

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