Introduction to the Special Issue: On Philosophical Education

Abstract

A very healthy thing for philosophy would be to rethink its own historical origins. I think it has been much too unhistorical and has a lot of the insights of the past. Fruitful lines of thinking and development have been abandoned partly because of fashion and partly because of . . . the availability of certain simple, reasonably well-understood problems where you can do technical work that will succeed and will even be rather classy in a way, and elegant. In a I think philosophy always has to keep going back to its own sources and try to return to the central problems that every generation somehow rethought and reformulated.-Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics (2004)Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle are right when they claim, in their recent Tenured, that philosophy has lost its way since its institutionalization in the university in the late nineteenth century. With this institutionalization philosophy has not only become an unnecessarily technical exercise mostly of interest to other professional philosophers, but also created a condition where wouldn't be hired today by any department of philosophy.1 But who represents Socrates today?These are all those philosophers whose education has more to do with their Being rather than the programs, departments or Universities they attended. Being is challenged in the university today by the hegemony of analytic philosophy. The teaching of how to measure the quality of philosophical argumentation through formal logic is squeezing out ontological accounts of existential problems from the history of philosophy. An increasing number of departments all over the world are funded and rewarded only as long as they follow the secure path of modern science, in other words, if they adopt a problem-solving approach that assures objective results. Noam Chomsky's critique in the epigraph is clearly directed against analytic philosophy's ahistorical and technical method, that is, its subordination to science, whereas philosophy is a theoretically self-sufficient discipline. Philosophy is not wisdom but rather love of wisdom, where truth is sought and questioned instead of analyzed and applied.In classrooms, the transmission of logical notions, with its aim of educating students according to certain metaphysical assertions, prevails over fruitful dialogues. While this transmission might be useful for being at the university, it definitely is not useful for Being in the university-an institution where it is possible to question the fundamental concepts of philosophy and also of oneself. If, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explained, We understand only when we understand differently, then much more than the transmission of information happens during a lecture; there is also the possibility to disclose to students (and professors) their interpretations, differences, or even existence. Philosophy does not stand together with other disciplines, such as economics or physics, in legitimizing practices; rather, its practice is questions whose answers have never been legitimized or settled. Answers to the question of Being can only come from devotion to thought.Unlike law or chemistry students, who are often motivated by the jobs their discipline guarantees, philosophy students are primarily motivated by the questions the discipline of philosophy will invite them to confront. As Martin Heidegger explained in his course of 1928: You do not get to philosophy by reading many and multifarious philosophical books, nor by torturing yourself with solving the riddles of the universe, but solely and surely by not evading what is essential in what you encounter in your current Dasein devoted to academic studies. . . . [P]hilosophy remains latent in every human existence and need not be first added to it from somewhere else.2Using the ontological difference (i.e., the difference between existence and reality) to individuate the relationship between philosophy and the university might seem misleading at first, considering ontology is itself a branch of philosophy, but it is the necessary point of departure for those who consider philosophy's ongoing subordination to science a misfortune. …