Queen or Handmaiden?

Abstract

P HILOSOPHY should be a queen among the faculties in our colleges; yet everywhere she seems to be a handmaiden. That love of wisdom which should be the chief glory of all education has been pushed into the background in this country until it is now merely one of the incidental by-products of our varied curriculums. Every year the degree of Bachelors of Arts is granted to students who have never taken even an introductory course in philosophy; and those majoring in fields ranging from literature, languages, and the arts to the physical, biological, psychological, and social sciences are declared Masters without their once having been required to inquire into the first principles and general problems of their specialties. This unfortunate situation is perhaps symptomatic of our national aversion to ideas and our uncrystallized intellectual standards; but it has not always been so in American colleges. In Colonial days, higher education was still cast in a theological mold, and the curriculum was organized into the classical subjects of physics and metaphysics, grammar and rhetoric, logic and ethics. It was inevitable that a pioneering nation, with its rapidly expanding economy and its democratic mingling of many strains and religions, should find such a conservative system inadequate to its needs and develop new patterns. The process that took place was one of specialization: natural philosophy was replaced by a wealth of intensive disciplines, while psychology, anthropology, economics, government, and sociology entered the fields of ethics and politics. Something was both lost and gained as a result of this usurpation of philosophy by the various sciences. Specialization enabled each branch to make rapid progress in the development of techniques and theories, and in the gathering and organization of facts; but a sense of the relationships among the sciences, and of their contributions to the education of a full man, became increasingly difficult to keep. As a result of these various influences, most faculties of philosophy in our colleges today are in an anomalous, rather than a commanding, position. Their functions are either limited by a specific tie-up with religion or psychology or education; or they may find themselves reduced, as a result of the competition of other departments, to a situation in which they virtually ignore some of the major, traditional problems of the subject. Is it not a common occurrence today for many students to acquire their more active and vital (though not necessarily more critical)