This weeks episode concerned the Future of Philosophy. It was something of a departure for us. We taped the show in front of live audience of professional academic philosophers at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association way back in March. We had three really good guests -- Liz Harman, Sean Kelly and Brian Weatherson. Thanks to the three of them for appearing. We've invited each of them to blog here any further thoughts they might have about philosophy's future. Perhaps they'll take us up on the invitation. Stay tuned. Brian Weatherson is a famous philosophy blogger -- though like many others he seems to have tailed off a bit on his blogging activity. Check his blog outhere.Apparently Sean Kelly has a blog too, but it seems to have been inactive for awhile. You can check that outhere

I just listened to a recording of the episode and thought I would follow up on a few of the things that were said there. I'll begin with my last remark that undergraduate institutions would be improved if Philosophy Departments became the size of English Departments. I should say that I didn't really mean that as a knock on English Departments. Some of my best friends are professors of English or of Literary Criticism. The real point of my remark was that philosophy deserves to play a much larger role both in undergraduate education and in our intellectual culture more broadly. I think, or at least hope, that that is beginning to happen. Maybe Philosophy Talk can in some small way contribute to that eventuality. In the remainder of this post I want to defend the view that philosophy deserves a larger seat at the intellectual, educational, and cultural table than it currently has.

以下是我认为的一些关于哲学的深刻真理。第一，哲学现在是，过去是，将来也可能永远是一个碎片化的学科。没有一件事是哲学家所做的，也没有太多的东西能将哲学家所做的不同事情的多样性统一起来。哲学是那些自称哲学家的人所做的事。那些自称哲学家的人会做各种各样的事情。哲学家所做的一些事情与科学密切相关。哲学家所做的一些事情与科学并没有太多的交集。一些哲学家认为哲学深刻而恰当地关注自己的历史。有些人认为，哲学史的研究与正在进行的哲学进步没有多大关系，正如科学史的研究与正在进行的科学进步没有多大关系一样。一些哲学家认为自己在很大程度上是在解决先天的问题，这些问题可以通过努力思考而得到决定性的解决，而无需求助于经验观察。 Some philosophers are engaged in the basically conservative business of analyzing, and perhaps tidying up at the margins, our ordinary conceptions of things. Others aim to exert pressure -- sometimes extreme pressure -- on our ordinary concepts. Sometimes philosophers of this ilk are content merely to destroy the old, but often they offer up radical reconfigurations of those ordinary concepts. Some philosophers want to reconnect philosophy with broader humanistic inquiry; others recoil from the broader humanities. Some see philosophy as exhortation. Some see it as explanation.

At certain moments in history of philosophy, different conceptions of philosophy dominate various academic institutions. Some conceptions of philosophy, especially when conjoined with institutional structures like tenure and the power to grant phd's are more or less successful at reproducing themselves in subsequent generations of thinkers. But sometimes younger generations pull off paradigm shifts and declare the death of philosophy as previously practiced. Though philosophy is perhaps the oldest (academic) profession, it has died a thousand deaths and has been reborn and reshaped a thousand times.

我突然意识到这是永远不会发生的。因此，过于狭隘地关注构成哲学穿越时间之旅的广阔动态景观中的局部均衡点，对于揭示任何深层次的东西都是独一无二的。从某种意义上说，这让我们很难——尤其是在一小时广播的背景下——对哲学的未来做出任何有力的评价。哲学碎片的当前配置不太可能在未来完全复制自己。在整个碎片化的景观中，你可以很有益处地跟随不同的线，并预见不同的线随着过去的消退和未来的到来而合并和分裂。当然，哲学的碎片以各种有趣的方式相互联系——而这些相互联系本身也在不断变化。例如，在上个世纪初，出现了一种被称为“语言学转向”的现象，它将语言和逻辑的研究置于所有哲学问题的中心。语言学的转向早已结束。语言哲学仍然是一个充满活力的学科，但没有人，即使是最热心的实践者，仍然相信它会像第一哲学一样。

If it's true that philosophy is a fragmented discipline, whose various overlapping strands exhibit no deep unity and stand in interrelations one to another that are in constant flux, how could it possibly be that it deserves a larger seat at the educational, cultural, and intellectual landscape?

Precisely because philosophy is so fragmented and so diverse, when taken as a whole it turns out to be a massive and sprawling undertaking. It is deeply engaged in some way or other with almost the entirety of the remaining intellectual landscape. It is certainly by far the most interdisciplinary of at least the humanities and probably the most interdisciplinary of all the fields of intellectual inquiry. Just think of the range of issues that philosophy has historically and still currently seeks to illuminate. It is philosophy that has struggled hardest and most persistently to spell out the rational foundations of the coercive powers of the state, the duties of human to human, the limits of the scientific method. Philosophy has tried to adjudicate the long struggle between science and religion, to integrate the daunting results of the natural, biological, and cognitive sciences into an uplifting or at least not debilitating picture of the place of humanity, and our deepest aspirations, into the order of things. Philosophy seeks to understand how consciousness and rationality manage to have a place in what looks to be a merely material univers, to understand what human beings can hope to know and by what methods of inquiry we can hope to know it. Philosophy seeks to understand the nature of art, the nature of beauty, the nature of truth, of language, of action, of causation -- and on and on. It is willing to subject any and every bit of received wisdom to the light of critical self-reflection.

有时，当外人看到我们这个时代专业的学术哲学家的作品时，他们理所当然地会被我们有时使用的令人生畏的、高度专业化的技术机器所吓倒。但所有这些技术机制实际上只是一套工具，旨在使我们能够将大问题分解成更小的、更易于管理的子问题，并使我们能够以更严格和更清晰的方式处理分解后的问题。考虑到专业学术哲学的结构，能够熟练运用这些令人生畏的技术工具的人会得到很高的回报。我认为这是完全合理和合理的，他们应该。事实上，我完全赞同哲学成熟为一套技术分支学科。这种技术的成熟有一个不幸的缺点，那就是它使许多局外人难以理解哲学与许多更广泛的知识分子关注的持续的和深刻的相关性。

The fact that many intellectuals and reflective thinking citizens more broadly fail to appreciate the deep relevance of philosophy to many current intellectual, cultural and social concerns is unfortunate. There is something of an unmet demand for philosophy among the broader intellectual public -- or at least there is the perception that professional academic philosophy is not responsive to a certain demand for philosophy.

这部分与哲学的某些部分的技术性有关，以及它对外行公众的不可接近性。部分原因在于，在专业学术圈中，更广泛的人文学科一直在狂热地重新思考，在种族、性别、身份和文化方面的许多基本类别和概念。许多人文主义者认为这些是相当基本的概念和范畴，他们认为它们在历史、社会和文化变化的动力中扮演着“迄今为止”未被重视的角色，以及其他许多方面。这在人文学界已经持续了很长一段时间，但直到最近，所谓的分析哲学家大多对这些问题保持沉默，或好或坏，除了一些显著的例外。我们的主要职业是在其他地方。这当然已经改变了不少。但即便如此，总体而言(以我们支离破碎的方式)，我们并不像许多人文主义者那样把这些问题视为核心或根本——尽管也有例外。但是，即使是许多研究这些领域和这些概念的分析哲学家，也不倾向于与许多人文主义者在这些问题上持有相同的观点。

It's a complicated situation to which I don't pretend to do justice here. The long and short of it is that among humanists, professional philosophy has been something of an outlier in its governing concerns. Other humanists have noticed that fact. And they have noticed that areas ripe for philosophy were for awhile pretty much off the radar screen of academic analytic philosophers. Partly because analytic philosophy didn't readily and quickly step up and meet that demand, certain, let's say, substitutes stepped into the breech. The situation was made worse by certain fallen away analytic philosophers who "confirmed" the worst prejudices of many of the humanists about what we were good for.

对于哲学的未来来说，有一件事是好的预兆，那就是我上面提到的“替代品”开始失去它们的光彩，而最杰出的哲学家们开始以一种让“局外人”进入的方式工作，而不牺牲我们所喜爱的严格和清晰的标准。

I've gone on too long. So I'm going to stop with the thought that I don't really know what the future holds for philosophy. But I predict that this will be an exciting century for philosophy (if we don't destroy the planet). It will be one in which the breadth and depth of philosophy is given full play both within and without the academy. And the intellectual and cultural landscape will be much improved because of it.