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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 20 graduate students in the mid-1970s had studied, benefited from, and taken as role models philosophical writings that uniformly predated this dearth of professional opportunities. But we had also received a letter from the American Philosophical Association, routinely sent to all aspiring graduate students, advising them that very few jobs were likely to be available upon receipt of the Ph.D. Under these circumstances, such aspiring graduate students have had three choices: (1) ignore the letter; (2) ignore those aspects of one's previous philosophical training that conflict with it; or (3) try to adapt to both in ways that will allow one to compete successfully in the field. Clearly, the student who is both rationally self-interested and committed to philosophy will choose (3), and most who have survived professionally have done so. For the most part the results have not been auspicious for the health of the field. The methodological caution that is essential to doing good philosophical work has been too often supplanted by an intellectual and philosophical timidity that is the antithesis of it. Understandably concerned to ensure their ability to continue and succeed professionally in the discipline to which they are committed, many younger philosophers in the past few decades have grown increasingly reluctant to fulfill the demands of the Oedipal drama that is essential to the flourishing of any intellectual discipline. In order to break new ground, younger thinkers must strive to study, absorb, elaborate, and then criticize and improve upon or replace the authoritative teachings on which their training is based. Otherwise they fail to achieve the critical independence and psychological and intellectual maturity that enable them to innovate new, stronger, and more comprehensively authoritative paradigms in their turn. Strawson's early critique of Russell's theory of descriptions, for example, or Rawls's rejection and displacement, as a young man in his early thirties, of Moore's philosophy of language-based metaethics, or Barcan Marcus' and Kripke's early repudiation of Quine's constraints on quantificational logic, or Kuhn's displacement of Popper's philosophy of science in the early 1960s are only a few of the available contemporary role models for playing out this drama in philosophy. The obligations of philosophical practice as Epictetus and Hampshire enumerate them - and as Socrates exemplifies them - create an ideal context of transpersonal rationality within which all of the characters in this drama can thrive. In attending only to the quality of philosophical contributions and not to the hierarchical position of those who make them, the "style of philosophical talking" Hampshire describes is designed to call forth the best philosophical efforts of all parties, regardless of rank or stature. Careful, patient and rational philosophical discussion is the great equalizer among © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
