ThinkBlog

A professor of mine last semester recounted, with all the smug satisfaction that a philosophy professor could muster (that would be hyperbole if philosophy professors didn’t actually exist, mind you), a brief snippet of a conversation he and a colleague from the English department had had in the elevator:

“You see, [sir], that’s the problem with you philosophers: You think you have all the claims to truth, what with the logic and the historical things. We, of course, in the English department, really have the answers to human experience.”

Yesterday in my class on existentialism, the professor was recounting the rise of psychologism in philosophical tradition, which—briefly—posits philosophy under the head of psychology as explanatory both epistemologically and from a standpoint of logic (as classically defined). Then, of course, the backlash, and the various means by which philosophers (often violently) dissociated themselves from psychology, created quite the mess for everyone involved.

During the discussion, Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was brought up as the grandfather of the two schools of neo-Kantianism, but having been a student of Aristotle, he apparently had none of this schism between psychology and “pure” philosophy. His students included Husserl and Freud, among others.

I’m majoring in psychology and philosophy; and I’ve always said that if I could triple-major, my third would be English. They all evaluate human experience. Camus and Sartre—even Plato and, in a way, Hobbes—came at philosophy from the literary angle. Freudian theory is packed with philosophy—indeed, psychologists these days now either lament over or belittle (or both) his entire corpus because so little of it can be verified empirically; but philosophers admire the airtightness of his arguments, however Victorian.

Psychology is the marriage of physiology and philosophy; literature is the result of psychology plus experience or, if you like, of all three (and then some) as made manifest in the author. I hope in my life to be able to draw from and instruct via all of these areas and more; but I do wonder if these fell into this trap because of an unwillingness to embrace truth when they saw it because of politics, or fear for their jobs.

In the war for claiming truths, I see myself as a medic and a liaison—I just hope I don’t get run through by my colleagues who believe me a traitor, lest my career as a professor be “nasty, poor, brutish, and short”!

A professor of mine last semester recounted, with all the smug satisfaction that a philosophy professor could muster (that would be hyperbole if philosophy professors didn’t actually exist, mind you), a brief snippet of a conversation he and a colleague from the English department had had in the elevator:

“You see, [sir], that’s the problem with you philosophers: You think you have all the claims to truth, what with the logic and the historical things. We, of course, in the English department, really have the answers to human experience.”

Yesterday in my class on existentialism, the professor was recounting the rise of psychologism in philosophical tradition, which—briefly—posits philosophy under the head of psychology as explanatory both epistemologically and from a standpoint of logic (as classically defined). Then, of course, the backlash, and the various means by which philosophers (often violently) dissociated themselves from psychology, created quite the mess for everyone involved.

During the discussion, Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was brought up as the grandfather of the two schools of neo-Kantianism, but having been a student of Aristotle, he apparently had none of this schism between psychology and “pure” philosophy. His students included Husserl and Freud, among others.

I’m majoring in psychology and philosophy; and I’ve always said that if I could triple-major, my third would be English. They all evaluate human experience. Camus and Sartre—even Plato and, in a way, Hobbes—came at philosophy from the literary angle. Freudian theory is packed with philosophy—indeed, psychologists these days now either lament over or belittle (or both) his entire corpus because so little of it can be verified empirically; but philosophers admire the airtightness of his arguments, however Victorian.

Psychology is the marriage of physiology and philosophy; literature is the result of psychology plus experience or, if you like, of all three (and then some) as made manifest in the author. I hope in my life to be able to draw from and instruct via all of these areas and more; but I do wonder if these fell into this trap because of an unwillingness to embrace truth when they saw it because of politics, or fear for their jobs.

In the war for claiming truths, I see myself as a medic and a liaison—I just hope I don’t get run through by my colleagues who believe me a traitor, lest my career as a professor be “nasty, poor, brutish, and short”!