‘Still crazy after all these years’ would make
an apt title for a conference to mark my retirement and to probe the pathways
by which people join and remain in particular academic fields.  Dave, a school friend
who constantly read novels, is now Professor of Literature at Liverpool, with a
particular penchant for science fiction; Patrick,
who was at primary school with me and to whom I am indebted for revealing
exotic food and even more exotic languages, is now researching Gurindji, an
Australian aboriginal language; John, the
friend who encouraged my brief flirtation with theism and who made me aware of
Nelson Mandela at the time of his original imprisonment, is now a Professor of
Dogmatic Theology in Austria.  (While we may celebrate South Africa’s advances, let me also
remember Burma: at school, our Amnesty
International cell was allotted a Burmese prisoner of conscience, forty years
later what has changed?)

If George Yancy had asked me to contribute to
his collection I would have told a story of Patrick and me, on the way home
from primary school, discussing what we had gathered about Einstein’s theories
and coming up with something recognizably the same as the argument Lucretius
gives for the infinity of space: if you got to the end, you could always shoot
an arrow further (now usually reinterpreted as a point about the boundlessness
rather than the infinity of space or space-time).   That would have been my
first premonition of a career in philosophy. 

Yancy’s book brings together 16 brief
autobiographical essays by people who are currently engaged primarily in
philosophy in North
America. 
Yancy reports his own first sign of a philosophical vocation as occurring about
the age of ten, when he asked his mother whether he should pray for the devil. 
Most of his contributors report initial portents at a slightly later age, but I
was not surprised to find a good number worrying about some aspect of religion
or morality €” I once bought Nowell-Smith’s Penguin Ethics in the hope of
finding guidance on how to live!  Whatever one might think of its explorations
of the way we use pro and con expressions, it is not going to
tell an adolescent how to cope with growing up.   Nietzsche or Marx or even
Plato have more going for them, as some of Yancy’s stories show.

With benefit of hindsight, one can pick out
intimations of future preoccupations, but again, as several of the authors
report, actually getting into the academic study of philosophy can often be a
very hit-or-miss affair.  A course here, a chance public lecture there, a deal
with one’s spouse, or an inspiring teacher.  (Shall I say that I went to
university to study linguistics, and to get away from living at home, and that
in 1965 in England the only way I could do
that was to do a degree at York
that was half philosophy?  There was also a thought that it might help in
becoming an Orthodox bishop, but who would believe that?)

 Some, but by no means all, of Yancy’s team were
taken with a particular teacher, either for a mode of critical self-examination
or the excitement of new vistas or, as I was with John Mackie, for clarity of
view.  No one in Yancy’s book, however, evinces my kind of discipleship, though
Popper and Wittgenstein inspired it in the past century and many contemporary
philosophers remain bound to earlier thinkers or their isms.  There are, by the
way, several comments on the excellence of teaching to small groups in modest
colleges compared to the lack of contact for undergraduates in more prestigious
mass-production universities.

Yancy’s group are all now in North America (not all born or
trained there, however) but I would guess they are not exactly representative
of the American Philosophical Association.  He has several black philosophers,
several women, many at the edges of traditional fields or seeking new
alignments.  Many have suffered from some of the manifold prejudices blighting
American life: anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, anti-woman,
anti-Catholic, anti-poor.   In terms of their interests within philosophy there
are very few here moved to wonder whether they are brains in a vat or what to
do with names that don’t refer or how to make sense of quantum mechanics.  We
have people exploring the situatedness of our thinking, including our
scientific thinking, and several embracing some sort of pragmatism.  Sellars
figures in a few stories, Quine in one, and then only in passing.

This sort of orientation goes naturally with a seriousness
of purpose, a concern that philosophy should make a difference, that it is not
mere self-indulgence for a clever but socially irresponsible élite.  No one
here is inclined to praise the philosophical life for its avoidance of heavy
lifting.  Yancy expresses this earnestness in his introductory essay, though he
is not helped by the jargon he uses when wearing the philosopher’s hat rather
than the autobiographer’s €” is this partially a reflection of the editorial
demands of US journals?  (My own utterly unrepresentative sampling suggests
that they are less hospitable to asides and a human engagement with the issues,
more concerned for "objectivity", than other Anglophone journals €” I
think it was a US editor who altered my "educational apartheid of
the mother country" to "rigidly-stratified educational system"
in talking about schooling in colonial Jamaica.) 

Yancy also argues in his introduction for a role
for autobiographical narrative in self-creation, and as reflection on philosophizing
as a way of life rather than a professional, circumscribed discipline (often
aspiring to factitious decontextualized Archimedean points).  While several of
his contributors agree with him, I cannot claim to have derived much of philosophical
insight from these narratives, fascinating though they are in other respects. 
Perhaps Lorraine Code’s account of the way she gradually realized the
implications of being female, being white, now being Canadian, for philosophizing
is the most persuasive case here for Yancy’s position.  But here everything
lies in the interpretation of what she found, and there is not much room in
essays such as these for authors to argue for the perspectives they have
adopted.  For instance, I still cannot help thinking that Code’s questions of
the ownership of knowledge, or "knowledge", are political
rather than epistemological.  It is the kind of response Yancy expects will be
made to his own reflections: doing politics rather than philosophy.  I do not
think one has to be "genteel" to make it, however.  There is a need
and a place for protest; there is a place at least for other inquiries; I
suspect there is too often a slurring of distinctions.

The publishers quote Robert Solomon referring to
the "too-rare genre of contemporary philosophical autobiography".  My
impression is that philosophers in fact indulge in the genre with more zest
than many of their colleagues.  There is the august series, the Library of
Living Philosophers, inclusion in which is too often a death sentence €“
each volume usually includes a lengthy intellectual autobiography besides
replies to one’s critics and even a specimen of the philosopher’s handwriting. 
There are other companions or guides to eminent philosophers that often include
some sort of intellectual autobiography, and a number of practitioners have
independently chronicled their lives.  One reason for all this suggested by
Yancy’s collection is that it may seem to mitigate the contingency or
arbitrariness of a person’s making such a fuss about these particular ideas
when most other people are making a fuss about other things.  How come I got
into ellipsis, or Lakatosian theology, or neopragmatist aesthetics?  Narratives
don’t in general do more than suggest why X rather than Y should become the
ruling passion €” they don’t reveal X’s special power to illumine €” but given
the distinctiveness of notable philosophers that is itself of more than passing
interest.  Some of us tend to overestimate the commonalities and common
problems in the area.  Yancy’s stories help to remind us of the very different
constellations of problems, key texts, methodological approaches, etc. that a
person studying philosophy would have found in the US in the past few
decades.  They suggest that a more sociological analysis might be profitable,
though it would almost certainly make more enemies than friends €” compare the
reactions to Gellner’s Words and Things, a key text for my introduction
to contemporary philosophy that I bought by mistake for the book of the same
title by Roger Brown, prescribed by my linguistics teachers.  

I have given you more material for a 17^th
autobiography than reports on any of the 16 in Yancy’s book.  It would be
invidious to pick on particular persons, and too much to try to summarize the
already often dense narratives in this collection.  Unrepresentative though
they may be, they are a uniformly interesting and diverse set of stories.  If I
may end with my own bit of politicizing, several of them make the point that
applies equally to me that in earlier more welfarist times they were able to
move into academia where now the demands for private payment would make it
impossible.  I had five years of university education for nothing but
opportunity cost. My school-mates and I went to Hampton Grammar School for nothing;
its fully independent successor will now be charging £3330 per term €” more than I
can afford, let alone what my parents could have done if an equivalent charge
had been made then.  Our societies are once again throwing away half our
future, as an English educational report once had it.  

© 2004 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by
training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the
University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical, Memoirs