COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Mr. Khawaja responds to my questioning the academy's openness to reason by focusing largely on his own experience. But I wonder whether one will find more openness to system building, epistemological certainty, and the idea reason can know reality at a Catholic university like Notre Dame, where he is studying, than at Stanford or Harvard, Duke or Columbia? Catholics by definition believe there are standards, and certainties. Objectivists tend to end up at smaller, less postmodernly trendy, more often denominational schools.

Lack of a monolithic standard could account for the difference in the experience I had in colleges and the one he is having. Perhaps it's a mistake to generalize about "all" of academia -- or even all of modern philosophy in the U.S.

However, I must take exception to the idea I have no evidence of widespread philosophical corruption or decline.

Doesn't evidence consist of data from an array of sources, of which personal experience in one's career is only one?

There is an enormous literature on the death of mainstream philosophy, the demise of its conviction that it can know anything "metaphysical", on modernist and postmodernist trends, on the influence of Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kuhn, Rorty.

If they are not skeptics, deniers of certainty and proof in epistemology and ethics, then I am a ham sandwich on rye.

The most recent book I read on this subject which confirms every one of my worst fears... by someone who is not necessarily a critic of postmodernism ... is The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas. I have read no book or article in fifteen years which argues that the postmodernists, multiculturalists, analysts, neo-pragmatists have been supplanted or even challenged in philosophical circles by advocates of reason and science.

Since neither Mr. Khawaja nor myself can read every journal or sit in every classroom, these kinds of reporting, these surveys, do constitute evidence, not just in the field of philosophy --- with regard to its state --- but in many other professions as well.

...Influence of Objectivist intellectuals like Tara Smith and the Ayn Rand Society?

One can hope so...this may indeed be something that someone not in the philosophy profession would not see but, please flesh this out a bit more than does The Chronicle article.

-- Philip Coates, Brown B.A., Michigan M.S. (posted 5/4, 5:10 p.m., E.D.T.)

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