Only just came across Jacoby's article. Groan! More sweeping generalizations about philosophy from a non-philosopher. Why do the Chronicle editors publish this dilettantish stuff? Jacoby's complaint is, not that philosophy has stopped studying its past (it still "prizes the study of its past" he correctly says, got that right anyway), not even that it has stopped studying its nineteenth century past, but that it has stopped studying a particular specific thinker, Hegel, and maybe he'd extend the complaint to other progenitors of what's nowadays called "continental philosophy" (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche get mentioned, tho' my impression is that they are still widely studied in some detail, if not in courses devoted entirely to them). Well yes, to the mainstream, Hegel and some others are pretty marginal. But exactly how does the marginalization -- well-deserved, to many minds -- of a specific few writers convict the discipline of a "flight from history"? Jacoby's a historian. He could probably find some nineteenth century historians who may have been big names in their time but are not much read any more by mainstream historians. Would this convict history of a flight from history?
Couple of other points. Jacoby quotes one John McCumber that in philosophy "senior editors dispense with peer review and... a few established professors select papers for the discipline's annual conferences" (I guess there has to be an implicit "all or nearly all" in front of "papers" in that last bit -- "one or two" wouldn't fire us up). Sounds to me like the sour grapes of someone with a big chip on his shoulder. I've done a lot of refereeing for top journals over the last twenty-odd years, and I cannot remember the last time I received a paper that wasn't prepared for blind review. As for the programs at conferences, come on, Jacoby, don't just quote someone else's girning as if it was gospel, go to the APA website, **find out** how the program committees of the divisional meetings get selected (it's different for different divisions) and *ask yourself* if those processes are likely to enable "a few established professors" to determine the programs. Why this reluctance in a historian to consult the original documents?
According to Jacoby, there are "pressures which force - or tempt - big names such as Rorty and Nussbaum to quit philosophy". Better salaries, most likely. But unlike Jacoby, I did some source checking. There's nothing I can see on
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum/ to suggest that Nussbaum has quit philosophy. She still reads it, writes it, teaches it, and has an appointment in a department of it.
As for Rorty and Jacoby's Rortian remark that "polishing philosophical eyeglasses is futile if they are rarely used to see", I am reminded of an occasion many years ago when I was reading an article by Rorty in (I think) the NYRB, full of the usual stuff about the irrelevance of mainstream philosophy. Elsewhere in the same issue Harvard University Press had taken out a rather self-serving advertisement about a list made by East European intellectuals of the books they had found the most inspiring and supportive of their resistance to Communist dictatorship (a lot were published by HUP). Strangely, there were exactly zero works by Rorty's avowed intellectual heroes on this list. Even more strangely, there was a significant number of works by philosophical eye-glass polishers on it. I recall "A Theory of Justice", "Law's Empire", one of Sen's philosophical works, and two or three others ("Anarchy, State and Utopia" was noticeable by its absence). This was all in the top ten or twenty.
I'd like to give more details about this ranking. But Jacoby, above all, will surely sympathize if I do not take the time to seek out the original source.
