Don’t you love academic kerfuffles? In June, I wrote here about the “Enduring Questions” grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants were all about $25,000, and they went to professors developing undergraduate courses on such weighty matters as “what is happiness?”, “what is the meaning of life?” and “what are the dangers of individualism?” The goal was to promote critical thinking. Twenty courses were chosen as winners, involving a wide range of academic disciplines.
Philosophers, in turns out, were stunned — and hurt. Those enduring questions are their territory. Inside Higher Ed reported (here) on the controversy, explaining how philosophers felt:
One source of friction was the grant description’s use of the world “pre-disciplinary,” which it defined as, “questions to which no discipline or field can lay an exclusive claim. In many cases they predate the formation of the academic disciplines themselves.” This remark, [Ben] Bradley [a philosophy professor at Syracuse University] notes in his blog post, seems to ignore the very existence of philosophy.
And here’s a bit more:
John Powell, professor of philosophy at Humboldt State University, stated in an e-mail that he sees the framing of the questions in the grant application as evidence that NEH is looking for professors to teach philosophy without the philosophical context.
“The questions are so clearly mostly old chestnut philosophy problems that they seem evidence that NEH staff don’t know what philosophy is,” he stated.
As it happens, the NEH refined its grant guidelines for the next round (applications due Sept. 15), but not in any way that would solve philosophers’ problems with the program.
Here’s a suggestion: they should propose a course on “why history?” or, better yet, “what is art?”