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academia, Boston University, Harvard University, Jay Harris, Josipa Roksa, Michael Sandel, pedagogy, Richard Arum
I’ve been delighted to take up my new full-time job as educational technologist at Boston University. It’s been great to use my background in scholarship and teaching in a way that, unlike faculty work, actually makes a living.
My specialty as a technologist has been to help faculty adopt ePortfolios – electronic collections of student and faculty work, typically with the intent of making student learning visible to an outside audience. There are a variety of purposes to ePortfolios, but one of the most common is assessment – figuring out whether students are really learning what they’re supposed to be learning.
Educational institutions have come to emphasize assessment more and more in the past decade. Assessment is sometimes resisted in the humanities because of an emphasis on quantification – often with good reason, as in the case of the UK’s catastrophic RAE and its relentless insistence on quantity over quality of scholarship. But there’s no reason for humanists to be opposed to assessment in principle. We always claim that our students come out of our classes better than they were when they began – better writers, more careful readers, more thoughtful, more critical, more knowledgeable, more engaged citizens, whatever. If they didn’t improve in some such ways, there would be no point in our teaching them. And surely at least some such improvements can be observed, even if we resist attaching numbers to that improvement beyond the grades we give. Moreover, some of those who have tried to observe whether students do indeed improve in these ways in their college classes – notably Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa – have found that in many cases, in the US at least, they don’t. This fact, if true, would be disastrous, considering that US students typically go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for their educations. Surely we cannot merely assume that this is money well spent. And so assessment of some sort seems to me quite a valuable task.
Working professionally with assessment has led me to think more about the question: how do we assess philosophy? It is this question, I think, that may have contributed the most to the notorious divide between analytic and “continental” philosophy.
It has been a commonplace for some time that the concerns of analytic and “continental” philosophers overlap considerably. In the past couple decades, philosophers in the two traditions have started reading each other’s work considerably more than they had when the divide was at its peak. Yet the gap endures – a student trained in the continental Boston College philosophy department is unlikely to be offered a job at analytical NYU, and vice versa.
It’s understandable to bemoan such a gap; I’ve done my share of this bemoaning myself. And yet I’d also like to suggest that the gap currently exists for good reason. It is not, as partisans on either side usually have it (and as I have thought in earlier periods of my life), because one side does philosophy so much better than the other. Rather, it is for the related reason that the two sides disagree on what good philosophy is. They disagree, that is, on assessment – right down to the matter of assigning marks (grades) to student essays and exams.
I saw this difference firsthand as a teaching assistant at Harvard. I taught in two courses, Michael Sandel’s “Justice” and Jay Harris’s “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted”, which I think exemplified the divide. Both courses were offered under the now-defunct rubric of “Moral Reasoning”, in which all Harvard undergrads at the time had to take a course. Neither course was taught by a philosophy professor – Sandel taught in the department of government, Harris in Near Eastern studies – and yet the courses still effectively managed to reproduce the analytic/continental divide, evidence that this divide is not merely a matter of the parochial turf wars of philosophy departments.
In Sandel’s course, argument was all. Students were given a specific question on which to take a position (e.g. “Should governments torture terrorists to gain information about future attacks?”) We marked the papers on whether they had a clear thesis; gave clear, logical and relevant arguments to demonstrate the truth of that thesis; and anticipated potential objections and responded to those. If you did that, you got a good mark; if you didn’t, you didn’t. Kant and Mill and Rawls and Aristotle were on the reading list, but as resources for arguments about the particular cases, deeper theoretical sets of reasons to underlie the arguments students made. Whether you interpreted them correctly was of secondary importance.
That wasn’t the case in Harris’s course. I had a bit of difficulty adjusting to that course, because after two semesters with Sandel, I expected to continue marking on the basis of argument. But for Harris and my fellow TAs in that course, argument was secondary. There was a wide variety of topics to write about, some of which would barely even require the students to have an argument, just explore an interesting position. Much more important was interpretation – and not merely a correct interpretation, but a deep interpretation, one that could explain not merely what Kant said, but why he said it.
Harris’s approach here was much closer to that typically taken in continental Europe. I found it very enlightening to read a short piece in a Harvard magazine by a student who’d gone on a study-abroad program in France. She noted that in French humanities classes – not merely in philosophy – students were expected to open their papers not with a thesis, but with a problématique, an explanation of the various aspects of the problem to be explored.
I’m not even talking here about the difference in content taught between the two classes – but about assessment. The two professors effectively disagreed about what constitutes good philosophy. And it’s that disagreement, I think, that makes the analytic-continental split so enduring.
Now couldn’t one say that both rigour of argument and depth of interpretation are important, and get over the dispute that way? Well, sure, and I would argue that that’s the right way for philosophy to go. The trick is that doing it is not as easy as it sounds. Pedagogically, it’s easier to focus on teaching students a single skill than multiple ones. And I might be tempted to argue that there’s a deeper problem – that the two goals can in some respect interfere with each other. But that’s a topic for another post.
[EDIT: Earlier version of the post didn’t have links to the BC and NYU philosophy departments, just notes to myself to include them. Whoops. Thanks to Jeff for pointing that out!]
Congratulations. I hope it goes well.
A Sandel/Harris hybrid sounds perfectly possible and not an anomalous monster. You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.
A thought-provoking post, but two quick responses:
1. Whether or not faculty work allows for a meaningful and rewarding “living” and to what extent depends also on individual choices, institutional, and departmental features.
I know that the institution and department I work at has afforded me, and allowed me to carve out, a meaningful “living”, based on general and subjective criteria, to an eminent degree. And, for this reason, I had turned down opportunities for joining a large university department and even a selective liberal arts college.
2. “But for Harris and my fellow TAs in that course, argument was secondary. There was a wide variety of topics to write about, some of which would barely even require the students to have an argument, just explore an interesting position. Much more important was interpretation – and not merely a correct interpretation, but a deep interpretation, one that could explain not merely what Kant said, but why he said it.”
There is definitely a false opposition between “deep interpretation” and good argument.
The emphasis on good argument is inextricably tied to the central task of philosophy: to ascertain the truth or plausibility of views. In fact, it is also indispensable for knowing that one has “interpreted” or understood a claim, or view, well or “deeply”.
It is obvious that the proponents of the “School of Deep Interpretation” can either dogmatically assert that argument is secondary to “deep interpretation” or they can argue for this view.
If they take the latter, reasonable, alternative, they fall into inconsistency.
Further, how does one establish that an interpretation is “deep”?
Again, the proponents of the “School of Deep Interpretation” can either dogmatically assert that an interpretation, presumably the one they proffer, is a “deep” interpretation of some religious or philosophical doctrine, or they can offer a good argument showing that this is the case with the interpretation they have proffered.
And, again, they fall into inconsistency if they embrace the latter, reasonable, alternative.
The false opposition between interpretation and argument becomes evident also in this way: if “interpretation” means “understanding”, then, obviously, one must have a good interpretation or understanding of a view or claim, what it means, before one can ascertain its truth or plausibility.
But how does one know that one has understood a claim or view well? Surely, this requires recourse to argument or the examination of reasons, inclusive of criteria of meaning, for thinking that one has interpreted or understood a claim or view well or “deeply”.
This shows that recourse to argument is indispensable to any form of inquiry, and hence, also for philosophical inquiry.
“Much more important was interpretation – and not merely a correct interpretation, but a deep interpretation, one that could explain not merely what Kant said, but why he said it.”
It looks like the Harvard professor, if indeed he maintained this view, is actually saying that a “deep interpretation” of Kant, for example, involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!! LOL
What else could “why he said it” mean or refer to? LOL
And it is surely incoherent to claim that argument is secondary or unimportant and at the same time make a claim which implies that its alleged superior alternative, so-called “deep interpretation”, must, in its very nature, focus on explaining the argument given by the thinker whose views are being interpreted! LOL
I tell students that there are two steps to reading a philosopher: 1. What is the philosopher saying? 2. Is the philosopher right? (and repeat as needed!) I think both of these steps are essential to doing philosophy, and I agree with Thill that you can’t do either without argument. But I also agree with Amod that there is a difference of emphasis between continental and analytic types. Outside of history of philosophy, very few analytic philosophers would publish a paper with a thesis saying “x said y.” But this is something a respectable continental philosopher can build a career doing (with arguments, of course!). This makes continental philosophy more susceptible to devolving into a kind of hero worship (“Heidegger/Nietzsche/Derrida was right about everything!”), which most analytic philosophers avoid (aside from the cult of Wittgenstein, anyway). On the other hand, sometimes analytic philosophers are too quick on interpretation and rush into criticism. This can give a lot of analytic philosophers a very shallow understanding of great philosophers and an easy acceptance of whatever happens to be the standard interpretation at the time (which is very strange for people so committed to critical thinking!). I’m more analytic by temperament, but I think there’s a lot to be learned from a continental approach, especially that interpretation is often a delicate and rewarding business.
Ethan, with the exception of Wittgenstein, first-rate analytical philosophers such as Moore, Ryle, Austin, Ayer, Williams, Kripke, Stawson, Popper, and Dummett have all done important interpretive or exegetical work, e.g., Austin’s work on some concepts in Aristotle’s Ethics and Plato’s Republic, Ryle’s work on Plato and Aristotle (in his Plato’s Progress), Strawson’s insightful work on Kant (not merely an exercise in the history of philosophy or Kant scholarship), Popper on Plato and Hegel, Ayer on the work of Russell and Wittgenstein, Kripke on Wittgenstein, and Dummett’s work on Frege, Bernard Williams’ work on Descartes, and so on.
So, I don’t think good analytical philosophers have been, or tend to be, or need to be, indifferent to issues of exegesis, or interpretation, or even the history of philosophy.
The acute and meticulous, perhaps sometimes tediously so, G.E. Moore is certainly immune to the criticism that he doesn’t expend sufficient effort to understand the philosophical positions he is attacking.
Moore expends extraordinary effort in first seeking to understand the meaning of the positions or views he attacks.
I am not sympathetic to an inordinate focus on interpretation or an approach which treats interpretation as an end in itself.
If we don’t understand a claim, then the claim is unclear. If it is unclear, then it is vague or ambiguous. If it is vague, then let’s try to make it clear. If it is ambiguous, then let us specify the alternative readings or “interpretations” and move on to the task of ascertaining the truth or plausibility of the claims yielded by the alternative readings.
P.S. Here is a question for you: Which twentieth century philosopher said that “Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.” (Hint: It was a philosopher in the analytical tradition!)
My comments about both analytic and continental philosophy are really directed more at the tendencies that often (but certainly not always) befall the more “rank-and-file” people in those traditions largely due to the pressures of professionalization and academic territory disputes. Good philosophers are good regardless of tradition. Just as Williams’s work on Descartes is exemplary, but not as mere interpretation for its own sake, so is, say, Dreyfus’s work on Heidegger or Hadot’s work on Hellenistic philosophy. I do think that sometimes purely interpretive work can be worthwhile, but hopefully someone else will pick up where that work left off to investigate it critically, maybe even the same author in a later work.
If we get bogged down in interpreting a work and go back and forth on whether the work means X or Y when it says P or whether the author in fact meant Z and so on, then this is clearly a case of a serious lack of clarity, stemming from vagueness or ambiguity, in the work. I fail to see how this can count as a virtue of the work unless one thinks that spawning an entire industry of “interpretation” is a virtue of a work.
Philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to the problem of why they frequently raise the charge of misunderstanding against each other!
Could this be due to the fact that philosophical concepts and claims have an “open texture”, or vagueness or ambiguity? And, as Wittgenstein suspected, is this because the typical philosophical use of language is divorced from everyday contexts and “forms of life”?
Btw, it was Ludwig “Lucifer” Wittgenstein who wrote in 1933 that “I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.”
Hard to believe, eh?
Great post, Amod. I agree about doing assessment, and also about how hard it is to do properly.
(Incidentally, I think you have a note to yourself about adding a link that is still in your blog post.)
Thanks, Jeff, and great to see you here. Re the note: d’oh. Fixed now.
Interesting post, Amod, thank you (and congratulations for your new job).
You somehow stop halfway with the first part of the post, which was quite interesting for me, i.e., the need for assessment and the problem of how to assess philosophical work. I agree about both points and I would be glad to read about your view on how to solve the conundrum.
You do not mention the fact that assessment is needed also for faculty members. In my home country, the assessment of the work of each faculty partly determines how much additional money a faculty will get from the state. Hence, beside our teaching duties (which are evaluated according to different parameters) we are asked to “produce” a certain number of publications. These get different scores according to whether they have been published on a peer-review journal, on an international one, in a foreign language, etc. The main problem with this is that it substitutes quantity with quality as a criterion. Even admitting that peer-reviewed journals only publish “good” articles, there is still no way to distinguish between a good one and an excellent one, so that Dr. G, who has published only few articles, which are really excellent, will get less fundings than Dr. F, who has published quite a lot of average articles, which will soon be forgotten.
(I’m rather the second type of person, hence, no personal interest here).
Hi Elisa – thanks! I address faculty assessment at least obliquely when I mention the British RAE. It sounds a lot like the system you have now, which I think is a huge problem – measuring quantity over quality. But the question is how you actually can measure the quality of work in philosophy. You can use proxy measures like the number of people who cite an article, but that risks becoming a popularity contest. And in either a citation system or a pure quantity system, there’s still the question of how reviewers are to assess the quality of an article when they decide to publish it – and in philosophy, that takes us back to the very different quality standards of analytic and “continental” thought.
Hi Amod! I did not mean to blame you for not discussing the topic of assessment, I just wanted to introduce the topic. The number of quotations seems, again, a case of quantity over quality (apart from the possible falsifications: we all know how influential scholars have plenty of people willing to quote whatever triviality they say!)… One is left with a conundrum which lies at the heart of the humanities: not everything is quantifiable. In order to assess philosophical work, one needs a quality check, and this can only be done (I am afraid) by human beings. I see your points concerning the different points of view, nonetheless I tend to think that serious work cna be recognised as such, if one is aware of its framework.
One year ago I have been selected to review an article on South Asian art. It would have been suitable within a catalogue (since it was full of admiration for a certain contemporary artist), but it was meant for publication within a research journal. It was unappropriate for that context and I suggested substantial changes. Similarly, could not one adjust one’s judgement according to whether a certain article has to appear on “Mind” or on “Nouvelles de la République de Lettres”? After all, assessment is not a question of whether I like X’s work, but rather of whether X did work (enough). What do you think?
Yes, I agree. I think that in practical terms the best one can do is acknowledge the standards of quality set by the community and judge accordingly, recognizing that what counts as a good article in one context is not what counts in another. It’s particularly helpful to learn more than one set of such standards, so that one does not assume that “good philosophy” is reducible simply to its precision and rigour or to its interpretive depth and creativity. But it’s important to remember that one is nevertheless left with two sets of potentially competing standards of assessment, and that doing well at both is very difficult – which is why the divide endures.
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