Thursday, October 06, 2005
(9:49 AM) | John Emerson:
Mary Midgley on the Philosophy PhD
I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder.Read it all
(Via Political Theory Daily Review)
(Incidentally: two suggestions by Midgley, which I haven't read, for the "animals" reading group:
Animals and Why They Matter; Beast and Man)
