Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st-Century Philosophy - Paperback

by Robert Frodeman (Author), Adam Briggle (Author)

Professional philosophy has strayed so far from its roots that Socrates wouldn't stand a chance of landing tenure in most departments today. After all, he spent his time talking with people from all walks of life rather than being buried in the secondary literature and polishing arguments for peer-reviewed journals. Yet somehow this hypertrophy styles itself 'real' philosophy.

Socrates Tenured diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary philosophy and shows how the field can be revitalized. The first part of the book sketches the crisis facing philosophy in a neoliberal age and traces its roots back to the 20th-century move to turn philosophy into an academic discipline. In the second part the authors look at various attempts from applied ethics to their own brand of 'field philosophy' to confront the resulting problems of insularity and societal irrelevance. Part three connects this evaluation of philosophy with wider discussions in the politics of knowledge about the impacts of research on society. The final chapters consider both what impacts philosophy might have and what a philosophy of impact might look like.

Author Biography

Robert Frodeman is Professor of Philosophy and founding Director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. His publications include Sustainable Knowledge: A Theory of Interdisciplinarity (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (editor in chief; 2nd edition 2016).

Adam Briggle is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is the author of A Rich Bioethics (2010), co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction (2012), and author of A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking (2015).