Words&Dirt

“There is the question of what impression one gives of the subject in teaching it.  Most students have no interest in becoming professional philosophers.  They often take away an image of philosophy as a self-contained technical subject, and this can admittedly have its own charm as something complicated which can be well or badly done, and that is not to be despised.  It also in some ways makes the subject easier to teach, since it less involves trying to find out how much or how little the students know about anything else.  But if we believe that philosophy might play an important part in making people think about what they are doing, then philosophy should acknowledge its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves, and if it insists on not doing so, it may seem to the student in every sense quite peculiar.

We run the risk, in fact, that the whole humanistic enterprise of trying to understand ourselves is coming to seem peculiar.  For various reasons, education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective enquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.  If that is how it is preserved, it will not be the passionate and intelligent activity that it needs to be.  We all have an interest in the life of that activity––not just a shared interest, but an interest in a shared activity.”

––Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, by Bernard Williams, pg. 198-9