[MD] Academic philosophy

[John Carl]

So I came across this in my reading this morning, and I thought,
"hmmm.  This must be what Jackie Kegeley meant by "un-Roycean
attitude".  It is rather scathing and yet, somehow comforting.  It
certainly illuminates a great deal about why the philosophical
community has completely ignored Pirsig's work.  According to Auxier,
its because the philosophical community is sociopathic,,,

Here's what I read:

conversation overheard at an APA meeting:

#1  ... so did the interview go just as well?

#2:  No. It really didn't go well at all. It was very odd. [puzzled look]

#1: How so?

#2:  Well, for example, they asked me what I would like to teach and I
talked about my philosophy of mind course, you know, and one of them cut in
and asked me if I would have my students read William James and...

#1: William James?  The Pragmatist?  [said in disbelief]

#2:  Yes, yes, and so I told them of course not.  Can you imagine?

#1: Good God.  What did they say?

#2:  They said, "why not?"

#1:  What did you say?

#2:  I said I never read anyone who takes philosophy personally [look of
great distaste] or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their
little lives.

#1:Right.  If they want to talk about philosophy as if it matters
personally they need to get out of the profession or at least go back to
school.  Yeah -- maybe we [Princeton]
could get together with Pittsburgh and Rutgers and offer some regional
post-doctoral remedial programs for those kind of people.

--taken from Fashionable Nihilism, Bruce Wilshire

The fact that they are philosophizing poorly, dogmatically, even
sociopathically, is not a fine testament to the quality of their
Princeton educations.  The content of their personally held ethic is
that philosophy should be practiced impersonally.  Their objection to
James is that he took philosophy to be something practiced
impersonally.

This is accompanied by the ethical judgment that each professional
philosopher must (this is a stringent moral "must") hold the same
ethic, and that enforcing the norm is something that requires a plan
of action to remediate, should it slip (which obviously it has, if an
interview committee could seriously  ask about teaching James, who,in
spite of the judgment of these sociopaths, is quite possibly the best
philosopher America ever produced).

The implicit ideal in the anecdote (and I wish it were rare, but it is
not) and whether these arrogant young men know it or not (probably the
latter; they are just aping what they've seen ) is that we must all
uphold this impersonal standard or more accurately, this contradictory
facade, because this little lie is what ensures our standing in the
universities and it is also what protects our autonomy from the
encroachment of allegedly  sub-philosophical (i.e. personal)
criticisms.  Professional philosophy has become a scam and must not be
discovered as such, and its current ppractice entails a paradoxical
pose, the "lone wolf, profound, inscrutable interpreter of science"
which is now so often imitated that the swindlers themselves no longer
realize they participate in a great confidence game."

Auxier, Time, Will and Purpose pg 322