writer’s discipline.^20 Later, I suggest that views of philosophy as a
“problem case” can be traced to aspects of the evaluative culture of
the discipline.
Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that American
philosophers think of their field as a “second order discipline,”
superordinate to all other disciplines, because it investigates the claims
made by other fields.^21 This in turn fosters a propensity among phi-
losophers to see their field as uniquely demanding. This view can
lead them to conclude that only philosophers are truly competent to
evaluate philosophy proposals, an attitude that challenges the very
possibility of multidisciplinary evaluation. A philosopher on one of
the four panels expresses this view very clearly. He asserts that not all
panelists are qualified to evaluate philosophy proposals because, like
mathematics, philosophy presumes special skills that many panelists
lack.^22
Philosophy requires the ability to make analytic distinctions, the
ability to clarify a position or an argument to a degree that hasn’t
been done before, a certain kind of rigor in working through the
implications and details of a position and a mastery of the details
but at the same time, a sense of the larger scale significance of de-
tailed arguments and positions in the larger landscape of philo-
sophical issues.This understanding of the field as promoting a unique “rigor” and
incisive clarity in arguments reflects the dominance of analytical
philosophy as an intellectual style.^23 As a second philosopher ex-
plains, “Philosophy differs from other disciplines because there’s
much more of a sense of argumentation or debate...Whenyougive
a paper in philosophy, you give a paper and then you have an hour of
people trying to find what’s wrong with it. [The debates are] very
clear, obvious, and not at all, so to speak, elegant.” By contrast, “in
On Disciplinary Cultures / 65