he didn’t like and that other people did like...Ireallydidn’t ap-
preciate a number of the proposals that the philosopher really ad-
mired. I also felt like I couldn’t understand why he admired them,
and I really appreciated his explaining. I thought [he] was a very
articulate, patient explainer, but I just still didn’t get it.Some panel members opposed the philosophy proposals because
they considered them boring, unfocused, or simply not as strong
as proposals from other fields. One English professor was willing
to defer to the philosopher in the evaluation of these proposals, a
stance not supported by the other panelists. She explains her attitude
this way:
Up to a certain point I was trying to defer to [the philosopher’s]
ranking. He had some kind of say over which of the philosopher
candidates he liked most, which he liked least, why, who was do-
ing what kind of philosophy, why it was important versus some-
thing else...inmyballotingforalternatesItriedtokind of go
along with that, to sort of support him...because I felt that he
was the expert and I was sort of out of my league. And I felt that
they should have awards, especially if we had high-quality philos-
ophers.Disciplinary differences in definitions of excellence and, especially,
how much weight should be given to “significance” (one of the two
most frequently used criteria, as we will see in Chapter 5) also take
their toll on philosophy proposals. According to a historian, these
proposals are “in their own stratosphere.” One philosopher, though,
sees as the root problem that originality (the other most popular
evaluative criterion) is manifested very differently in philosophy
than it is in other fields. The predominant templates that interdisci-
68 / On Disciplinary Cultures