plinary panels use to assess originality focus on the study of new ob-
jects. This handicaps philosophy applicants:
We’re grappling in much of conventional philosophy with very
traditional problems that [have] defined the subject for, you
know, thousands of years. It’s not that entirely new problems
come up that haven’t been studied or investigated before...I
think a certain kind of innovation and certainly originality is im-
portant in philosophy, but it’s assessed very differently. That was
one place where I consistently felt there was a difference between
my conception of what the criteria for assessing good philosophy
would be and the criteria that were sometimes used in our assess-
ments: it would be held against people if they were doing com-
paratively traditional projects that might have been worked on in
the past.Finally, philosophy’s reputation as a potential “problem case” is
not helped by the fact that the discipline is defined by its own practi-
tioners as contentious. Philosophers tend to approach each other’s
work with skepticism, criticism, and an eye for debate. Disagreement
is not viewed as problematic; rather, it largely defines intelligence
and is considered a signature characteristic of the culture of the dis-
cipline—with often disastrous results for funding. A similar conten-
tiousness characterizes literary scholars.^26 But in the case of literary
scholars, this rancorous debate occurs in the context of a great inter-
disciplinary openness, and so is not used to strengthen the disciplin-
ary inward-looking impulse, as is the case in philosophy. The two
disciplines have reacted in opposite ways to the decline of their disci-
plinary audiences—philosophy, with an increasing rigidity of stan-
dards, and English, as we shall see, with an approach to standards
that is increasingly relativistic and diversified.^27
On Disciplinary Cultures / 69