from contemporary Germany: instead of the struggles of post-Idealism amidst
the new academic disciplines, we see the formation of Utilitarian economics
and political thought, along with movements of non-university natural scien-
tists who united under the secularizing banner of evolutionism. After 1870
academicization set in with the familiar upsurge of Idealism; it also produced
some distinctively British philosophical combinations when the academic Ide-
alists settled affairs with non-academic Utilitarians, and then when a younger
generation settled affairs with them. Before 1870 British universities had re-
mained old-fashioned, but one discipline that was well established within them
was mathematics, albeit a rather traditionalistic version. This too had philo-
sophical consequences. As British mathematicians struggled to update their
field, they found themselves in the midst of what looked to the traditional eye
like paradoxes in the elementary parts of algebra. Another border became
intensely scrutinized, resulting in a lineage of British mathematician-philoso-
phers which burst into full bloom in the generation of Russell and Whitehead.
Border struggles are often nasty, as they involve challenges to old identities.
Shucking off old skins is painful, and all the more so when it is a militant
newcomer who is pulling the skin off someone else. We can never take these
disputes at face value. The boundary issues which instigate so much of modern
philosophy may begin in particular disciplines, but philosophy transmutes
everything into its own key. What starts in one ideological tune often ends up
in an entirely different one by the time counter-movements and philosophical
reflexivity have done their work.
Meta-territories upon the Science-Philosophy Border
Disciplinary differentiation stimulates philosophy in several phases. First there
is the struggle for separation, promoting accompanying ideologies of inde-
pendence such as the materialism of the 1850s. Next, when the new disciplines
are safely institutionalized, philosophy makes its peace with them; it is in this
niche that Neo-Kantianism flourished, presiding over the conceptual map of
disciplinary spaces. Third, once a variety of disciplines exist in the university,
there arises the possibility of disciplinary imperialism, bringing new mixtures
of ideas and new networks of personnel into play. Such flows often intrude on
philosophical turf, in part because any issue pursued at a sufficiently high level
of abstraction has an affinity for philosophical argument, and in part because
philosophy was the largest and softest labor market. Migration of medical
physiologists into philosophy produced experimental psychology; an influx
of mathematicians promoted both logical positivism and phenomenology.
Through the dynamics of social conflict, in response to such border-crossing694 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths