the disputes of two generations back, between the logical positivists and
phenomenologists of the 1920s and 1930s. And the long-term significance of
that generation and even the one before it no doubt remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, there is some structural unity in the whole period since the
university revolution. The triumph of the research university has had several
overlapping effects on intellectual life. There is inevitably some trend toward
scholasticism, toward the curatorship of texts and compiling commentaries on
them. This is one route toward the stagnation which we have seen in other
periods of academicized philosophy in world history. The stagnation too may
be only a matter of perspective; inside the network of academic specialists there
may be creativity of a highly technical kind, which does not travel well outside.
But histories are written for the most part about the larger attention space of
general issues and broad-ranging disputes, and this viewpoint swallows up the
technical creativity in fine print.
A second result is peculiar to the academicization of the period after 1960:
the huge expansion in numbers of universities in every wealthy society, and
indeed around the world. There is a population explosion of professors and
of texts. This puts unprecedented pressure on the law of small numbers. To
survive, intellectuals must divide the attention space into smaller and smaller
specialties. The larger arenas of conflict are crowded with huge numbers of
contenders. Pan-intellectual movements across the specialties have the only
chance for full-scale fame, but the choppiness of this vast ocean makes it heavy
going.
Yet with all this proliferation of specialties, there are still some structural
sources of first-class innovation in philosophy. This is so even though the space
of philosophy, which is that of the most general questions, is just the territory
which would seem to have the greatest difficulty in an age of specialization
and large-scale intellectual populations. But these have existed on a lesser scale
in the German universities since the 1830s, and elsewhere since about 1900.
What has kept philosophy alive, even fostering some spectacular developments
in the periods we have just reviewed, has been the impetus to border disputes.
Academic structures foster these in many directions. Some movements, such
as Neo-Kantianism, arise to adjudicate the knowledge claims that specialized
disciplines put forward in their own self-aggrandizement, especially new fields
when they first capture a university chair or separate themselves off from
an older department. Physicists disputing the status of findings generated by
their new research technologies made border alliances with psychologists and
mathematicians, and eventually produced the Vienna Circle. Mathematicians’
disputes over their methodological foundations spilled over onto philosophical
terrain and philosophical careers, with ramifications that reached as far as
phenomenology. Existentialism emerged from further twists in these networks,
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^783