![]() Its intellectual integrity was enhanced by the reliance on symbolic logic-a new, fertile discipline that “did not depend on mastering vast amounts of empirical information either from the sciences or about scientific activity” (Thomas Nickles in Callebaut 1993, p. the “logical analysis of the body of accepted scientific theories.” In becoming “logical-analytical,” the field declared its autonomy from both the sciences themselves and historical, social, and other empirical studies of science. 408), for one, carefully demarcated the empirical study of science as “the body of actions carried out by certain persons under certain conditions” from what he and others in the Circle thought of as the only proper concern of philosophy of science, viz. In philosophy of science, on which I will concentrate here, scholasticism ultimately has its roots in the professionalization of the field initiated by the Vienna Circle (Vienna Circle 1973 Stadler 1997). Philosophy now requires ‘specialization,’ …technique, narrow focus, and rigor rather than vision, curiosity, and openness. Has narrowed itself to a set of conceptual skills, declared war on richness and variety in favor of a ‘thin’ and all but exclusive preference for argument and logical analysis…. ![]() It is far from clear how linguistic justice could ever be restored, if at all. ![]() As the new dominant lingua franca, English undoubtedly benefits humanity as a whole, but its cost as a social good is distributed very unfairly: English native speakers get for free the lingua franca that others must spend much time, energy, and money acquiring (Van Parijs 2011). The imperative to write papers in (academic) English-another indicator of the standardization we witness-adds linguistic injustice to the pile of problems many philosophers, other academics, and in/voluntary “independent scholars” face. In the case of philosophy, the standardization of writing imposed by the new forms of communicating and publishing knowledge is a veritable dagger in the heart. Some of these spheres are less susceptible to the violence of the paper while in others, perhaps, it is simply less noticed because it is just a matter of a change of format in the ways in which people are used to writing. The diversity of genres and voices, of ranges and types that come together in the sphere of knowledge and that shape it, have been reduced to one thing, the ‘paper,’ as a unit of measure and vehicle for communication for research in all areas of knowledge. One key element in this process of regimentation affects writing-probably the quintessential philosophical activity-itself: The changes universities all over the world are undergoing, epitomized by the “Bologna Process” in Europe, are a form of standardization that includes the formalization of academic institutions and their teaching and research activities, and gauging their relative merits in keeping with “international standards” (see also Liessmann 2006 Zarka 2010). Quite apart from the uncertainty that results from the slashing of public budgets (particularly in Southern European countries Footnote 1, the transformation of educational institutions to better serve the neoliberal economy, and the ways in which cultural and knowledge markets are developing generally, she identifies a threat for philosophy and “all forms of free thought”: the regimentation of writing within the framework of “a process of university homologation on the global scale” (2013 p. Garcés finds the present-day situation of philosophy particularly alarming. ![]() On the other hand, questions of knowledge perish when they are no longer exposed to their own limits and to the real problems that nourish them…. …On the one hand, knowledge needs to consolidate, to organize and foster contact between different spheres of erudition. What has been presented throughout history as two options, as the alternation between two conceptions of the world and knowledge, is in fact a necessary polarity. The Academy and the jar the man of prestige and the stray dog the organization of all knowledge in its unity and its destruction root and branch education and de-education reformist political aspiration and subversion: this is the binary body with which philosophy took its first steps.
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