The metaphor is that like plumbing, philosophy is taken for granted until it goes wrong [ ... ] As if philosophy were a doctrine, not a process [ ... ] sorting out the conceptual confusions that we otherwise take for granted. — Banno

Where philosophy is salaried and professionalized, the lawyer-like skills are almost bound to predominate. (You can examine people to test their logical competence and industry, but you cannot test their creativity.) These skills are then no longer being used to clarify any specially important new vision. Philosophy becomes scholastic, a specialized concern for skilled plumbers doing fine plumbing, and sometimes doing it on their own in laboratories. This happened in the late Middle Ages; it seems to have happened in China, and it has happened to Anglo-American philosophy during much of this century.

This self-contained, scholastic philosophy remains an impressive feat, something which may well be worth doing for its own sake, but it leaves a most dangerous gap in the intellectual scene. For it cannot, of course, prevent the other aspect, the poetic aspect of philosophy, from being needed. The hungry sheep who do not get that creative vision look up and are not fed. They tend to wander round looking for new visions until they find some elsewhere [e.g. youtube]. Thus, a good deal of poetic philosophising has been imported lately from Europe and from the East, from the social sciences, from evangelists, from literary criticism and from science fiction, as well as from past philosophers. — Mary Midgley

It may be that some of the pipes of the academic elite have become corroded and clogged. — Jack Cummins

But of course, this poetry comes without the disciplined, detailed thinking that ought to go with it.

My apologies, my jest has offended. — Banno

but what I got a bit worked up about was your view that philosophy is simply about experts being seen as having knowledge because they are the experts. — Jack Cummins

Since I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit, if not also the letter, of Midgley's paper... — 180 Proof

I noticed your did not address Midgley's specific criticism. — Banno

Midgley's essay is extremely accessible and thought provoking — Tom Storm

She points out that social contract theory implies individuality, — Banno

For instance—if we rely heavily on the notion of contract we have to ask, what about the interests of non-voting parties? What, for a start, about the claims of children, of the inarticulate and the insane, and of people as yet unborn? What about something that, till recently, our moralists hardly mentioned at all, namely the non-human, non-speak- ing world—the needs of animals and plants, of the ocean and the Antarctic and the rainforests? There is a whole great range of questions here which we now see to be vital, but which we find strangely hard to deal with, simply because our culture has been so obsessed with models centring on contract. Again, too, even within the set of possible con- tractors, we might ask who is entitled to a voice on what? What happens to the interests of people in one democratic country who suffer by the democratically agreed acts of another? What, too, about minorities within a country, minorities who must live by decisions they did not vote for (a question which Mill worried about profoundly in his Essay on Liberty)} And so on.

I did address it. — frank

we as a society only need philosophy when things go bad or things don't work anymore. — Manuel

I'm tying myself in knots here... — Manuel

Is it the case that when society works it is because the underlying philosophy works? — Tom Storm