Question: Why does philosophy matter in a modern world?
Michael Walzer: Well, we try to, at our best I think, we try to take the moral intuitions of ordinary people, the sense of right and wrong that prevails in our society, and we try to give it a systematic form and to test its internal tensions and possible contradictions and to apply it to difficult cases and then to suggest revisions as the cases required revision. And that kind of work, I think, even if it is carried out at a very high level of abstraction as it often is in academic philosophy, that kind of work tends over time to interact with the more ordinary moral conversation of humankind and to have some impact I think.
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Joe Ryan on May 21, 2009, 4:17 PM
This is interesting but a bit tepid. Why not get steamed about the ridiculous state of academic philosophy today? If people are going to get their dander up about “whether Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding” they ought to get a little tiny bit upset about the rape of the Mother of Science by bureaucratic twits in U.S. and British philosophy departments. So there.
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