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Old 08-23-2010, 10:07 AM   #905
TimMason
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Pontoise, France
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Quote:
Emerson is no longer counted as a philosopher
Isn't it the case that many people who would have been 'counted as' philosophers no longer are? Vast parts of what used to be philosophy have been 'hived off', in a vast exercise in intellectual delocalisation. The whole of science used to be the philosopher's domain. Psychology and Sociology used to be the philosopher's domain. In France, to a large extent, they still are: most of our prominent sociologists of the last decades of the last century were trained philosophers - Bourdieu is a prominent example. (In France, Freud is seen as a philosopher, and he is taught in the lycées in philosophy classes, along with Kant, Plato, or Marx. I'll leave it up to you what to think of that list).

I recall Stanislaw Andrewski arguing that the sociologist was - or should be - a social philosopher. Today, someone like Richard Sennett is as much an old-timey philosopher as he is a scientist. In anthropology, Michael Taussig is a philosopher in the continental style. Among historians, E.P. Thompson was a philosopher, as is someone, from another angle, like Daniel Lord Smail.

So it may be that philosophy is still kicking away - but not, by your account, in the halls of university philosophy departments.
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