Logic and Calypso

 Last week's obituaries of Harry Belafonte brought to mind a passage from the 1980 foreword to Willard Van Orman Quine's From a Logical Point of View:

I foresaw by 1952 that [the writing of Word and Object] would be a long pull and became impatient to make some of my philosophical views conveniently accessible meanwhile. Henry Aiken and I were with our wives in a Greenwich Village nightspot when I told him of the plan, and Harry Belafonte had just sung the calypso "From a logical point of view." Henry noted that this would do nicely as a title for the volume, and so it did.

I can't offhand think of another work of philosophy that takes its title from a song.

Hunting and Philosophy

Near the end of Book II, "Of the Passions" of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, there occurs a passage beginning

To illustrate all this by a similar instance, I shall observe, that there cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other, than those of hunting and philosophy, whatever disproportion my at first sight appear betwixt them. 'Tis evident, that the pleasure of hunting consists in the action of the mind and body; the motion, the attention, the difficulty, and the uncertainty. 'Tis evident likewise, that these actions must be attended with an idea of utility, in order to their having any effect upon us. A man of the greatest fortune, and the farthest remov'd from avarice, tho' he takes a pleasure in hunting after partridges and pheasants, feels no satisfaction at shooting crows and magpies; and that because he considers the first as fit for the table, and the other as entirely useless. ... To make the parallel between hunting and philosophy more compleat, we may observe, that tho' in both cases the end of our action may in itself be despis'd, yet in the heat of the action we acquire such an attention to this end, that we are very uneasy under any disappointments, and are sorry when we either miss our game, or fall into any error in our reasoning.

(Book II, Part III, Section X)

 In Plato's dialogue The Sophist, the sophist appears as hunter, but as one out for gain rather than recreation:

Str[anger]. Now up to that point the sophist and the angler proceed together from the starting-point of acquisitive art.
Theat[etus].  I think they do.
Str. But they separate at the point of animal-hunting, where the one turns to the seas and rivers and lakes to hunt the animals in those.
Theat. To be sure.
Str. But the other turns toward the land and to rivers of a different kind--rivers of wealth and youth, bounteous meadows, as it were--and he intends to coerce the creatures in them.

(Loeb Classical Library, translated by H.N. Fowler, 222A)

Colleges

 In this week's New York Times, Bret Devereaux, a (most interesting) historian at the University of North Carolina, notes and deplores the decision of Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, to eliminate majors including mathematics, English, history, and philosophy. He questions the wisdom and practicality of aiming to give colleges a more vocational direction, and the motives of those who wish to do so. In all this, I agree with him.

On the other hand, there is another story to be told. Marymount College was founded as a two-year college for women in 1950. Only in 1973 did Marymount offer four-year degrees. At some point in the 1980s, an ambitious college president worked on expansion. I first became aware of this when the Ballston metro station, not within easy walking distance of the original Marymount campus, became Ballston/Marymount University. I became more aware of this when my wife started to receive postcards from Marymount inviting her to earn a master's degree in interior design. (She did not take Marymount up, for she considered that she should be teaching the subject, not studying it.)

I suspect that the expansion of Marymount was enabled by the Washington metropolitan area's appetite for credentials. Many in the area work for government contractors, and a contractor can bill more for someone with an associate's degree than for someone with only a high school diploma, more still for someone with a bachelor's degree, and so on. The contractors get favorable treatment for money spent on courses that go to "maintain or improve" employees' skills for the jobs they hold. I don't know that this fed Marymount's expansion, but I believe that it helped many local schools thrive.

For feeding that appetite, though, there is a ratio to be considered, (dollars + hours) / credential. On-line instruction has driven down the numerator, without necessary diminishing the perceived value of the denominator. Marymount has physical plant to maintain, and for that matter full-time staff to pay, in relatively greater quantity than some of its on-line competitors. That has to have hurt it. The credential business at this level appears to be ruthlessly competitive.

 I am not happy at the news. I know at least one instructor--conscientious, intelligent--who may be affected by the decision. And I know that Marymount has served many of its students well. Still the story is not entirely one of the defeat of the liberal arts.