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  • On Being Buried with Praise:A Response to Critics
  • Steve Fuller

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK) is basically about how contemporary developments in knowledge across the disciplines provide a unique opportunity for philosophy and rhetoric to join forces in reorganizing the academy.1 The period during which I wrote the book (the late 1980s and early 1990s) was when I was most immersed in the emerging interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies.2 In hindsight, this moment in history may help to explain my confidence. With the end of the Cold War, the centrality of the physical sciences to knowledge production had begun to be questioned on intellectual and more practical grounds, yet the academy as a whole did not appear under threat—especially not from the short-term and client-driven mentality that threatens to disintegrate universities around the world today. The amorphous and only partly academic location of today's exemplars of knowledge production, the biomedical sciences, symbolizes the shift I had not anticipated.

When PREK was first published in February 1993, I assumed that the academy was ripe for becoming, once again, a progressive force in society—and that this could be done on the academy's own terms. Back then I conceptualized disciplinary boundaries as largely institutionalized communication barriers, in keeping with my previous work on social epistemology. It was not yet clear that the difficulty of communicating across disciplinary boundaries would be eclipsed by the much more general failure of academics to identify with the university as the institution that sustains whatever commonalities, differences, or indifferences they manage to forge among themselves. My work in social epistemology over the past decade has thus increasingly shifted to an updated defense of the classic Humboldtian vision of the university, the core of which lies in the integration of teaching and research.3 [End Page 275]

The Danish contributors to this retrospective critique of PREK are distinctive in two senses. First, at the University of Copenhagen, where all have taken at least one degree, philosophy and rhetoric—along with pedagogy—are located in the same department, the one that spawned the "Danish Socrates," Søren Kierkegaard, in the early nineteenth century. Second, they represent the academic generation after mine. They had barely left high school when PREK was originally published. This means that their academic careers have transpired only under the new regime I have just sketched. It happens that the Danish responses pull in opposite directions. Thomas Basbøll draws on his own pedagogy to respond to Christine Isager and Sine Just's skepticism of PREK's practical payoff for rhetoric. I begin by dwelling in general terms on the reception problems facing any rhetoric that calls for people to change their ways, and then turn to the specific version of the problem their critiques raise.

Although "disciplinary knowledge" is nowadays most closely associated with academia, the phrase originally referred to training in the religious orders, which in turn recalls the institutional roots of the university in the seminary, whose linguistic vestige is the word "seminar."4 A key feature of Christian religious orders, in particular, is the indefinite extension of their mission. In principle, everyone is worthy of conversion. However, from a rhetorical standpoint, conveying the exact strategy for the conversion of new recruits has always been very difficult. Rhetoric works best when the speaker tries to get a familiar audience to act in one of the several ways specifically permitted by the speech situation. Thus, elections and trials provide the ideal combination of constraint and freedom for rhetoric to work its magic. The rhetorical act itself may consist of many words doing complex things, but all of the sound and fury is ultimately settled in a vote or a verdict. In contrast, religious orders have been faced with a task so open-ended that one could not presume that it would ever be completed. Moreover, the new recruits likely will come from various backgrounds that lead them to resonate somewhat differently to the order's mission statement. The general form of this problem also captures those interested in enrolling the next generation of normal scientists. After all, until the state co...

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