Essay Submission - The Marketing of Philosophy
Peter Jones
The Marketing of Philosophy
A Preliminary Report
There is much talk in the profession these days of finding
ways to improve the marketing of philosophy as an academic discipline. The
department is under attack from almost all sides for its ongoing inability to
reach a conclusion on any important philosophical question and some prominent scientists
publicly doubt the value of studying it. In the US at least the teaching of
philosophy is coming to be seen as inessential to a credible university
curriculum and departments are closing.
A commercial enterprise finding itself in this positon would
initiate a marketing review as a matter of urgency, probably bringing in
external consultants armed with have a fresh eye and holding no stake in
maintaining the status quo. It is
interesting to wonder what their report might look like.
Marketing is often confused with selling but would normally
refer to a broader range of activity. Confusion
on this point afflicts many suggested approaches to promoting philosophy as an
academic discipline and rarely are they more than proposals for selling the
current product by dumbing it down, repackaging it, making it cheaper or
increasing the advertising budget. This is disrespectful to the customer. It is
being assumed that the customer is at fault for not seeing what a wonderful
product the company is selling. This is naïve and a well-known recipe for
failure. In the way it pre-judges, makes assumptions and fails to look at the complete
picture it is even unphilosophical.
Marketing in a full sense would begin with the design of the
product. If the product is poor then it will require much effort, a large
budget and considerable copyrighting sophistry to sell it. A great product will
be relatively easy and cheap to sell and customers will keep coming back. It is
not always easy to change a product when it loses its appeal and sometimes a
manufacturer has no option but to continue to promote it at any cost up to the
bitter end, but few companies have total inertia and philosophy is not one of
them. A company with a marketing focus will be continually re-designing its
products and services in order to minimise the cost of selling them. In this
way products evolve and do not become ossified relics of their former glory.
Is university philosophy a great product? Clearly not, given
the widely acknowledged difficulty of selling it and the current interest within
the profession in finding new and more effective ways of doing so. The question
then arises of whether the product has to be this way, such that it must be
sold at any cost, or whether it can improved. The first question to be asked would
be that of whether this is a problem affecting the whole industry or just our own
product.
This latter idea is rarely considered in the Academy. The
only successful alternative to the current university product belongs to its
main competitor, the Perennial philosophy, and so it is felt that this must be
shunned and its good features denied. Most importantly, the study of it must
not be encouraged for this might lead customers to take it seriously. The
success of this denial is that over time a myth has arisen that there is no
competitor product and it is only poorly known. It is assumed by almost all
professional philosophers in our universities at this time that philosophy is
what universities currently sell, no more and no less, and that this cannot be
improved. No improvement would be necessary anyway, since on this view the
customer has no choice as to what to buy.
A consultant would be duty-bound to point out that this is not
marketing but commercial suicide. It is also the betrayal of philosophy, albeit
that this is not a strictly commercial concern. A corporate culture exclusively
focussed on selling the traditional product has blinkered the company’s vision
and acts as a major obstacle to the creation and implementation of a well thought-out
and effective marketing plan, one for which product design would be at the core
and not promotion and selling. The consequence is a product that has not
evolved in centuries that is becoming increasing difficulty to sell even to
highly intelligent and interested students of science and religion.
A marketing plan would normally start with the needs and
wants of existing and potential customers. What do they want? Fortunately no
market research is required. They want to know how the world works, whether
life has any purpose or meaning, what happens to them when they die, whether they
have freewill, whether God exists, whether space and time are real, whether
Materialism is true, how they should interpret quantum mechanics, whether it
matters how they behave and if so how they should, how they can find happiness,
how they can make sense of their own consciousness, the list is a long one. Does
the current product meet their wants and needs? No. So how can it be sold
effectively? Only by arguing that although the company’s product cannot provide
these benefits it is better than nothing. This requires maintaining the
pretence that there is no alternative product. It requires that the customer be
misled not just at the time of purchase but on an ongoing basis and it ensures
that the product never improves.
Must the company suffer increasingly from cut-backs and
closures or might the situation be turned around? If it can be turned around
then it could only be by making the product more attractive. This will only
become possible if the organisational culture of the company is re-oriented
away from promotion and selling towards a process of constant
product-improvement on behalf of its customers. Here university philosophy may
have much to learn from industry.
The academic study of philosophical questions brings well-known benefits regardless of its success as long as it is serious, but are these fringe-benefits incidental or are they what customers really want? Are they enough to generate healthy sales forecasts? Are they enough to fill courses and attract investment and grants? It seems they are not even enough to convince many scientists or university administrators that philosophy is a worthwhile activity. What most potential customers want from philosophy is answers, conclusions, results, tangible and quantifiable benefits that would include a better understanding of themselves and their world. The product currently on offer is not what customers want but what they settle for because they have been told they must. This is marketing madness. The walls of academia are coming down and even a casual browse around Youtube would be enough to establish the ineffectiveness of the philosophy department’s product and the low opinion of it held by many senior academics. Indeed, often those with the lowest opinion of the efficacy of philosophy are often professors of philosophy, for it is they who are most affected by the failure of the current product.
A vital ingredient for any marketing review would be a close
examination of the products and services of competitors. For the modern Academy
the main competitor would be the school of practice and thought known as the
Perennial philosophy, yet it appears that at this time little is known about this
competitor. If there is an alternative to its own product in the same market
then a commercial company would usually know it as well as their own, and for
anyone involved with marketing this would be a matter of professional
competence. Yet ask most professional philosophers to explain this competitor
product and their lack of competence is likely to become immediately clear.
What does the competitor product offer? What would the philosophy
of the writers of the ancient Upanishads, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Al-Halaj, Rumi, Eckhart,
de Cusa, the Gymnosophists, Druids, Advaitans and Nondualists be able to claim
in its marketing brochure that the Academy cannot claim for its own product? That
it provides answers to questions and solutions to problems. That is has a
strong and global customer base, a myriad of ecstatic customers and thirty
centuries of positive customer-feedback including endorsements from countless
well-known celebrities. That it has proven reliability, is unbreakable and remarkably
cheap to teach while offering something for everyone from the dabbler to the
professional expert or committed practitioner. Unlike the traditional ‘Western’
or northern European product - which accompanies and supports a religious world-view
rejected by its competitor for having become as naïve and misleading as the
philosophy that supports it - it is a product only very occasionally criticised
by physicists, who rarely know anything about it, but that is quite often
endorsed by them where it is studied.
Its brochure could, without demonstrably breaking the Trade
Descriptions Act, claim that it offers
an interpretation of quantum mechanics, an explanation for consciousness, a way
of avoiding philosophical ‘hard’ problems and of solving Metaphysics, a
‘hands-on’ method for increasing happiness in life and reducing fear of death or
even of overcoming it, an ethical scheme that is forgiving, clearly-defined and
practical at all times and a description of Reality that reaches beyond time
and space to enshrines Love and Compassion as Cosmic principles. It offers a
vast multi-lingual literature characterised by its rigour, elegance, beauty,
simplicity, helpfulness, reliability, humour and honest motivation.
Such a competitor might seem a dangerous threat. Even if it is
unable deliver on all its claims it is able to present itself as a very attractive
product and that it maintains these claims over centuries indicates that it
would be difficult to prove that it cannot deliver. Yet, as the cliché goes, every
threat is an opportunity. This competitor has captured a large market share and
its student numbers continue to rise. To compete for these students the company
would only need to jump on the bandwagon and copy, steal or improve on its
competitor’s product. The work of establishing a market has been done, the
entire theoretical edifice is in place and the blueprints for the product are
in the public domain.
A consultant in this situation would be bound to advise the
company to examine this competitor product in great detail. A formal analysis
of strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats may be anticipated to conclude
that the main and urgent priority for the marketing department should be
product research. Market research would be unnecessary since enough is known
about what customers want. They want the same as we all want. The research
focus would have to be placed on backwards-engineering this competitor product
in order to steal its best features and cash-in on its appealing brand-image
and global market. This research would then later inform product design and
eventually, once the bugs are ironed out, the promotion and selling of a new and
improved product, this last step now made cheap and easy by having a product
that can openly claim to meet all customer needs and wants.
If the company’s in-house research into this competing product leads to the creation of a set of corporately-approved texts, interpretations, commentaries and other introductory teaching materials that can be trusted within the company as authoritative and which are capable of being comprehended by a strictly ‘scholastic’ philosophy student at undergraduate level then this may be a highly profitable product that could be offered by most existing philosophy departments. As a wildly different product from the traditional fare it would attract attention and it might even be popular with many of the competitor’s existing customers as a way of studying the theory behind their practice.
The marketing brochure could look too good to be true. Many
people young and old may be expected to want to come to university to learn
about this astonishing description of the world, how it would connect-up with
physics, consciousness studies, psychology, theology and other areas of
knowledge, what it would mean for their daily lives, how it would explain
origins, freewill, matter, mind and so forth, what it predicts will happen to
us when we die and what may have happened to our deceased loved ones, and, for
the more analytical of them, what makes this philosophy unfalsifiable such that
it can safely be called ‘Perennial’ not only for its ancient origins but as a
hostage to fortune. There might be queues around the block.
This world-view is easy to sell for its mysteriousness and
weirdness, for its magical and seemingly endless literature, for its claim that
life and death are of cosmic significance while also being a misunderstanding,
for its air of peace and tranquillity, for its opposition to the status quo,
for its immediate connection with hearts and minds, for its encouragement of
joy and happiness, for its claim that within each of us the universe is
enfolded. Whatever else it is this other philosophy is not boring, unengaging
or unchallenging. Whether it is true would be another matter but students
should not be allowed to pass their first year exams unable to make a
well-informed judgement, for this would be the USP of the course and what makes
it a wildly new product. And then, the cherry on the cake, the practices
normally associated with a theoretical study of this philosophy are reported to
be assisted in the early stages by the ingestion of mind-altering substances.
There seems to be no downside, a perfect product for a healthy student
market.
At under-graduate level a ‘scholastic’ approach to teaching
the Perennial philosophy may only be practical if it remains almost entirely
theoretical. If so then it need not be a replacement for existing courses but an
extension, an acknowledgement that there is more to philosophy than for a long
time has been taught to students. Later development might extend courses into
post-graduate studies but there would be a limit to the level at which a
university can be relevant to advanced study. At post-graduate level one would
expect students to be doing practical work guided by an expert teacher
off-campus in addition to their academic studies and scholarly research. If an undergraduate
course covers the theory properly then subsequent courses would have to be almost
entirely practical in order to be worth taking.
Driven by a new and resolute marketing focus there would get
underway a natural and ongoing process of improving the explanation of the
Perennial Philosophy taught to undergraduates and this didactic goal could
provide a focus for post-graduate research. Hesse’s evolutionary ‘Glass Bead
Game’ might provide a model for this communal enterprise. At present there is
much confusion and nothing like a consensus on how to translate the teachings
of even one authentic Master or Sage into the language and concepts used by the
Academy, or even on whether it would be a good idea to do so, but the Academy
itself has all the skills and resources required to change this situation. It
has the motivation of growing criticism, falling sales and a measurably
increasing rate of professional redundancies.
University philosophy has no global marketing department or
ability to act in a directed way so a list of marketing recommendations would
be useless to it. There will be as many opinions on this initial report as
there are readers of it. One practical and probably uncontentious approach, and
perhaps as much as would be necessary in the long-term to turn the situation
around, would be the establishment of a grant-awarding body charged with
encouraging and promoting the study of the philosophy of the Upanishads and its
equivalents with a strong emphasis on the clarification and reliable
communication of this doctrine within an academic context. This might be
likened to a testing process for the introduction of a new drug and should be
just as rigorous. It would be a process of getting to know the enemy and its
product, the first step towards designing a new product that can be expected to
attract punters at little cost for a long time to come. This would not be a
duplication of existing work but a shot in the arm for an area of research and
literature that is under-motivated and under-populated at this time and that
could be much improved by some targeted encouragement. The competitor’s product
is so poorly known at present most professionals would be pushed to say what is
wrong with it. This alone would seem to be sufficient justification for the
investment and it would be doing a service for philosophers everywhere.
Given the promises that it would allow the department to make
to prospective students it can be expected that demand will be high if the
‘nondual’ philosophy of the mystical traditions were to be offered as an area
of undergraduate study but prior to research it should not be assumed that it
is perfect and cannot be improved. Perhaps it will be found that it cannot
deliver on its marketing claims. Until this is determined there is also the risk
of introducing a new product only to see it immediately made redundant by an
even better one. It would be important, therefore, that throughout any product
design process the mission statement for the company remains the same as
ever. The pursuit of a rational intellectual
understanding of the universe, consciousness, time, origins, knowledge, God,
ethics and so forth that can confidently and effectively be communicated to
students will not be over until there is a professional consensus that it is
over. Perhaps the answers and explanations given in the Upanishadic tradition
can be shown to be incorrect and the company’s research process eventually
destroys the credibility of its competitor. In marketing terms this would be a
fabulous outcome and well worth the time and effort, although not as profitable
as seeing it survive the testing and so allow the creation of a more attractive
product to sell.
A necessary first step would be to reach a corporate
consensus on what this other philosophy actually is, what it claims, how it explains
things. This must be presented in an accessible language appropriate for use
within the Academy. This would require the creation of an officially approved
and trustworthy body of literature and its dissemination internally. This will
take time. A philosophical view can be taught without making a commitment to
its truth or falsity but if front-line staff are going to be able to tell
customers about a great new product then they will have to know that it is one and
must be able to explain what makes it so.
Curriculum changes need not be considered. If these come
about they should be self-motivating, evolutionary, something individual
departments or philosophers may choose to do if given the opportunity. The
corporate-wide issue would be a scholastic one, the lack of any sort of
consensus as to what the competitor is actually selling, how to interpret its
ambiguous and self-contradictory language, how it solves metaphysical problems
and so forth. Within the Academy at this time there is no agreement on how to
interpret or translate the ‘nondual’ or neutral philosophy of the ‘enlightened’
ones, the countless prophets, sages and other less exalted practitioners who
endorse it, and barely even a recognition that it is an identifiable doctrine
open to analysis and comparable with the alternatives. To many Academy members
it must appear that this other philosophical tradition is a myriad of different
voices and nothing at all like a choir. This uncertainty about the competitor’s
product would have to be cleared up before it can be offered as a new
attraction. The Academy has spent many years - Heidegger would say twenty
centuries for he blamed the early Greeks after Socrates for abandoning the idea
of Unity necessary to the Perennial philosophy - trying to undermine the
credibility of its competitor and internally seems to have been entirely successful.
Western religion and philosophy have ever since Plato worked hand in hand in
this endeavour and the layman never stood a chance. If the Academy is to now to
endorse this product as worthy of serious study as a complement or extension to
its traditional product then for the sake of its own credibility it will have
to be able to show that there are very good reasons for this change of
tune.
Such an approach might seem to prioritise sales over
philosophical progress but the two goals are mutually self-supporting, just as
they must be for an effective marketing approach. As long as the company
retains a marketing focus it will be an honest search for the best possible
product to offer to its customers and thus an honest search for Wisdom,
Knowledge and Truth. It cannot be
predicted how or whether the competing product can be improved or whether it
needs to be and so a new field of research and teaching practice will be opened
up. If it turns to have terminal flaw then nothing has been lost and much
gained. The Academy will then be able to offer courses explaining what is wrong
with the Perennial philosophy. Such a course ought to be popular and is surely
long overdue. If no such flaw is discovered then it would not be a business
decision to offer courses to students but a professional duty.
The recommendation of this report, a little tongue-in-cheek
and for discussion only, is the establishment of a grant-awarding body
supporting work that fosters a better theoretical understanding of Metaphysics
and the philosophy of the Upanishads within the profession, with the long-term
goal of creating an internally-approved canon of explanatory literature that
can be trusted by undergraduate students and their teachers to be well-informed
and safe to include on their reading-lists, one that is comprehensive and that deals
with all the necessary philosophical issues whilst also making the appropriate
connections to scientific consciousness studies, physics, evolutionary biology,
psychology and so forth and is informed by them and which, crucially, is
designed for students who have not yet chosen to undertake experimental work in
the mountains of Tibet but want to study philosophy as a theoretical problem.
This will not be a reproduction of the existing literature, which for the most part is targeted at practitioners and already more extensive than it needs to be. Rather, it will be a reliable and clear translation and interpretation of that literature into an appropriate language that does not depend on non-ordinary experience (or mind altering substances!) for comprehension at the required level. Much authoritative and useful literature already exists but identifying it requires expertise and there are significant gaps.
A rigorous corporate approach to the creation of teaching material would capitalise on the existing analytical and communication strengths of the company and create a well-defined new subject for study. If the marketing claims of its competitor prove to be genuine or at least cannot be falsified such that its product can be honestly promoted and sold, then its introduction into the curriculum will make possible a discipline that cannot be criticised by physicists, university administrators, students or anyone else for its irrelevance, ineffectiveness or, one would anticipate, its unprofitability.
***
Ben Iscatus
"probably bringing in external consultants armed with have a fresh eye and having no stake in maintaining the status quo." Needs rewording (omit "have"?)
"A commercial enterprise finding itself in this position would initiate a marketing review.." suggest you add after the word "position": "(hereinafter called 'the Company)' " and maybe you need to associate explicitly the Academy with the Company for clarity.
On Friday, 16 June 2017 12:25:27 UTC+1, Peter Jones wrote:
The Marketing of Philosophy
Mark Tetzner
In any event good article, that has my vote of course.
Bernardo
On Friday, June 16, 2017 at 1:25:27 PM UTC+2, Peter Jones wrote:
The Marketing of Philosophy
A Preliminary Report
There is much talk in the profession these days of finding ways to improve the marketing of philosophy as an academic discipline. The department is under attack from almost all sides for its ongoing inability to reach a conclusion on any important philosophical question and some prominent scientists publicly doubt the value of studying it. In the US at least the teaching of philosophy is coming to be seen as inessential to a credible university curriculum and departments are closing. A commercial enterprise finding itself in this position would initiate a marketing review as a matter of urgency, probably bringing in external consultants armed with have a fresh eye and having no stake in maintaining the status quo. It is interesting to wonder what their report might look like.
Marketing is often confused with selling but would normally refer to a broader range of activity. Confusion on this point afflicts many suggested approaches to promoting philosophy as an academic discipline, for rarely are they more than proposals for selling the current product by dumbing it down, repackaging it, making it cheaper or increasing the advertising budget. This is disrespectful to the customer. It is being assumed that the customer is at fault for not seeing what a wonderful product the company is selling. This is a naïve and well-known recipe for failure. In the way it pre-judges, makes assumptions and fails to look at the complete picture it is even unphilosophical.
Marketing in a full sense begins with the design of the product. If the product is poor then it will require much effort, a large budget and considerable copyrighting sophistry to sell it. A great product is easy and cheap to sell and customers keep coming back. Granted, it is not always easy to change a product when it loses its appeal and sometimes a manufacturer has no option but to continue to promote it at almost any cost right up to the bitter end, but few companies have total inertia and philosophy is not one of them. A company with a marketing focus will be continually re-designing its products and services in order to minimise the cost of selling them. In this way products evolve and do not become ossified relics of their former glory.
Is university philosophy a great product? Clearly not, given the widely acknowledged difficulty of selling it and the current interest within the profession in finding new and more effective ways of doing so. The question then arises of whether the product has to be this way, such that it must be sold at any cost, or whether it can improved. The first question to be asked is that of whether this problem affects the whole industry or just our own product.
This latter idea is rarely considered in the Academy. The only successful alternative to the current university product belongs to its main competitor, the Perennial philosophy, and so it is felt that this must be shunned and its good features denied. Most importantly, the study of it must not be encouraged for this might lead customers to take it seriously. Over time a myth has arisen that there is no competitor product and as a consequence it is poorly known. It is assumed by almost all professional philosophers in our universities that philosophy is what universities currently sell, no more and no less, and that this cannot be improved. No improvement would be necessary in any case, since the customer has no choice as to what to buy.
A consultant would be duty-bound to point out that this is not marketing but commercial suicide. It is also the betrayal of philosophy, albeit that this is not a strictly commercial concern. A corporate culture exclusively focused on selling the traditional product has blinkered the company’s vision and acts as a major obstacle to the creation and implementation of a well thought-out and effective marketing plan, one for which product design would be at the core and not promotion and selling. The consequence is a product that has not evolved in centuries and that is becoming increasing difficulty to sell even to highly intelligent and interested students of science and religion.
A marketing plan would normally start with the needs and wants of existing and potential customers. What do they want? Fortunately no market research is required. They want to know how the world works, whether life has any purpose or meaning, what happens to them when they die, whether they have freewill, whether God exists, whether space and time are real, whether Materialism is true, how they should interpret quantum mechanics, whether it matters how they behave and if so how they should, how they can find happiness, how they can make sense of their own consciousness, the list is a long one. Does the current product meet their wants and needs? No. So how can it be sold effectively? Only by arguing that although the company’s product cannot provide these benefits it is better than nothing. This requires maintaining the pretence that there is no alternative product. It requires that the customer be misled not just at the time of purchase but on an ongoing basis and it ensures that the product never improves.
Must the company suffer increasingly from cut-backs and closures or might the situation be turned around? If it can be turned around then it could only be by making the product more attractive. This will only become possible if the organisational culture of the company is re-oriented away from promotion and selling towards a process of constant product-improvement on behalf of its customers. Here university philosophy may have much to learn from industry.
The academic study of philosophical questions brings well-known benefits regardless of its success just as long as it is serious, but are these fringe-benefits incidental or are they what customers really want? Are they enough to generate healthy sales forecasts? Are they enough to fill courses and attract investment and grants? It seems they are not even enough to convince many scientists or university administrators that philosophy is a worthwhile product.
What most potential customers want from philosophy is answers, conclusions, results, tangible and quantifiable benefits that would include a better understanding of themselves and their world. The product currently on offer is not what customers want but what they settle for because they have been told with great authority that this is all there is. This is marketing madness. The walls of academia are coming down and even a casual browse around Youtube would be enough to establish the ineffectiveness of the philosophy department’s product and the low opinion of it held by many senior academics. Indeed, often those with the lowest opinion of the efficacy of today's academic philosophy are professors of philosophy, for it is they who are most affected by the failure of the current product.
A vital ingredient for any marketing review would be a close examination of the products and services of competitors. For the modern Academy the main competitor and perhaps the only serious one would be the school of practice and thought known as the Perennial philosophy. Knowing one’s enemy would be vital for a good marketing operation yet at this time it appears that little is known about this competitor. If there is an alternative to its own product in the same market then a commercial company would usually know it as well as their own, and for anyone involved with marketing this would be a matter of professional competence. Yet ask most professional philosophers to explain this competitor product and their lack of competence is likely to become immediately clear.
What does the competitor product offer? What would the philosophy of the writers of the ancient Upanishads, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Al-Halaj, Rumi, Eckhart, de Cusa, the Gymnosophists, Druids, Advaitans and Nondualists be able to claim in its marketing brochure that the Academy cannot claim for its own product? That it provides answers to questions and solutions to problems. That is has a strong and global customer base, a myriad of ecstatic customers and thirty centuries of positive customer-feedback including endorsements from countless well-known celebrities. That it has proven reliability, is unbreakable and is remarkably cheap to teach while offering something for everyone from the dabbler to the professional expert or committed practitioner. Unlike the traditional ‘Western’ or northern European product - which accompanies and supports a religious world-view rejected by its competitor for having become as naïve and misleading as the philosophy that supports it - it is a product only very occasionally criticised by physicists, who rarely know anything about it, but that is quite often endorsed by them where it is studied.
Its brochure could, without demonstrably breaking the Trade Descriptions Act, claim that it offers an interpretation of quantum mechanics, an explanation for consciousness, a way of avoiding philosophical ‘hard’ problems and of solving metaphysics, a ‘hands-on’ method for increasing happiness in life and reducing fear of death or even of overcoming it, an ethical scheme that is forgiving, clearly-defined and practical at all times and a description of Reality that reaches beyond time and space to enshrines Love and Compassion as Cosmic principles. It offers a vast multi-lingual literature characterised by its rigour, elegance, beauty, simplicity, helpfulness, reliability, humour and honest motivation.
Such a competitor might seem a dangerous threat. Even if it is unable deliver on all its claims it is able to present itself as a very attractive product and that it maintains these claims over centuries indicates that it would be difficult to prove that it is unable to deliver on them. Yet, as the cliché goes, every threat is an opportunity. This competitor has captured a large market share and its student numbers continue to rise. To compete for these students the company would only need to jump on the bandwagon and copy, steal or improve on its competitor’s product. The work of establishing a market has been done, the entire theoretical edifice is in place and the blueprints for the product are in the public domain.
A consultant in this situation would be bound to advise the company to examine this competitor product in great detail. A formal analysis of strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats may be anticipated to conclude that the main and urgent priority for the marketing department should be product research. Market research would be unnecessary since enough is known about what customers want. They want the same as we all want. The research focus would have to be placed on backwards-engineering this competitor product in order to steal its best features and cash-in on its appealing brand-image and global market. This research would then later inform product design and eventually, once the bugs are ironed out, the promotion and selling of a new and improved product, this last step now made cheap and easy by having a product that can openly claim to meet all customer needs and wants.
If the company’s in-house research into this competing product leads to the creation of a set of corporately-approved texts, interpretations, commentaries and other introductory teaching materials that can be trusted within the company as authoritative and which are capable of being comprehended by a strictly scholastic philosophy student at undergraduate level then this may be a highly profitable product that could be offered by most existing philosophy departments. As a wildly different product from the traditional fare it would attract attention and it might even be popular with many of the competitor’s existing customers as a way of studying the theory behind their practice.
The marketing brochure could look too good to be true. Many people young and old may be expected to want to come to university to learn about this astonishing description of the world, how it would connect-up with physics, consciousness studies, biology, psychology, theology and other areas of knowledge, what it would mean for their daily lives, how it would explain origins, freewill, matter, mind and so forth, what it predicts will happen to us when we die and what may have happened to our deceased loved ones, and, for the more analytical of them, what makes this philosophy unfalsifiable such that it can safely be called ‘Perennial’ not only for its ancient origins but as a hostage to fortune. There might be queues around the block.
This world-view is easy to sell for its mysteriousness and weirdness, for its magical and seemingly endless literature, for its claim that life and death are of cosmic significance while also being a misunderstanding, for its air of peace and tranquillity, for its opposition to the status quo, for its immediate connection with hearts and minds, for its encouragement of joy and happiness, for its claim that within each of us the universe is enfolded. Whatever else it is this other philosophy is not boring, unengaging or unchallenging. Whether it is true would be another matter but students should not be allowed to pass their first year exams unable to make a well-informed judgement, for this would be the USP of the course and what makes it a wildly new product. And then, the cherry on the cake, the practices normally associated with a theoretical study of this philosophy are reported to be assisted in the early stages by the ingestion of mind-altering substances. There seems to be no downside, a perfect product for a healthy student market.
At under-graduate level a ‘scholastic’ approach to teaching the Perennial philosophy may only be practical if it remains almost entirely theoretical. If so then it need not be a replacement for existing courses but an extension, an acknowledgement that there is more to philosophy than for a long time has been taught to students. Later development might extend courses into post-graduate studies but there would be a natural limit to the level at which a university can be relevant to advanced study. At post-graduate level one would expect students to be doing practical work guided by an expert teacher off-campus in addition to their academic studies and scholarly research. If an undergraduate course covers the theory properly then subsequent courses would have to be almost entirely practical in order to be worth taking.
Driven by a new and resolute marketing focus there would now get underway a natural and ongoing process of improving the explanation of the Perennial Philosophy taught to undergraduates. This didactic goal could provide a focus for post-graduate research. Hesse’s evolutionary ‘Glass Bead Game’ might provide a model for this communal enterprise. At present there is much confusion and nothing like a consensus on how to translate the teachings of even one authentic Master or Sage into the language and concepts used by the Academy or even on whether it would be a good idea to do so but the Academy itself has all the skills and resources that would be required to change this situation. It has the motivation of growing criticism, falling sales and a measurably increasing rate of professional redundancies.
University philosophy has no global marketing department or ability to act in a directed way so a list of marketing recommendations would be useless to it. There will be as many opinions on this initial report as there are readers of it. One practical and probably uncontentious approach, and perhaps as much as would be necessary in the long-term to turn the situation around, would be the establishment of a grant-awarding body charged with encouraging and promoting the study of the philosophy of the Upanishads and its equivalents with a strong emphasis on the clarification and reliable communication of this doctrine within an academic context. This might be likened to a testing process for the introduction of a new drug and should be just as rigorous. It would be a process of getting to know the enemy and its product, the first step towards designing a new product that can be expected to attract punters at little cost for a long time to come. This would not be a duplication of existing work but a shot in the arm for an area of research and literature that is under-motivated and under-populated at this time and that could be much improved by some targeted encouragement. The competitor’s product is so poorly known at present most professionals would be pushed to say what is wrong with it. This alone would seem to be sufficient justification for the investment and it would be doing a service for philosophers everywhere, thus for people everywhere.
Given the promises that it would allow the department to make to prospective students it can be expected that demand will be high if the ‘nondual’ philosophy of the mystical traditions were to be offered as an area of undergraduate study, but prior to research it should not be assumed that it is perfect and cannot be improved. Perhaps it will be found that it cannot deliver on its marketing claims. Until this is determined there is the risk of introducing a new product only to see it immediately made redundant by an even better one. It would be important, therefore, that throughout any product design process the mission statement for the company remains the same as ever. The pursuit of a rational intellectual understanding of the universe, consciousness, time, origins, knowledge, God, ethics and so forth that may be confidently and effectively communicated to students will not be over until there is a professional consensus that it is over. Perhaps the answers and explanations given in the Upanishadic tradition can be shown to be incorrect and the company’s research process will eventually destroy the credibility of its competitor. In marketing terms this would be a fabulous outcome and well worth the time and effort, although not as profitable as seeing it survive the testing and so allow the creation of a more attractive product to sell.
A necessary first step would be to reach a corporate consensus on what this other philosophy actually is, what it claims, how it explains things. This must be presented in an accessible language appropriate for use within the Academy. This would require the creation of an officially approved and trustworthy body of literature and its dissemination internally. This will take time. A philosophical view can be taught without making a commitment to its truth or falsity but if front-line staff are going to be able to tell customers about a great new product then they will have to know that it is one and must be able to explain what makes it so.
Curriculum changes need not be considered. If these come about they should be self-motivating, evolutionary, something individual departments or philosophers may choose to do if given the opportunity. The corporate-wide issue would be a scholastic one, the lack of any sort of consensus as to what the competitor is actually selling, how to interpret its ambiguous and self-contradictory language, how it solves metaphysical problems and so forth. Within the Academy at this time there is no agreement on how to interpret or translate the ‘nondual’ or neutral philosophy of the ‘enlightened’ ones, the countless prophets, sages and other less exalted practitioners who endorse it, and barely even a recognition that it is an identifiable doctrine open to analysis and comparable with the alternatives. To many Academy members it must appear that this other philosophical tradition is a myriad of different voices and nothing at all like a choir. This uncertainty about the competitor’s product must be cleared up before it can be offered as a new attraction. The Academy has spent many years, (Heidegger would say twenty centuries for he blamed the early Greeks after Socrates for abandoning the idea of Unity that is necessary to the Perennial philosophy), trying to undermine the credibility of its competitor and internally seems to have been entirely successful. Western religion and philosophy have ever since Plato worked hand in hand in this endeavour and the layman never stood a chance. If the Academy is to now to endorse this product as worthy of serious study as a complement or extension to its traditional offering then for the sake of its own credibility it will have to be able to show that there are very good reasons for this change of tune.
Such an approach might seem to prioritise sales over philosophical progress but the two goals are mutually self-supporting, as they must be for an effective marketing approach. As long as the company retains a marketing focus it will be an honest search for the best possible product to offer to its customers and thus an honest search for Wisdom, Knowledge and Truth. It cannot be predicted how or whether the competing product can be improved or whether it needs to be and so a new field of research and teaching practice will be opened up. If it turns to have terminal flaw then nothing has been lost and much gained. The Academy will then be able to offer courses explaining what is wrong with the Perennial Philosophy. Such a course ought to be popular and is surely long overdue. If no such flaw is discovered then it would not be a business decision to offer courses to students but a professional duty.
The recommendation of this report, for discussion only, is the establishment of a grant-awarding body supporting work that fosters a better theoretical understanding of Metaphysics and the philosophy of the Upanishads within the profession, with the long-term goal of creating an internally-approved canon of explanatory literature that can be trusted by undergraduate students and their teachers to be well-informed and safe to include on their reading-lists, one that is comprehensive and that deals with all the necessary philosophical issues whilst also making the appropriate connections to scientific consciousness studies, physics, evolutionary biology, psychology and so forth and is informed by them and which, crucially, is designed for students who have not yet chosen to undertake experimental work in the mountains of Tibet but want to study philosophy as a theoretical problem.
This will not be a reproduction of the existing literature, which for the most part is targeted at practitioners and already more extensive than it needs to be. Rather, it will be a reliable and clear translation and interpretation of that literature into an appropriate language that does not depend on non-ordinary experience (or mind altering substances!) for comprehension at the required level. Much authoritative and useful literature already exists but identifying it requires expertise and there are significant gaps. Such is the level of misunderstanding that at present the subject is assumed to be fiendishly complicated, and while it can be made so it is almost maximally simple at the level of principles.
A rigorous corporate approach to the creation of teaching material would capitalise on the existing analytical and communication strengths of the company and create a well-defined subject for study. If the marketing claims of its competitor prove to be genuine or at worst cannot be falsified, such that its product can be honestly promoted and sold, then its introduction into the curriculum will make possible a discipline that cannot be criticised by physicists, university administrators, students or anyone else for its irrelevance, ineffectiveness or, one would confidently anticipate, its unprofitability.
***
Bernardo
Mark Tetzner
I was never really aware of this. I also think the subject-matters relating to the Perennial Philosophie are
maybe found when studying Chinese (Sinologie) where Lao Zi of course comes up or Indiologie etc.
So in Germany at least thats how the cookie crumbles. Yes, Lao Zi is how he is written though americans
invented their own "pin yin" which is called Wade-Giles.
I am still offering to create videos without any profit whatsoever if someone would like to create a marketing-video
for anything philosophie-related or needs one for their own purpose. After all, if there are idealistic motives floating
around here someone might want to take some action sometime.
Again I am not promoting my service, at zero profit to me, you can work directly with my providers if you want.
The videos I produce are partly thousands of dollars per minute, you can get them for peanuts if you know where
to go.
What bugs me even more is that the perennial philosophie or any of the questions that Peter broke down are not
being infused into regular school-subjects. We have been hearing a lot here that we want a paradigm-change.
Mathematics, Physics, Bio-Chemistry, learning about our planet (whats that called in English?)...nothing whatsoever.
Should it not start there to reach the mainstream? In Germany you automatically take "religion" where of course
its about the Bible.
How much amazing would it be if every human would have his eyes opened to the amazingness of existing in the
first place. Imagine a baby just leaving the birth-canal and someone shaking it and screaming at it: "You are here!!!!!
Do you get that dude??? Its a miracle!!"
I think we agree that would be over the top. But it is possible to grow 6 years old and hardly be aware that the stars
exist if no one points them out to you and nowadays, say, your parents just drive you from A to B and everything
is in a hurry.
Years ago I thought it would be amazing if school itself had a telos. The most expensive Hollywood-movie of all times
is supposedly Pirate of the Carrebeans, 378 Million. It would be awesome if a country would simply create a
2 billion dollar movie that is held like a secret... that every school-kid would watch in, say, 2nd grade that infuses
them with meaning what this entire school-bs is all about to begin with and if all the subjects could be tied together
in a meaningful way with a common thread connecting them. The telos would not be being a little working-bee in the system, of course...
Dana Lomas
On Friday, June 16, 2017 at 7:25:27 AM UTC-4, Peter Jones wrote:
The Marketing of Philosophy
A Preliminary Report
There is much talk in the profession these days of finding ways to improve the marketing of philosophy as an academic discipline. The department is under attack from almost all sides for its ongoing inability to reach a conclusion on any important philosophical question and some prominent scientists publicly doubt the value of studying it. In the US at least the teaching of philosophy is coming to be seen as inessential to a credible university curriculum and departments are closing. A commercial enterprise finding itself in this position would initiate a marketing review as a matter of urgency, probably bringing in external consultants armed with have a fresh eye and having no stake in maintaining the status quo. It is interesting to wonder what their report might look like.
Marketing is often confused with selling but would normally refer to a broader range of activity. Confusion on this point afflicts many suggested approaches to promoting philosophy as an academic discipline, for rarely are they more than proposals for selling the current product by dumbing it down, repackaging it, making it cheaper or increasing the advertising budget. This is disrespectful to the customer. It is being assumed that the customer is at fault for not seeing what a wonderful product the company is selling. This is a naïve and well-known recipe for failure. In the way it pre-judges, makes assumptions and fails to look at the complete picture it is even unphilosophical.
Marketing in a full sense begins with the design of the product. If the product is poor then it will require much effort, a large budget and considerable copyrighting sophistry to sell it. A great product is easy and cheap to sell and customers keep coming back. Granted, it is not always easy to change a product when it loses its appeal and sometimes a manufacturer has no option but to continue to promote it at almost any cost right up to the bitter end, but few companies have total inertia and philosophy is not one of them. A company with a marketing focus will be continually re-designing its products and services in order to minimise the cost of selling them. In this way products evolve and do not become ossified relics of their former glory.
Is university philosophy a great product? Clearly not, given the widely acknowledged difficulty of selling it and the current interest within the profession in finding new and more effective ways of doing so. The question then arises of whether the product has to be this way, such that it must be sold at any cost, or whether it can improved. The first question to be asked is that of whether this problem affects the whole industry or just our own product.
This latter idea is rarely considered in the Academy. The only successful alternative to the current university product belongs to its main competitor, the Perennial philosophy, and so it is felt that this must be shunned and its good features denied. Most importantly, the study of it must not be encouraged for this might lead customers to take it seriously. Over time a myth has arisen that there is no competitor product and as a consequence it is poorly known. It is assumed by almost all professional philosophers in our universities that philosophy is what universities currently sell, no more and no less, and that this cannot be improved. No improvement would be necessary in any case, since the customer has no choice as to what to buy.
A consultant would be duty-bound to point out that this is not marketing but commercial suicide. It is also the betrayal of philosophy, albeit that this is not a strictly commercial concern. A corporate culture exclusively focused on selling the traditional product has blinkered the company’s vision and acts as a major obstacle to the creation and implementation of a well thought-out and effective marketing plan, one for which product design would be at the core and not promotion and selling. The consequence is a product that has not evolved in centuries and that is becoming increasing difficulty to sell even to highly intelligent and interested students of science and religion.
A marketing plan would normally start with the needs and wants of existing and potential customers. What do they want? Fortunately no market research is required. They want to know how the world works, whether life has any purpose or meaning, what happens to them when they die, whether they have freewill, whether God exists, whether space and time are real, whether Materialism is true, how they should interpret quantum mechanics, whether it matters how they behave and if so how they should, how they can find happiness, how they can make sense of their own consciousness, the list is a long one. Does the current product meet their wants and needs? No. So how can it be sold effectively? Only by arguing that although the company’s product cannot provide these benefits it is better than nothing. This requires maintaining the pretence that there is no alternative product. It requires that the customer be misled not just at the time of purchase but on an ongoing basis and it ensures that the product never improves.
Must the company suffer increasingly from cut-backs and closures or might the situation be turned around? If it can be turned around then it could only be by making the product more attractive. This will only become possible if the organisational culture of the company is re-oriented away from promotion and selling towards a process of constant product-improvement on behalf of its customers. Here university philosophy may have much to learn from industry.
The academic study of philosophical questions brings well-known benefits regardless of its success just as long as it is serious, but are these fringe-benefits incidental or are they what customers really want? Are they enough to generate healthy sales forecasts? Are they enough to fill courses and attract investment and grants? It seems they are not even enough to convince many scientists or university administrators that philosophy is a worthwhile product.
What most potential customers want from philosophy is answers, conclusions, results, tangible and quantifiable benefits that would include a better understanding of themselves and their world. The product currently on offer is not what customers want but what they settle for because they have been told with great authority that this is all there is. This is marketing madness. The walls of academia are coming down and even a casual browse around Youtube would be enough to establish the ineffectiveness of the philosophy department’s product and the low opinion of it held by many senior academics. Indeed, often those with the lowest opinion of the efficacy of today's academic philosophy are professors of philosophy, for it is they who are most affected by the failure of the current product.
A vital ingredient for any marketing review would be a close examination of the products and services of competitors. For the modern Academy the main competitor and perhaps the only serious one would be the school of practice and thought known as the Perennial philosophy. Knowing one’s enemy would be vital for a good marketing operation yet at this time it appears that little is known about this competitor. If there is an alternative to its own product in the same market then a commercial company would usually know it as well as their own, and for anyone involved with marketing this would be a matter of professional competence. Yet ask most professional philosophers to explain this competitor product and their lack of competence is likely to become immediately clear.
What does the competitor product offer? What would the philosophy of the writers of the ancient Upanishads, the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Al-Halaj, Rumi, Eckhart, de Cusa, the Gymnosophists, Druids, Advaitans and Nondualists be able to claim in its marketing brochure that the Academy cannot claim for its own product? That it provides answers to questions and solutions to problems. That is has a strong and global customer base, a myriad of ecstatic customers and thirty centuries of positive customer-feedback including endorsements from countless well-known celebrities. That it has proven reliability, is unbreakable and is remarkably cheap to teach while offering something for everyone from the dabbler to the professional expert or committed practitioner. Unlike the traditional ‘Western’ or northern European product - which accompanies and supports a religious world-view rejected by its competitor for having become as naïve and misleading as the philosophy that supports it - it is a product only very occasionally criticised by physicists, who rarely know anything about it, but that is quite often endorsed by them where it is studied.
Its brochure could, without demonstrably breaking the Trade Descriptions Act, claim that it offers an interpretation of quantum mechanics, an explanation for consciousness, a way of avoiding philosophical ‘hard’ problems and of solving metaphysics, a ‘hands-on’ method for increasing happiness in life and reducing fear of death or even of overcoming it, an ethical scheme that is forgiving, clearly-defined and practical at all times and a description of Reality that reaches beyond time and space to enshrines Love and Compassion as Cosmic principles. It offers a vast multi-lingual literature characterised by its rigour, elegance, beauty, simplicity, helpfulness, reliability, humour and honest motivation.
Such a competitor might seem a dangerous threat. Even if it is unable deliver on all its claims it is able to present itself as a very attractive product and that it maintains these claims over centuries indicates that it would be difficult to prove that it is unable to deliver on them. Yet, as the cliché goes, every threat is an opportunity. This competitor has captured a large market share and its student numbers continue to rise. To compete for these students the company would only need to jump on the bandwagon and copy, steal or improve on its competitor’s product. The work of establishing a market has been done, the entire theoretical edifice is in place and the blueprints for the product are in the public domain.
A consultant in this situation would be bound to advise the company to examine this competitor product in great detail. A formal analysis of strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats may be anticipated to conclude that the main and urgent priority for the marketing department should be product research. Market research would be unnecessary since enough is known about what customers want. They want the same as we all want. The research focus would have to be placed on backwards-engineering this competitor product in order to steal its best features and cash-in on its appealing brand-image and global market. This research would then later inform product design and eventually, once the bugs are ironed out, the promotion and selling of a new and improved product, this last step now made cheap and easy by having a product that can openly claim to meet all customer needs and wants.
If the company’s in-house research into this competing product leads to the creation of a set of corporately-approved texts, interpretations, commentaries and other introductory teaching materials that can be trusted within the company as authoritative and which are capable of being comprehended by a strictly scholastic philosophy student at undergraduate level then this may be a highly profitable product that could be offered by most existing philosophy departments. As a wildly different product from the traditional fare it would attract attention and it might even be popular with many of the competitor’s existing customers as a way of studying the theory behind their practice.
The marketing brochure could look too good to be true. Many people young and old may be expected to want to come to university to learn about this astonishing description of the world, how it would connect-up with physics, consciousness studies, biology, psychology, theology and other areas of knowledge, what it would mean for their daily lives, how it would explain origins, freewill, matter, mind and so forth, what it predicts will happen to us when we die and what may have happened to our deceased loved ones, and, for the more analytical of them, what makes this philosophy unfalsifiable such that it can safely be called ‘Perennial’ not only for its ancient origins but as a hostage to fortune. There might be queues around the block.
This world-view is easy to sell for its mysteriousness and weirdness, for its magical and seemingly endless literature, for its claim that life and death are of cosmic significance while also being a misunderstanding, for its air of peace and tranquillity, for its opposition to the status quo, for its immediate connection with hearts and minds, for its encouragement of joy and happiness, for its claim that within each of us the universe is enfolded. Whatever else it is this other philosophy is not boring, unengaging or unchallenging. Whether it is true would be another matter but students should not be allowed to pass their first year exams unable to make a well-informed judgement, for this would be the USP of the course and what makes it a wildly new product. And then, the cherry on the cake, the practices normally associated with a theoretical study of this philosophy are reported to be assisted in the early stages by the ingestion of mind-altering substances. There seems to be no downside, a perfect product for a healthy student market.
At under-graduate level a ‘scholastic’ approach to teaching the Perennial philosophy may only be practical if it remains almost entirely theoretical. If so then it need not be a replacement for existing courses but an extension, an acknowledgement that there is more to philosophy than for a long time has been taught to students. Later development might extend courses into post-graduate studies but there would be a natural limit to the level at which a university can be relevant to advanced study. At post-graduate level one would expect students to be doing practical work guided by an expert teacher off-campus in addition to their academic studies and scholarly research. If an undergraduate course covers the theory properly then subsequent courses would have to be almost entirely practical in order to be worth taking.
Driven by a new and resolute marketing focus there would now get underway a natural and ongoing process of improving the explanation of the Perennial Philosophy taught to undergraduates. This didactic goal could provide a focus for post-graduate research. Hesse’s evolutionary ‘Glass Bead Game’ might provide a model for this communal enterprise. At present there is much confusion and nothing like a consensus on how to translate the teachings of even one authentic Master or Sage into the language and concepts used by the Academy or even on whether it would be a good idea to do so but the Academy itself has all the skills and resources that would be required to change this situation. It has the motivation of growing criticism, falling sales and a measurably increasing rate of professional redundancies.
University philosophy has no global marketing department or ability to act in a directed way so a list of marketing recommendations would be useless to it. There will be as many opinions on this initial report as there are readers of it. One practical and probably uncontentious approach, and perhaps as much as would be necessary in the long-term to turn the situation around, would be the establishment of a grant-awarding body charged with encouraging and promoting the study of the philosophy of the Upanishads and its equivalents with a strong emphasis on the clarification and reliable communication of this doctrine within an academic context. This might be likened to a testing process for the introduction of a new drug and should be just as rigorous. It would be a process of getting to know the enemy and its product, the first step towards designing a new product that can be expected to attract punters at little cost for a long time to come. This would not be a duplication of existing work but a shot in the arm for an area of research and literature that is under-motivated and under-populated at this time and that could be much improved by some targeted encouragement. The competitor’s product is so poorly known at present most professionals would be pushed to say what is wrong with it. This alone would seem to be sufficient justification for the investment and it would be doing a service for philosophers everywhere, thus for people everywhere.
Given the promises that it would allow the department to make to prospective students it can be expected that demand will be high if the ‘nondual’ philosophy of the mystical traditions were to be offered as an area of undergraduate study, but prior to research it should not be assumed that it is perfect and cannot be improved. Perhaps it will be found that it cannot deliver on its marketing claims. Until this is determined there is the risk of introducing a new product only to see it immediately made redundant by an even better one. It would be important, therefore, that throughout any product design process the mission statement for the company remains the same as ever. The pursuit of a rational intellectual understanding of the universe, consciousness, time, origins, knowledge, God, ethics and so forth that may be confidently and effectively communicated to students will not be over until there is a professional consensus that it is over. Perhaps the answers and explanations given in the Upanishadic tradition can be shown to be incorrect and the company’s research process will eventually destroy the credibility of its competitor. In marketing terms this would be a fabulous outcome and well worth the time and effort, although not as profitable as seeing it survive the testing and so allow the creation of a more attractive product to sell.
A necessary first step would be to reach a corporate consensus on what this other philosophy actually is, what it claims, how it explains things. This must be presented in an accessible language appropriate for use within the Academy. This would require the creation of an officially approved and trustworthy body of literature and its dissemination internally. This will take time. A philosophical view can be taught without making a commitment to its truth or falsity but if front-line staff are going to be able to tell customers about a great new product then they will have to know that it is one and must be able to explain what makes it so.
Mark Tetzner
It reminds me a bit of the MLM/network-marketing industry where everyone is always jumping up and
down "lets change lives, lets changes lives"....but harldy do lives ever get changes.
I dont much believe in changing the world except the world around me, consisiting of people I can
personally know.
Alternatively.....it is enough to achieve what one can achieve in a lifetime. Without any glamourous victories.
I still think if marketing is not employed....its all talk.
And I am not talking about what Peter mentioned, I believe writing an article for a blog is one thing.
Marketing the article is a different story.
Without marketing, which amongst other things means to get visibility, nothing matters, nothing moves.
Dana Lomas
Mark Tetzner
This one paradigm-shift is not going to happen. The so-called primitive cultures are going extinct and though a lot of superstition was mixed into the bag, they were at least not brainwashed by a system. But extinct they go.
Anyway...I think its important for those that are on some seeking path, what is all this altruism good for anyway ;)
Seriously, who cares.
Awwware Iconomen
Dana Lomas
Bernardo
Peter Jones
Maybe I should say a bit more at the start about the state of philosophy in universities. There has been a lot a discussion recently in the profession about how to market philosophy since the department really is under threat in a way it has never been before and this is causing widespread concern, which might mean that it is forced to change its attitude simply to survive. It has no answer to the complaints of physicists and and struggles to even explain what point there is in studying philosophy. Its attempts to explain away its lack of progress look increasingly desperate (cf. that article Bernardo posed recently), and there are worries about student numbers and grant income. My feeling is that within a few decades the old paradigm and approach will have to be abandoned simply to protect jobs. .
Mark - "It did not even occour to me that the Perennial Philosophie is a "competitor" of philosophie, I thought it would be a competitor of religion."
This is a fascinating comment. It is not really a competitor of philosophy or religion, just of philosophical and religious views that do not work. But if we use 'philosophy' and 'religion' to mean what the professors usually mean then it would be a competitor of both. The opposition to this view is just a strong in religion as it is in physics and probably more so. At least physicists don't burn books or excommunicate and crucify those who promote it.
Peter Jones
On Friday, 16 June 2017 17:49:20 UTC+1, Bernardo wrote:
-- As in your earlier essay, Peter, I feel you start to sound a little repetitive at about 2/3 of the way. I sense that you feel a need to emphasize the points by repeating them in different words towards the end, but I think the essay would be sharper without it.
I'm sure you're right, but reading it through I couldn't see what to cut. I'll try again.
-- It's a pity you don't say much about the need to decide on what is (likely) true, or closest to truth, in academic philosophy, as opposed to the endless and non-committal entertainment of conflicting options that we see today.
Dana Lomas
Ben Iscatus
Dana Lomas
Anne
I can't tell you how important this feels to me. I got wind of the Perennial Philosophy (though I didn't know that was what it was) at a very young age, maybe ten or so, and eventually left the church of my upbringing in search of it. Having left however, I found myself in limbo not knowing where to look for whatever it was I was searching for. (No internet in 1967!)
Though philosophically inclined I was no academic and was uneducated in the subject (thank God in retrospect). Into this vacuum within a matter of weeks of having formally left the church, fell Douglas Harding's little book Religions of the World. What a grace-filled miracle that was.
If I had discovered a course addressing the PP I would have absolutely gone for it without doubt, and even if the essay doesn't have the desired effect of changing philosophical academia, it makes a powerful statement of the real status of the PP and who knows where who might pick that up and run with it in directions we can't currently imagine.
Bernardo
Mark Tetzner
Peter Jones
On Sunday, 18 June 2017 09:54:32 UTC+1, Bernardo wrote:
Five votes, we're good to go.Peter, can you post the final version a.s.a.p.? Today is Sunday, the traditional day for publishing new material, so if you can post the final version here today, I shall publish it still today.
Thanks Bernardo. The OP has now been updated with a new version that hopefully is good to go. No major changes but some tidying up.
Anne - You seem to nicely represent the market the Academy is ignoring. My essay here is a bit tongue-in-cheek but this really is a serious marketing issue at at a time when sales are falling.
Dana Lomas
Bernardo
Mark Tetzner
Peter Jones
Thanks all. I just wish the real-life profession would call in consultants.