A philosophy department is saved — and philosophy argues about how to defend itself

Philosophy departments are closing. For a decade the trend has run from Britain to Australia and from the United States to the Netherlands, and it is usually explained by a single figure: student numbers.

At the end of August came a piece of news that ran the other way.

Dundee: in part, and for now#

The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee was on the closure list. The headline of a guest post at Daily Nous sums up the outcome: "Philosophy at Dundee Saved—In Part, For Now."

The emphasis of the piece falls here: a small programme with a wide international reach has reversed the pattern of closures in the arts and humanities.

Note the two qualifications: in part and for now. This is not a declaration of victory; it is a stay of execution.

What makes Dundee instructive, though, is which argument worked.

Two kinds of case can be made for a department. The first is internal: philosophy matters, it teaches people to think, it is the foundation of a civilisation. The second is external and measurable: it attracts international students, it produces publications, it feeds interdisciplinary programmes, its graduates find work.

The internal case is true, and on its own it almost never works — because the people who decide budgets do not speak that language.

At Dundee it was the second kind that settled the matter.

What does the public think?#

Another item, published at Daily Nous the day before, supplies the other leg of the argument: an opinion survey.

The question put to respondents was this: "How important is it for a typical university to maintain a department in each of the following fields?"

The wording shows precisely where the familiar defences of philosophy stop working.

The issue is not whether philosophy is worth having. Nobody says philosophy is worthless. The issue is whether it is thought necessary for every university to house it as a department of its own.

The distinction holds for the debate in Turkey as well. Defending the place of philosophy courses in a curriculum and defending the number of philosophy departments are different jobs, and they call for different arguments.

And a quarrel from within#

In the same week, one of the field's oldest internal tensions flared up again.

A post published at Daily Nous on 4 September, "Free to Be Experimental Philosophy," opens with a single question:

"But is this really philosophy?"

It drew more than thirty-five comments — and the comments show where the real knot lies.

Experimental philosophy — x-phi — proposes that philosophical intuitions be studied empirically. The classical method runs like this: a philosopher sets up a thought experiment and says "our intuition tells us such and such." Experimental philosophers ask: whose intuition? Then they go out and run surveys.

The findings have often been uncomfortable. Intuitions vary with culture, with socio-economic position, even with the order in which the questions are asked.

The objection is ready to hand: that is psychology, not philosophy.

What the comment thread reveals#

The course the argument takes is of the kind a philosophy site ought to follow.

Kenny Easwaran's intervention is sharp. Labelling this work "science" does not answer the question of whether it counts as "philosophy" too. And he adds a further question: what is the criterion by which anything belongs to discipline X at all?

His own proposal is relational. Subfields can remain a single discipline for as long as they are transitively connected to one another; once that connection breaks, it makes more sense to treat them as separate disciplines.

As criteria for disciplinary boundaries go, this one is remarkably practical. The logician and the Heidegger scholar in the same department may never read each other; but if there is a third person both of them read, the connection holds.

Another commenter names the source of the tension: the disputants talk past each other because they mean different things by conceptual analysis and by experimental philosophy.

Three stories, one problem#

The three developments look separate. They are not.

Dundee is the problem of defending philosophy's institutional existence.

The survey is the problem of measuring philosophy's social legitimacy.

The argument about experimental philosophy is the problem of drawing philosophy's own boundaries.

And the three are connected. A field that cannot agree on where its borders lie will struggle to mount a defence against those outside them.

This is not a weakness peculiar to philosophy — it is philosophy's defining feature. Philosophy is the only discipline whose own definition is one of its subjects. Physicists do not debate the question "what is physics"; philosophers have been debating "what is philosophy" for two and a half thousand years.

As we wrote yesterday in our survey of the field in 2026, the centre of gravity is shifting. That the border dispute should heat up while the centre moves is no surprise.

The view from Turkey#

In Turkey philosophy departments are not closing; their number is rising. That does not mean the problem is absent.

The difficulty there is places and employment: as the number of departments grows, the question of what graduates will do outside the academy goes under-discussed.

The lesson to be drawn from Dundee is this. Whether a department can be defended now depends on the visible, measurable output it produces. We are not obliged to like that criterion. But ignoring it leaves us with no argument on the day the department closes.