 Hi everybody, Matt Brown here. This is 19th and 20th century philosophy and I want to talk to you a little bit in this sort of intermission video about the bigger picture of what's going on with these thinkers that we've been talking about. If you're like me, you might be getting a little frustrated with sort of reading all of these different figures, writing in these different and sometimes very difficult styles. And you might want to know, well, how does all this fit together? That's what I want to reflect on a little bit here today. One of the things that we've talked about before, but I think is worth emphasizing here is that the field of philosophy as it moves through the periods we're looking at is really professionalizing, right? It's really starting to try to distinguish and demarcate itself from other kinds of intellectual pursuits as part of its identity within universities and the scholarly world. You think back to some of the earliest readings that we had, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. We're talking about figures, most of whom are not trained formally in philosophy, Marx was, but the rest weren't really. We're looking at figures who are not working for the most part in an academic scholarly setting. And a lot of their concerns are not particularly abstract in nature. They're thinking about how we live, how we govern the way we sort of authentically experience the world. As we start to move into thinkers like Frege and Husserl, we get more technical kind of accounts of philosophy. We get more abstract concerns. And this is partly a feature of that professionalization. That's partly a feature of, in particular for Frege and Husserl, their attempt to distinguish philosophy from psychology. A parallel movement, especially through the 19th century, is the professionalization of the sciences. Philosophy and science, at one point, were indistinguishable. We talk about natural philosophy, and that accounts for people like Newton, who we now think of as early physicists, and people like Descartes, who we think of as metaphysicians and philosophers. They didn't make those distinctions. We've talked about that before. So you've got Frege and Husserl, proto-analytic, proto-continental philosophers, working on sort of defining philosophy against psychology with their anti-psychologist arguments. In the U.S., you have pragmatism emerging in the late 19th century, with William James, Charles Perce, Anna Cooper, Jane Adams. And you have a lot of what the pragmatists are doing is trying to think of, trying to come up with philosophical theories of belief, experience, truth that responds on the one hand to sort of everyday needs of people, and on the other hand to sort of post-Darwinian understanding of the human being. And at the same time as you have this professionalization process going on, take William James, who's a great example of this, trained as a medical doctor. Originally, he gets on at Harvard to teach physiology, becomes interested in the new emerging psychology, and it's through his work on psychology that he becomes part of the philosophy department at Harvard, that he becomes affiliated with philosophy. But once he has made his sort of landmark work in psychology and becomes more interested in sort of traditional, what you might think of as traditional philosophical questions, he sort of moves away from psychology. And James moving away from psychology is I think consistent with what the philosophical world in the early decades of the 20th century was up to. So at the same time we have this sort of professionalization going on, we have other thinkers such as the feminist philosopher Jane Adams and Emma Goldman, from slightly different perspectives, pragmatism and anarchism, but they're both working outside of professional philosophy in the early decades of the 20th century. And that's in part because, you know, they're working for the liberation from oppression of other members of their group who are excluded from positions like university positions for the most part at this time. And there are a lot of other examples from the time period of women who are getting academic training, but not able to receive a doctorate or getting a doctorate abroad, but not being able to receive teaching positions. Anna Julia Cooper, for example, couldn't get her doctoral degree until later in life, and then only in France. And I'll see further examples of that. It wasn't just it wasn't just women, but also people of color struggling against oppression at the opening and on into the 20th century and doing philosophy but really working outside of the discipline itself. And this is a problem that philosophy is a discipline still struggles with. For example, in America, women are underrepresented. People of color are vastly underrepresented. And there's been a lot of progress on this in recent decades, but there's a lot of work left to do and these historical legacy of oppression and exclusion is a big part of it. So let's think in terms of some questions or problems or agenda items for philosophy as a field. Going forward from what we've read, right? So this question, what is philosophy? Right? How do we distinguish philosophical questions from psychological questions? What is the relevance of psychology to philosophy? What is the relevance of science to philosophy? Are they totally separate? Or are they relevant to one another? What is the relevance of philosophy to science and to psychology as another side of that coin? How are we going to integrate in members of these other groups into philosophy? How are we going to integrate their concerns? Right? How can philosophy be a tool of liberation? Right? And the struggle against oppression. These are these are just some of the questions that philosophers are addressing through these texts will be addressing further through other texts that we're company that we're reading that are coming up. And one of the things we'll see is that some of the different approaches to these questions come apart, recommend different ways of doing philosophy and lead to different kinds of philosophical traditions. So all of the thinkers that we read after the break are university educated, usually at the doctoral level, with the exception of James Baldwin, who did not go to university. Almost all of them, and Angela Davis also were employed in academic departments, most of them philosophy departments. And this is going to have an influence on how they think, the agenda that they set, the kinds of questions that they ask. Nevertheless, we're looking at thinkers from a variety of traditions, and sides of the different traditions that we're looking at. So we'll get we'll see a wide variety of perspectives going forward as well. Hopefully those thoughts help kind of pull the threads together a little bit for you based on what we've read, and give you a sense of what to look for as we go forward in our reading. I hope you all have had a good break. And I look forward to speaking with you soon about John Dewey, who's our next, who's our next thinker up. So I look forward to hearing what you think. Please, you know, make a note in the discord if this brings up any thoughts for you or comment on this video. And I'll see you in class next week.