In 1976 Rockefeller University shut down its stellar Philosophy department (the Logic Department was shut down a year later) so as to concentrate on bio-science and medicine. Among those forced out were Donald Davidson, Joel Feinberg, Harry G Frankfurt, and the great Saul Kripke- whose recent death we mourn. Apparently Hao Wang managed to cling on.
Needless to say, all the great philosophers dumped by Rockefeller (despite their having tenure) were snapped up by other Ivy League Colleges. I imagine that since Philosophy does not involve costly laboratory work, the Philosophy Depts. of fee charging Universities generate a surplus which can cross-subsidize STEM research. Rockefeller's scientific research, on the other hand, received Government and Corporate support because it was first rate and highly utile.
I should mention that Rockefeller was a free University with only 100 grad students and 400 professors all pursuing pure research projects of their own. Thus the philosophers represented a pure drain on resources. They could only have been kept on if they had made themselves useful to the Scientists.
Thus the reason the Philosophy dept. was axed was because if did not provide 'spill-over' benefits or 'external economies of scope and scale' for the Bio-Sciences. This was surprising to many at the time. In the mid Sixties, it appeared obvious that fundamental work on Semantics or Logic would be helpful for the Life Sciences and the Computer industry. Indeed, Frankfurter was tasked, in the mid Sixties, with bringing in the best and brightest philosophers to the Department. He himself had made an attempt to ingratiate himself with the guys in the white lab coats. But, as he says, his own thinking was not influenced by the great advances being made in evolutionary theory. Thus, Frankfurter's predecessor, Edelstein was proved right. Philosophers prefer to quarrel with each other rather than contribute to new paradigms helpful to all disciplines. Frankfurter takes comfort from the fact that his philosophers though refusing to talk to non-philosophers also preferred to avoid each other as well! On the other hand, Frankfurter admits to having let in a few Philosophy graduate students. But, he also says, they received step-motherly treatment and boasts that his colleagues sent some of these students off their rocker. Sadly, Frankfurter is obliged to admit that they may already have been crazy- a fair assumption given what they had chosen to study.
With hindsight, we can agree that Rockefeller University made the right decision. Philosophy, though appearing precocious, never fulfilled its promise. It needed its own 'safe space' where failed prodigies could play with their own feces or fling it about when in festive mood. Indeed, previously the philosopher Ernest Nagel had resigned after a year there to go back to Columbia where he would have more intellectual company for feces flinging purposes. This is not to say that the Department was wholly bereft of intellectual fireworks. Kripke attacked Wallace for raising doubts about substitutional quantification but 'satisfiability' is merely a theory of semantics. It isn't the last word- so to speak. Indeed referential quantification is more properly semantic. For Kripke's view to be meaningful we have to make assumptions about either a 'bottom level object language' or else a chain of meta-languages which nobody has access to. In other words, either you explicitly deal with 'satisfaction'- which ultimately will be what is useful for a particular purpose- or else there is some implicit assumption about infinite descending chains. Thus, even if substitutional quantification could be 'ontologically neutral' or merely linguistic, it wouldn't be enough for any substantive purpose. To be useful it must be actively ontologically dysphoric- just like Life. In other words, it needs to be upfront about why it is nonsense. After all, it is nonsense that Sinn (Sense) is founded upon. Reference can only arise by the arbitrary manner in which Sense is established- till it is sated and turns back to shit.
This was the wider problem with philosophy in the Sixties. 'Naturality' or 'Canonicity' or 'non-arbitrariness' seemed so accessible. Mathematical Logic or Semantics looked promising, just as mathematical economics looked promising. A second Enlightenment would replace 'artificial reason' and 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and their associated 'bourgeois strategies' with something which was purely natural and infinitely symmetric and all sweetness and light. In this psychodrama, the pointy-headed Professor was the ally of the 'flower-power' hippy. But the 'akrebia' of the intellectuals- their attempts at rigor and precision without loss of generality- was predicated on absurd and incompossible assumptions about metalanguages- to get rid of ambiguity ; or frictionless future's markets- to get rid of Knightian Uncertainty- or other such magical stuff which would only be computable after 'the end of Time'. I suppose Kripke has now reached that destination. Long may we avoid it.
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