646
PARTISAN REVIEW
achieve a corporate persona, with their members exhibiting a commu–
nity of philosophical taste and even a philosophical style. This is true
of Columbia and Stanford, of Princeton and Corneil, and certainly it is
and was true of The Department-though it sheltered philosophers as
exotic as Santayana and as deviant as Whitehead, and personalities as
skewed as Henry Sheffer's, in the period under survey. It is also true
that philosophical work suffers when conducted outside the con–
straints of clarity and rigor that departmental colleagues and students
demand: it is arguable that even Charles Pierce's striking philosophy
would have been less idiopathic had he been more employable and less
a departmental outcast. There is certainly a sociology of philosophy,
which is a field hardly immune
to
fads and glamours, and to shared
strange idiosyncracies. Still, the transformation of the philosophical
personality can be matched, one feels, by transformations in the
historical , the scientific, and the critical personality, partly in conse–
quence of changes in society felt all across the frontiers of the intellect,
and partly in consequence of the rise of the modern university.
Meanwhile the impulse to the
sort
of philosophy which became
professionalized was on ly reenforced by departmental considerations:
its sources lay elsewhere. Professional philosophy
reached
Harvard,
from England and from the Continent, but The Department was only
one of the centers in which it was advanced: and though it doubtl ess
underwent modification because of local traditions-Quine's thought
is clearl y an aftershot of Pragmatism-what was modifi ed came from
without. I would not dare to insist against Marxists and sociologists of
knowledge generally that the shape of philosophical content is not
reflecti ve of deep social structures. I would only insist that no one
knows what these structures are or how the laws of transformation
work. And I am at the same time certain that on ly a defl ected absurd
chauvinism would pretend that they are
to
be identified with the deep
structure of The Department as a social entity.
ARTHUR C. DANTO
