Is being ‘interdisciplinary’ an entirely practical thing?  Conferences and books that cross disciplines aim to practice interdisciplinary.  They do not theorise but engage in interdisciplinary activities.  They find places where disciplines meet or can potentially meet in tackling a problem or thinking about an object.

There are interdisciplinary centres which seek to represent this work and challenge the pressure of specialisation which creates ever higher boundaries and exclusive dom...

“I am not exaggerating when I say that this flood [of academic publishing] is eroding academic intellectual life. It has become impossible for anyone to maintain an overview of a single, even fairly narrow subject - let alone a discipline as a whole.  When I began work on a PhD on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the late 1970s, it was possible for me to keep up with almost everything new that was being published on Hobbes in Britain, the US and western Europe, while devoting most of my t...

Lately I have been considering the current state of the teaching of philosophy at A-level.  There is a philosophy A-level offered by AQA.  This is an excellent course because it requires students to develop significant subject knowledge and to tackle core problems in philosophy.  However, increasingly schools are offering the subject of ‘philosophy and ethics’ at A-level when this refers to certain modules on the various A-levels in religious studies offered by OCR, AQA and Edexcel.

My...

Is being ‘interdisciplinary’ an entirely practical thing?  Conferences and books that cross disciplines aim to practice interdisciplinary.  They do not theorise but engage in interdisciplinary activities.  They find places where disciplines meet or can potentially meet in tackling a problem or thinking about an object.

There are interdisciplinary centres which seek to represent this work and challenge the pressure of specialisation which creates ever higher boundaries and exclusive dom...

“I am not exaggerating when I say that this flood [of academic publishing] is eroding academic intellectual life. It has become impossible for anyone to maintain an overview of a single, even fairly narrow subject - let alone a discipline as a whole.  When I began work on a PhD on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the late 1970s, it was possible for me to keep up with almost everything new that was being published on Hobbes in Britain, the US and western Europe, while devoting most of my t...

Lately I have been considering the current state of the teaching of philosophy at A-level.  There is a philosophy A-level offered by AQA.  This is an excellent course because it requires students to develop significant subject knowledge and to tackle core problems in philosophy.  However, increasingly schools are offering the subject of ‘philosophy and ethics’ at A-level when this refers to certain modules on the various A-levels in religious studies offered by OCR, AQA and Edexcel.

My...