Santiago Zabala in the blog of the American Philosophical Association:
Given the chance to become a movie director in Hollywood or a professor of philosophy at Harvard, I imagine very few of us would choose the academic life. The money and fame of being a movie director are far more tantalizing than teaching Plato, Kant, or Simone de Beauvoir. Terrence Malick chose to become a movie director instead of a philosophy professor, but not for the reasons you might think. It was not money and fame that convinced him, but the inability of philosophy courses to help “him understand himself and his place in the order of the cosmos” as Martin Woessner explained in a recent book dedicated to the great filmmaker. Although he is not the only promising scholar to ditch his dissertation and a career in academia due to philosophy’s scientific turn in the 1960s, he is probably the only one whose “entire oeuvre,” as Woessner tells us, “constitutes a philosophy by other means and is worth taking seriously as such.”
Malick’s inability to pursue a career in academia reminds us—members and friends of the APA—that we must encourage and promote students who prefer wondering, and asking questions about everything and nothing, to completing narrow tasks. Malick’s films and Woessner study demonstrate it is possible (and sometimes necessary) to philosophize outside of the university’s rigid disciplinary boundaries when these questions emerge among our students. Malick’s career arguably shows us not only what has gone wrong with the teaching of philosophy today, but also how to fix it by returning it to the project of “examining our lives,” as Socrates suggested.
More here.
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