What is meant by conventionality here? The rough consensus (at times unspoken) four years ago was that large swathes of philosophy-related activity are in a state of ongoing low-level crisis, a state of crisis which current funding systems, grant allocations, research schemes, teaching and assessment regimes are all part of. The Humanities and Arts as a whole, philosophy included, have been set a formidable task – that of justifying themselves in strictly utilitarian, economically rational terms. And they have tended to do this by fairly uniform methods – by adopting a corporatist mentality; and by defining all activity in procedural, preferably quantifiable terms, from research output to teaching standards to levels of student ardour.

An ethos of fairly ruthless professionalism was and is to replace a free but dilettante spirit of intellectual enquiry. For aspiring philosophers considering making a fist of it within the university system this means thinking of a philosophical vocation in terms of single-minded career-building, productivity (preferably machine-like output of papers, journals and books), building profiles, professional development, applying for grants and submitting oneself to the full Kafkaesque rigors that involvement in university life beyond the graduate level requires. The impression of those who got things together in mid-2002 – Matt Sharpe, David Rathbone, Jon Roffe, Sean Ryan, Craig Barrie and myself – and I hope none of them would disagree with me too seriously on this – was that much of the above professional activity was and is bureaucratically self-serving, philosophically questionable and of marginal intellectual substance; further more that such bureaucratically self-serving, intellectually insubstantial marginalia were increasingly coming to dominate university life and the possibility of philosophising itself.

MSCP was set up in reaction to this and in the hope that a special sort of interest, from students and fellow philosophers, could be roused by circumventing the rigmarole of university procedure. In more positive terms, MSCP was set up in an informal and friendly spirit. It was set up, not quite in an anti-commercial spirit, but certainly in an anti-corporatist spirit, if anti-corporatist is understood to connote an organisation that doesn’t commit itself to the goal of indefinite economic growth or maximising profitability, doesn’t take on board elaborate accounting and budgetary procedures and swears off the term “resources”. In short the MSCP was set up in a spirit of non-conformity. The aim was to see how far we could go without narrowly defining ourselves as another arts organisation or academic subsection in that almost infinitely ramified arts-education system known to us all.

The result is that MSCP is certainly no easily recognisable Thinking Shop. Unlike other institutionally better defined entities, it certainly makes no endeavours to succeed by sticking as closely as possible to the university’s managerial rules of the game – a game I think most of those who run it and teach for it have some deep suspicions about.

Why was it hoped that such a grouping might work, in spite of its avowed or semi-avowed aim of swimming against the tide? How was it supposed to work? Largely I think by attracting to itself like-minded individuals, first and foremost talented students on the look-out for the sort of philosophical education that universities no longer even pretend to provide, perhaps those feeling alienated by university routine like ourselves. In short by presenting a program focussed, though not exclusively, around teaching – one of the great interests of the project was to see to what extent teaching could be brought into the foreground of MSCP’s life, in contrast to practice in the university at large, where teaching is often seen as an unglamorous slog of secondary importance in comparison to research, administration and generally blowing your own trumpet.

Summer School 2003 was the first MSCP event of them all and for a while Summer and Winter Schools were about all the group interested itself in. The School was set up without a doubt to counter the hollowing out of the philosophy curriculum and create a place where students, at undergrad level and beyond, could study unofficially but nonetheless in a spirit of seriousness, without feeling, as many do, that their studies, owing to the bureaucratically regimented feel of university life, have been transformed into an endless, costly series of hoops to jump through. As far as the first of these (the hollowing out of the philosophy curriculum) goes – it was increasingly felt that the subject was being taught in a narrow, anti-historical, socially naïve way, one which made of academic philosophy a bland pseudo-science, full of technical jargon and unable to address matters of much emotional depth or cultural breadth. As for the second point (the bureaucratic malaise of the university) – it was agreed that informally held classes with minimal fees and no assessment, taught with genuine verve, would be a small step in the right direction. Judicious operating within the postgrad community, loose affiliation with the university department, the sympathetic interest of a small number of staff within it and, above all, the time and energy of those who started it and keep it going have made of MSCP a viable proposition until now.

If any of our concerns speak to any of yours, as philosophers, students or both, I can only encourage you to join us. The best way to do which is – keep an eye on the website, come along to Summer or Winter School or any of the other events we send you news of and – experiment with the style of philosophical thinking on offer.

– Cameron Shingleton. Secretary

The volume the following passage is extracted from, H. Redner’s Ends of Philosophy asks the large, fascinating and worrisome question of whether philosophy has been subject in the course of the last several centuries to a wide-scale devaluation of its highest values – possibly of all of them. Redner himself answers in the negative and sets forth criticism, interdisciplinary mediation and the self-recollection of the present as possible future functions for philosophy to fulfil. If these are not the unambiguous or sole concerns of the MSCP, the circle of questions, anxieties and ambitions from which they emerge are nonetheless ones which all those interested in European philosophy might tentatively be thought to share.

“By facing up to its end and radically doubting itself philosophy wins for itself the first principle of its own new “method”: that of critical destruction. Out of its own attempted self-destruction philosophy can perfect the principle of critical destruction to a degree never before achieved. Philosophy might thereby establish a critical function within modern culture and society that is peculiarly its own. By subjecting everything else to its principle of doubt it becomes capable of a critical destruction in thought that goes beyond all previous ways of doubting developed from Pyrrho to Descartes. These appear mere quibbles compared with the destructive negation put at our disposal by the great destroyers of modernity, such as Marx, Freud, Weber, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Through this critical power of self-reflection we now possess new methods of “negative dialectics” which leave nothing intact: no foundations, axioms, assumptions, first principles, absolute truths, common sense or conventional acceptations.

The critical destructive function is of essential value for a modern civilisation that unthinkingly annihilates its past and unknowingly becomes entangled and trapped in its own rational and technological systems, caught up in self-imposed forms that constrict it further development. Technological rationality is one such form of constraint which can only be broken, at least in thought, by means of destructive critique. And the same holds true of many other modern cultural and ideological forms as well. Whatever becomes frozen and fixed, and so unchangeable, must be thawed in the fire of destructive thought, which now as ever is the “devil’s element” necessary for creation. Of course, thought in itself is impotent, it cannot change reality; for this other powers must be called on. Nevertheless, thought, even as philosophy, can provide insight and instigation that can be made to work socially in unpredictable ways. It is most likely that philosophy will have to continue to confine itself to the university; but it is precisely there that its critical functions need to commence.

As a state-owned and state-directed institution the university proliferates and diversifies, but at the same time it fixes and hardens itself. As the sciences fragment further under the instigation of specialisation, and as each speciality institutionalises itself in a separate department, so gradually the possibilities of anything radically new emerging decrease, and the scientific establishment becomes ossified. Institutional establishments and their prevailing power arrangements impede the entry of new ideas or theories; they fetishise techniques and methods of research and restrict intellectual debate. In such an institutional setting philosophy has a necessary, though highly difficult and dangerous, critical function to perform. It must continually endanger itself so as to provide a critical challenge to the prevailing disciplines. Its tactic must be the opposite to that of conventional philosophy departments, which wall themselves off in their own specialist ghettos so as to remain pure and untroubled by “worldly” concerns. Philosophy must enter the arena of battle for scientific truth. It must intrude even where it is now not wanted.

The philosopher’s critical intervention into the sciences can, of course, only occur on condition that he knows them, not necessarily in the way in which their specialised practitioners do, but sufficiently to perform another of the functions of philosophy apart from critique, that of mediation between sciences that can no longer communicate with each other. And once again this is a dangerous role, for he who is in the middle stands to be buffeted from either side. Nevertheless, there has to be such an intermediary if mediation is to occur at all.

Mediation takes many forms. In the first place mediation is a mode of translation between two languages otherwise incomprehensible to each other. The role of translation has been made mandatory in the tower of Babel of the sciences, each one speaking its own tongue of technical methods and concepts and a professional jargon specifically designed to leave outsiders guessing. And translating here is not simply a matter of making lucid in another language what scientists have garbled in theirs; rather, it is a matter of transferring and interpreting the results of one science in terms of those of another. Thus for example, the work done on the neurological structure of the brain has little direct relation to the work done on mental states and dispositions, partly because the neurologist and psychologist speak such different scientific languages. In some cases this is a problem with immediate practical relevance: how is communication to be brought about between those who treat patients neurologically with drugs and those who treat them with a “talking cure”? The philosopher is not confronted here with a mere abstract problem of how the mind acts on the body (that hoary old chestnut which professional philosophers are still trying to pull out of the fire) but with an actual problem of how the language of a physiological science translates into that of a mental one. Any abstract mind-body theory is bound to be useless in this kind of enterprise.

There are other problems of mediation awaiting the philosopher which go beyond translation to the establishing of conceptual connections where none as yet exist. There are many conceptual problems demanding this kind of treatment which professional philosophers are incapable of dealing with because they regard such issues as mere intellectual puzzles. Thus what they take to be the problem of the relation of empirical propositions to evaluative ones, and for which they seek a general philosophical answer, is really not a logical problem requiring a neat solution but a task waiting to be accomplished: a matter of mediating between the humanists who make value judgements and the more factual social and cultural scientists. This task has to be achieved differently in each discipline. It arises in one way in literary studies, where it is a matter of relating the judgements of the critics to the researches of historians and sociologists of literature; it arises in another in political studies, where it is a matter of referring the points of view of those who cultivate a general political outlook to the theories of political scientists; and still otherwise it arises in every factual field where value judgements play a role. There are no generalisable solutions for such problems, valid for all cases and all contexts. The philosopher has no inherent advantages in dealing with them, except perhaps one: that his is a mind cultivated to encounter such problems in a number of fields and that he is practised in the arts of mediation. For not only should he be familiar with mediation in the sciences, but also between diverse areas of social life which are now cut off from each other: between science and art, politics and economy, and also between the private and public dimensions of everyday life.

The extended task of social mediation merges into another function of philosophy, one which departs furthest from university and academic studies: that of recollection. Recollection does not simply mean remembering the past, thought this is part of it; more importantly, it is the self-recollective function of making the present aware of itself in relation to its past and to its possible futures. Self-recollection is the modern equivalent of the classical philosophical dictum “know thyself”, but it is addressed to the collective present, not merely to the thinking individual, and so it involves an historical dimension that classical recollection did not require. The present has to recollect itself historically so as to realise its predicament and re-establish its own self-presence in time. The loss of self-presence in the present is a basic distemper of modern time. The question of time abuts the even more ominous one of death. Philosophy’s fundamental task is to recollect death as it has manifested itself in contemporary consciousness, when the old meanings of death are no longer viable…

To enable such recollection of time and death a new mode of philosophising is called for, one that addresses itself to the present and to things as they are in the present. This function of philosophy was identified some time ago and dubbed “concrete philosophising” by Walter Benjamin. Adorno takes it as a mode of philosophising that follows on the destruction of metaphysical systems and abstract categorial schemes; he explains it as follows:

The dismantling of systems, and of the system at large, is not an act of formal epistemology. What the system used to procure for the details can be sought in the details only, without advance assurance of the thought: whether it is there, or what it is. Not until then would the steadily misused word of “truth as concreteness” come into its own. It compels our thinking to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophise about concrete things; we are to philosophise, rather, out of these things.

Thus we need to philosophise out of the concrete conditions of life in our time, so that at the very forefront of our attention as objects of philosophising are the specific concrete things that hold primary significance for us all for they threaten the death of mankind or a transformation of the human condition: nuclear weapons, for example. The real meaning of these things is not apparent to the specialists; neither the physicists and engineers who build them, not the politicians and strategic thinkers who plan and dispose of them know what they are really about. To know this calls for a peculiar kind of thinker, one who is only to be called a philosopher for want of a better name, one able to see the relevance of such things for the state and meaning of mankind in general. We need “eschatological” thinkers capable of thinking through the “end of things” without relying on traditional religious comforts; thinkers able to think the unthinkable, not as exercises in either lurid imagining or unimaginative rational strategy but as intellectual tasks of courage and devotion.

And it is not only the Bomb or space travel – both subjects of great “transcendental” consequence – that require concrete philosophising; there are other objects in our world that demand it as well. All the products of technology that impinge on daily life need to be recollected philosophically. The new media of communication, as well as the medical pharmacopeia are already having a decisive impact on human faculties and capacities: on language, perception, behaviour, knowledge, life and death. They ought to be receiving as much attention from thinkers as did once the opening up of a cosmopolitan environment outside the polis, or the discovery of other civilisations, or the great revolutionary upheavals. By pursuing such concrete recollective thought the philosopher can ensure a relevance of academic studies to society beyond that of rendering professional advice and technical services. Such questions of relevance ought not to be decided simply through the pressure of social problems, or the inroads of politics and publicity; they demand a philosophical re-conception of the point and purpose of the subjects taught in the university. The self-recollection of the university is the task of the philosopher; he has to carry it through concretely without resorting to any abstract Idea of the University.

In general, it must be stressed that if philosophy is to accept the three functions of thought as here outlined, then it must resign itself to abandoning many of the higher and nobler purposes on which it has always prided itself. A philosophy dedicating itself to critical destruction, mediation and recollection must give up the attempt to understand Being, or to define essences, or to specify the good life, or to propound world-views, or to ensure authenticity, or to overcome Nihilism, or to establish the foundations of the sciences, or to draw the limits of reason, or indeed most of the other things philosophers have tried to do. A modest philosophy exercising its three functions together – for they are interconnected and to practise one without the others is impossible – could still, however, achieve much both for intellectual and social life as well as for individual existence.”