1st Global Conference
Thursday 8th May - Saturday 10th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary
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Conference Programme, Abstract and Papers
Session 1: Intellectuals and the Public
Chair: Paul Reynolds
What is the Public Responsibility of Intellectuals?
Bob Brecher
Department of Philosophy, University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom
On the one hand, the suggestion that intellectuals have public responsibilities qua intellectuals appears at best élitist, at worst indefensibly arrogant. On the other hand, to deny the claim appears to undermine the very idea of an intellectual as someone occupying – in some sense – a public role: for what could such a role be in the absence of the specific responsibilities attaching to it?
I shall explore this tension from two starting-points. First, Gramsci’s remark that ‘Everyone is an intellectual...: but not everyone has in society the function of an intellectual’, (Selections from Prison Notebooks, eds Hoare and Nowell-Smith, p.9) which offers a means of thinking about what intellectuals are; second, an arguably Platonic conception of rationality as fundamentally practical offers the sort of connection between thinking and doing in terms of which responsibility may be understood.
The conclusion towards which I shall probably argue is that to know more and/or to be able to think more critically brings with it a greater degree of responsibility: for not only does ‘ought’ imply ‘can’, but -- on my cognitivist account -- ‘can’ implies ‘ought’. While every citizen carries certain responsibilities, the more accurately the epithet ‘intellectual’ applies to her or him, the greater that burden and privilege.
Out of the Ivory Tower, into the Public Sphere? Academics as Intellectuals
Alyce Von Rothkirch
Department of Adult Continuing Education,
Swansea University,
Swansea, United Kingdom
Are academics also intellectuals? And, if yes, what exactly does that mean? In his book Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society (2001), Gerard Delanty describes four academic roles: ‘research’, ‘teacher’, ‘professional trainer’, and ‘intellectual’. To him, being an academic intellectual refers to stepping outside the academic comfort zone into the public arena and, amongst other things, engaging in discussions about the nature of knowledge. Other books published in the United States, such as Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001) or Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1982), argue that academics abuse their position of power to take on public intellectual roles at the expense of non-academic public intellectuals – to the detriment of public intellectual culture as a whole. How much influence do academics seek in public life and how is that role defined? Does playing a role as a knowledge expert (in or out of the public sphere) automatically mean that an academic is engaging in intellectual work? Is being an intellectual as an academic always connected to playing a part in shaping public opinion or do academics define intellectual work in other terms? What kind of understanding do academics have of their ability to do intellectual work and what are the academic freedoms and constraints of the universities in which they work with regard to intellectual work?
This paper analyses research findings from a mainly qualitative research project, in which 15-20 academics, who occupy different positions at various universities in Wales and England, are interviewed about the overlap between academic and intellectual work. Agreeing that academics generally are intellectuals as well, the respondents explore the nature of academic intellectual work, the freedoms and constraints of academic institutions on intellectual work, and how they interpret academic intellectual roles for themselves.