Abstract

“If you can keep your head while people all around you are losing theirs,” the saying goes, “maybe you just don’t understand the situation.” There are times when this is no mere joke. And so one may likewise wonder about the fact that philosophy seems to be relatively free of the kind of canon warfare that has become one of the hallmarks of the humanities in recent years, despite the fact that, as canons go, ours is almost paradigmatic. Don’t we understand the situation? Don’t philosophers realize that canons are supposed to be either venerated, valorized, vindicated, and vaunted or else vilified, vitiated, and eviscerated if not simply verboten, but in any case vociferously and violently fought about? Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we go at each other about it the way our colleagues in other disciplines do? Are we so slow on the up-take that we haven’t caught on yet? Or are we so bloodless that we can’t even get worked up about issues relating to the heart and soul of our very enterprise?