Frank Kogan

i began an argument somewhere -- i think -- in the plato threads, relating the seeming continued need for philosophy (in the sense you're suspicious of) to the desire for the survival of the institution of academia itself

(the argument wasn't well-made or completed: it's a hunch, really)

i think there's a good reason why transcendence-as-filibuster might be valued, as a core and foundational element in the institutions of knowledge: and that is that there's always an awareness that you the lowly teacher or slightly-less-lowly administrator within any given institution will always be needing arguments to persuade those who "found" -- ie fund - the institution that your decisions for its content or administration trump theirs...

if the powers-that-fund are enlightened, then yr arguments will prevail: but you are not able to ensure their enlightenedness, which will flicker now and then... and it only needs one anti-enlightened decision to shut the institution down, torch the libraries, draft the scholars, etc etc... this must NEVER happen

you can trust if you are confident to yr argumentative skeez (or those of yr successors) in all situations and all times: in conditions you can't currently even imagine, that is

or you can set up "foundational" arguments that appeal above and beyond all local conditions -- actual, possible, imaginable, other -- to ensure the continued survival of the project, the continity and connectedness of the study of knowledge and the gathering of learning

trust in pragmatic adaptation to the real and the local is a gamble: the successful establishment of "transcendent values" -- which in other words also rule your rulers -- is not (or is anyway a situation you may feel comfy in)

there are always reasons for the rulers or funders to cut the funding; there are always reasons for the rulers or funders to pressure the institution to supplant knowledge with whatever nonsense they contingently need that month -- my suggestion/hunch is that the filibuster is a kind of default end-run to ensure that such pressures never impinge too catastrophically

it's not -- i don't think -- entirely an accident that the terms "academy" and "academic" derive from the actual (local) geographical spot, a grove sacred to athene, where plato set up his school; nor is it accidental that socrates's and plato's and aristotle's pupils were the scions of the rulers of athens and later all greece and macedonia; there's a relationship between content and value and the machineries of intellectual continuity here... you can't deny that these three had a gift for getting their thought and names down on the permanent role of knowledge... my argument is that transcendence-as-(infinite)-filibuster is a key cog in this machinery of intellectual permanence; a device to end-run the hostile contingent interests of ANY later ruler-funder of whatever current institution houses the continuing project...