Canada's Philosophical Association: Whatever Happened?

Once the CPA was a canadian philosophical association.

Philosophy papers were delivered and philosophers from coast to coast got to know each other, and valued these meetings as a chance to reunite and catch up with each others' news, academic or non. You learned about what was happening in other departments and other universities, just as much as about so-and-so's alcoholism, divorce or (more happily) new children. This created a national community. Some of the people you looked forward to meeting did interesting work that (mostly through their own choice) never got international exposure. These and other more famous people would present at the CPA in an atmosphere of pure intellectual discovery, and you would learn from year to year how their thoughts were evolving. People like

Don Brown, Steve Savitt, Ed Levy, and Jonathan Bennett at UBC; Phil Hanson and David Copp at Simon Fraser, Jack MacIntosh, Petra von Morstein, John Heintz, Kai Nielsen and Marsha Hanen at Calgary; the Churchlands and Michael Stack at Manitoba; Jan Narveson at Waterloo, a slew of people at Dalhousie, including Sue Sherwin, Rich Campbell, David Braybrooke, and the irrepressible Terry Tomkow, the Mackenzies, Ian Jarvie, Jagdish Hattiangaddi from York, loads from the U of T, Western Ontario, Queen's. I could go on.

Something happened a while ago--I wish I knew when and what--to change all of this. Personally, I remember Sarah Shorten's presidential address, when she decided to talk not about philosophy but about funding for universities. (She also threw in a brief and terribly predictable parody of Aristotle.) Sarah was a terrific scholar of ancient philosophy--one of the people in the never-publish category I mentioned above--but she lost her intellectual drive and became an academic functionary. As president of both the CPA and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, she never figured out that the two organizations had rather different agenda.

Ever since her presidency, I became personally aware that the CPA is no longer a place to do philosophy. Rather, it's a place for philosophers to fuss about Canadian politics: to worry not about content but about what language it's presented in, not about justice and education, but about the Departments of Justice and Education, to construct lobbies for SSHRC. Worthy stuff, no doubt, but who wants to spend a week away from home to tend to it? Leave it to the Deans and Department Heads.

It's pretty much that way now. It's a big congress when 150 people attend, and usually the reason is that it's being held in Montreal or Vancouver. The proceedings are incredibly tedious. And this is why I sound like a cynical old man bemoaning the passing of the good old days.