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Vocation versus Profession in Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Cecil H. Miller*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri

Extract

In the Prologue to the third book of Gargantua, Francois Rabelais compares his own predicament to that of the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope during the seige of Cornith. “I held it not a little disgraceful”, he confides, “to be only an idle spectator of so many valorous, eloquent and warlike persons, who in the view and sight of all Europe act this notable interlude or tragi-comedy, and not exert myself and contribute thereunto this nothing, my all, which remained for me to do”.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940

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References

1 J. Benda, La Trahison des Clercs, Bernard Grasset (Paris, 1927), p. 197.

2 “The Ethics of the Ministry”; in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 101, No. 192, p. 151.

3 Ibid.

4 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York (1920), p. 92.

5 In Winds of Doctrine, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, 1913), pp. 186-215.

6 The reference here is of course to traditional empiricists and not to those who hold to the “radical empiricism” expounded by James. For a scholarly treatment of the former, see Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Yale University Press (New Haven, 1932). Locke, Diderot, Hume, et al., according to this writer “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.”