The AI era is exactly the wrong time to be closing a philosophy programme

In 1961, Dundee-born philosopher George Davie published The Democratic Intellect, a study of what made Scottish universities distinctive.

His argument was not primarily about structures, curricula or funding models. It was about what a mind is for. In his view, to have a mind is to draw connections. And he saw philosophy as key to maximising that ability to see the mathematician’s proof and the painter’s canvas as kin, not strangers. That is what made the discipline democratic – not a narrow professional caste but a common inheritance, available to anyone.

Davie’s emphasis on philosophy is, however, at odds with the increasing closure of philosophy programmes across the UK, most recently at Kingston University and the University of Hertfordshire – culminating, 65 years on, in the proposal by his home city’s university to cease philosophy as a named degree.

Admittedly, critics would argue that much of modern academic philosophy is also at odds with Davie’s expectations of it, with many philosophers following a path as specialised as that of any other academic. However, a pedagogical approach that fosters curiosity, interconnectivity and responsiveness can still produce the ideal he described. And this is exemplified by the University of Dundee’s art and philosophy BA, a joint degree in which students are supported to move between studio practice and philosophical argument, transforming what it is to make and think in the process.

That was the degree in which Amanda Askell matriculated, before graduating in single honours philosophy, doing a PhD at New York University and going on to work for OpenAI and then Anthropic. She now leads the personality alignment team at the AI firm, shaping how its powerful Claude system reasons about honesty and uncertainty.

Dundee’s is the only philosophy programme in Scotland specialising in European “continental” philosophy, where one might read Bernard Stiegler or Yuk Hui or Catherine Malabou beside Luciano Floridi: thinkers for whom technology, ethics and society are never separable questions. The overall programme draws women at a ratio of roughly two to one over men, already far above the discipline’s national average and rising to three to one for the art and philosophy BA. And it refutes – at least in Dundee’s case – the common argument that to close a department is not to close a discipline and that anyone who wants to study the subject in question can do so elsewhere. Yes, a student can study philosophy elsewhere. They cannot study this elsewhere.

But how many students will want to study philosophy, here or anywhere else, following the recent Institute for Fiscal Studies and graduate labour market outcomes reports, which show low graduate earnings premiums for philosophy?

Again, AI is a big part of the answer here. Tellingly, the phrase “AI” appears only once within the IFS report, and it makes no attempt to model its potential impact on the labour market. In fact, there is a strong argument that the high-return subjects in the IFS data – business, computing, law – face a lot of disruption to entry-level positions since the routine analytical work such junior staff typically carried out can now be automated. Meanwhile, a Financial Times report by King’s College, Cambridge provost Gillian Tett offers an early sign of a return to the connective thinking Davie calls for: one finance firm has shifted its hiring away from “AI-native” STEM graduates toward humanities students. In the financier’s words: “We want critical thinking, not just AI.” 

Moreover, philosophy’s contribution to an individual’s life was never best measured by the market. Most people I’ve taught did not choose philosophy for its earnings capacity, and the IFS data was never designed to capture why someone picks philosophy, or what they get from it. Its value is better displayed by Amanda Askell’s skill set, made possible by being trained to think about aesthetics, formal argumentation and science together. A mind trained only in computation cannot supply this – and nor, for that matter, can one trained only in optimisation theory.

A final objection to sparing philosophy departments is that universities must make savings, and a vice-chancellor cannot rewrite the funding system alone, however much they value a subject.

Yes, Dundee, like most of the sector, is under real financial pressure – although its crisis stems substantially from internal mismanagement. Either way, it doesn’t follow that philosophy is where savings should fall.

An Economist feature this month cited Federal Reserve Bank of New York data putting American philosophy graduates’ 2024 unemployment rate at 5.1 per cent, against 7 per cent for computer science – the reverse of what a decade of “learn to code” advice predicted. DeepMind and Anthropic between them now employ numerous philosophers doing philosophy as their actual job. Even if this is not a mass hiring wave, a small number of highly visible, well-paid destinations raises the ceiling of what a philosophy degree can lead to – much as happened to linguistics degrees when computational linguistics opened up, or mathematics and physics degrees when quantitative finance did. And it makes the closure of philosophy departments look like a bad bet against the market.

Nor is the question facing Dundee’s leadership exclusively financial. The bigger question is the one Davie posed in 1961: whether a university exists to produce narrow specialists, or minds capable of critical, democratic citizenship. And in the age of AI, the answer to that is even more obvious than it was at the dawn of what, two years later, the then prime minister Harold Wilson would call the “white heat” of scientific revolution.

The heat is whiter than ever. And the need for people trained not to be dazzled by it has never been greater.

Oisín Keohane is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee. He writes on behalf of the university’s philosophy department.