When John Armstrong asks if it is better for an educator to live in London and be regarded as a small fish in a large academic pond or to become a larger fish in a smaller Australian pond, he makes the question sound both practical and a theme worthy of philosophical investigation.
Armstrong is the right person to cast the question in either fashion. He has been appointed to the newly created position of philosopher-in-Âresidence at the business school of a leading Australian university.
Survival skills
The role was created to familiarise students and faculty at the Melbourne Business School with what the institution’s parent University of Melbourne hopes will be an additional set of intellectual survival skills.
Armstrong comes to the role from a background in the philosophy of art and aesthetics, including stints in the wider world of literature as the author of a number of well-regarded works, including The Intimate Philosophy of Art and Love, Life, Goethe.
The Oxford-educated associate professor headed to Australia, joining Melbourne’s department of philosophy in 2003. “There wasn’t any great plan, it just sort of happened that way,” he says, noting that his own philosophical interests have also travelled a distance over the years. A fan of Wittgenstein, his interests have shifted from the orthodox figures who first delighted him, including Plato and Kant, “to people who have a philosophical mind but who are not in the mainstream of the philosophical tradition”.
Armstrong could be describing his own career trend, or that of Melbourne, founded in 1856 as an antipodean version of Oxford, but which in recent years has reconstituted itself as the country’s first American-style public institution of higher learning.
Was leaving the world of pure philosophy for business — and leaving London for Australia — stressful? “The thing that surprised me about Melbourne was how receptive the city has been to what I want to do.”
A few weeks ago, for example, Armstrong headlined a public discussion of philosophy and business, explaining to an alumni gathering that the dimensions for conducting business are perhaps more intellectually bedevilling than at any point since the dawn of industrialisation.
He goes on: “I had assumed it would take a long time to get established here but what surprised me was how quick that process has turned out to be.” Even so, he admits, leaving the humanities for the comparative slash-and-burn of the business-learning environment proved an eye-opener.
“I was generally sympathetic to the idea of business and markets and so on, but now, of course, I’m at the other end of things, at least in terms of the business school’s perception, where I’m the one who’s least knowledgeable about how this or that works or what some specific procedure is.
“So it’s been challenging here to hold on to what I do know and not try to pretend I might know about certain matters of business when I don’t. Then again, my invitation to come and work at the business school wasn’t based on those things anyway.”
Announcing the appointment, the Melbourne school’s dean, John Seybolt, said: “Great lessons in leadership can be learned from CEOs and managers. They can also be learned from Plato, Goethe and a philosopher-in-residence who can transfer knowledge.”
Armstrong is not yet regularly teaching the school’s 690-strong student body, which he expects will happen soon enough, but rather establishing what he describes as “a sense” throughout the institution and its 55 full-time faculty members “that philosophical issues matter to the business community”.
Armstrong may feel he has much to learn about business but, as conventional academic wisdom has it, those within the business education environment usually aren’t known themselves for possessing any great technical appreciation of philosophy.
Business ethics
“Sure,” he agrees. “These are not people going around quoting Plato or Hegel.” However, in reading academic business journals such as the Harvard Business Review, what’s already struck him is how suggestive many of the business issues are for a philosopher.
“They may not use the same vocabulary or derive from the great philosophical tradition. But read sympathetically, one can see related issues coming up again and again.”
This has proved the case even outside traditional philosophy-related issues such as business ethics. The issue of what people know and how they can be sure of it — the branch of philosophy known as epistemology — is something Armstrong has already introduced in one classroom setting.
There, he was meditating on the Socratic method of discourse, not only in the beginner’s method of haggling over every grand statement but in its higher style of formulating techniques for approaching life’s heavier questions.
And what about that other question, the one about the value of academic life as a relatively small fish in a big British pond figuring greater or worse than being a big fish in a smaller Australian pond, Armstrong chuckles.
He replies carefully: “In a way moving to a business school is subtly more challenging than either.” — Â