Even though subsidised university is now available to many, it is a mark of the new moneyed leisure that so many can and are willing to postpone the beginning of their productive life, especially when their interest in the explicit subject matter of their chosen discipline is often inchoate at best. As such, university departments now aim to provide far more than the core information that would have been demanded by the future scholars of yesteryear. Indeed, it could be argued that the subject matter is merely a vehicle by which to convey a set of skills deemed important for the future elite, a set that modern business and government cannot afford to spend time developing in their new recruits. The question then arises about the degree to which the university should accept this development and strive more systematically and consistently to cultivate these secondary skills, and the degree to which it should resist in the spirit of its original non-vocational calling. The contours of this debate are all the more striking in the university subject of philosophy.
Philosophy has a rather odd status among the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.
At the same time, philosophy claims to be the 'purest' of disciplines, at least in theory, in that it relies far less on palpable, given facts or on ever-developing knowledge and expertise, than any other discipline. Nevertheless, they can still be greatly admired for their insights and broad approaches to problems that stymied their predecessors and for their novel way of formulating the problem as a challenge for their successors. But the great problems of philosophy remain essentially the same now as they appeared to Plato, and countless number of ingenious solutions reveal not only just how intractable they are, but how fundamental they are to the way perceive the world and our place in it. It is also unlikely that philosophers are very happy people, or very practical people of action. Sometimes their philosophy is downright dangerous, whatever the noble intentions of a theory's progenitor.