system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Who was the last notable autodidact philosopher? Can you recommend any writings on the professionalization of philosophy?

I wouldn't call Wittgenstein an autodidact, he didn't go to university, but he didn't need to. He came from one of the best families in Europe and was taught at home by private tutors.

As for the professionalization of philosophy — and other intellectual disciplines like literature and the fine arts — there was once a time when to be a philosopher meant being a man considered "the questions" and shared their thoughts with the world by some means. Very few of them were educated to be a philosopher and those that were, weren't trained at a university, they were instructed as protégés of the thinkers of the day, the education of Plato and Aristotle by Socrates is a famous example. Those philosophers who did have a formal education, weren't educated to be philosophers, they were given a basic education and taught how to read and write in their language and Latin or Greek (to read the Bible), along with things like mathematics.

I think that this kind of professionalization is detrimental, it's important to be properly trained and certified if you're a doctor or lawyer whose actions can have a profoundly bad consequence for others if done wrong, but for something like this I would suppose that there plenty of people who have interesting things to say from a philosophical perspective, but if they don't have a postgraduate education in the field that they're writing in, no publication will take them seriously and they'll be ignored. Sometimes people who are very talented and have important things to say, just aren't "school peop." In literature it's the same thing, a lot of great poetry and prose is confined to perpetual obscurity on a blogspot page, because a poetry anthology or publisher of "serious literature" won't even look at their work if their resumé doesn't have an MFA on it.


Those are my thoughts on professionalization, but what I'm really interested in, is what philosophers themselves have to say on the situation.
gpt
The comparison of Plato and Aristotle to autodidacticism is quite inapt. They spent years in extensive philosophical education. That it was not in an institutional structure identical to that found in much of the world today hardly makes it comparable to autodidacticism.

Neither has philosophy ever meant merely "being a man [who] considered 'the questions' and shared their thoughts with the world by some means." People often point to the etymology of the word 'philosophy' to support this view of the discipline, but etymology is not a reliable guide to the history of institutions, and in any case what formative figures like Plato and Aristotle meant by 'wisdom' in this context is something much more specific and technical than is imagined on this etymological argument.

While there are some senses in which different periods have seen a professionalization of philosophy, the idea that philosophy has in recent history gone from its previously normal state of being the domain of autodidacts who just consider questions to the domain of people with formal training in the field is premised on what is simply a fictional account of the history. A systematized course of instruction was already a feature of the Neoplatonic tradition in late antiquity, and the institutional background and significance of the university is a development of the high middle ages.

The nature and significance of professionalization in philosophy is a matter meriting attention, but just for this reason our attention to it should be placed on a careful accounting of the relevant facts.