I argue that philosophy department should be reorganised: they should be built up around strong research groups in restricted fields. Another way to think of this: departments should model themselves on research centres. Members of such research centres / departments would teach outside their area of competency. At the BA level teaching can remain as it is, but those teaching classes will often be teaching outside the area of expertise. That is not a problem (it is an advantage). PhD supervision would be within the restricted fields that the department specialises in. In other words: I reject the zoo-model of academic departments where you get ‘one of each’, so that all classes can be taught by someone working on the topic of that class.

This article¹En stor takk til Synnøve des Bouvrie, Ingeborg W. Owesen, Kristin Sampson, Vigdis Songe-Møller, Ingebjørg Seip, Elin Svenneby og Else Wiestad for konstruktive bidrag og svært nyttige innspill til denne artikkelen. I 2014 hadde nærmere én av tre høyere utdanning. Blant folk mellom 25 og 39 år har mer enn halvparten av kvinnene høyere utdanning, noe som gjør denne aldersgruppen til den høyest utdannede i Norge.²Kilde er Statistisk sentralbyrå: https://www.ssb.no/utniv/ [Lesedato 3. oktober 2015]. presents reflections on women's presence in Norwegian philosophy, partly as a result of input from key persons in the Norwegian philosophy environment. We discuss the low proportion of women among students and staff in the field, then we investigate whether gender perspectives are present in the study of philosophy and why women's low participation in the study of philosophy is regarded as a vital challenge.

We argue that awareness of the impact history of categorization of gender is important and it is necessary to examine current direct and indirect stereotypes of gender, rationality and natural properties and their role in Norwegian philosophy today. We identify characteristics of the Norwegian post-war philosophy, such as diversity and openness, power struggles and gender blindness, and argue that women throughout the postwar period and until today been a minority in philosophy.

Our material shows that measures to improve gender balance in philosophy, and attempts to integrate gender perspectives, has met fierce resistance. The article also shows how the study of feminist philosophy and its influence and position in Norway, is well suited to give us a richer and more complex picture of the Norwegian philosophy. It may tell us something about how open-minded or closed the philosophical communities are, but it can also throw light on how philosophy itself plays the role as critical and self-reflective.

Are there common characteristics of Norwegian philosophy in the second half of the 20th century, from the Liberation (1945) to Bologna (1999)? In this paper I argue for view that we may point at four typical trends: (i) a rethinking and reworking of the traditional divide between so-called continental and analytic philosophy, at the same time a post-war reconciliation of German and English impulses, (ii) a vivid interest in politics and political philosophy, a political concern as philosophers, long before the Vietnam war, (iii) a genuine interest in scientific and scholarly research, in what colleagues in other disciplines were doing, a genuine interest and at the same time with a critical twist, and (iv) a concern for reasonable and enlightened discourse in public space, where also philosophers participated, at the same time as university philosophers, through their work with the introductory courses in semantics and the history of philosophy – examen philosophicum, mandatory for all university students – contributed to an enlightened formation of the academic youth. To elucidate these claims I refer to a few cases and trends, as I see it. A special emphasis is given to the situation in Bergen in this period.

In this article Føllesdal describes the development of philosophy at the University of Oslo, from a long period with only one professor in the subject and poor recruiting to the present situation with a strong and varied faculty educated at the best universities, which attracts young philosophers from many countries. The article devotes special attention to examen philosophicum, which is a compulsory exam for all university students in Norway, and to efforts to improve the quality of teaching at all levels, from exphil to education of researchers, partly through collaboration between the Nordic countries. Finally, the article describes the efforts to build up strength in ethics and in ancient philosophy and pays tribute to the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), the first center of excellence in the humanities at the University of Oslo.

The essay gives an historical overview of the «Department of Philosophy» at the University of Trondheim (NTNU) in its various stages, from NLHT, to NTH + AVH (UNIT) to NTNU (1995–). The appointed scientific staff over these years, their philosophical topics, interests and philosophical outputs is briefly reviewed and some topics of discussion are mentioned (such as the «unity of science» issue and the «postmodern» ascending «naturalism»). A regretful assessment of actual tendencies of (rhetorical) assimilation of the university to the model «corporation» concludes the text.