Although I don’t have experience of many different universities, there are a lot of departments at mine which are actually quite envious of our research culture. We have regular talks, regular conferences, work-in-progress sessions. Occasionally someone from another department (English, Politics, History maybe) will come along and say they wished their departments had as much of a research culture as ours. Some of them couldn’t remember the last time their department had hosted a talk of any kind.

I guess it’s not all doom and gloom in philosophy. I’d rather have a lot of talks and the occasional bad talk, than hardly any talks at all.
(This comment has only been partially researched, contributions welcome)

Not to be a Jerky McJerkface, but I think that a lot of men go to talks in order to ask what they think are devastating questions and then to sit back and feel satisfied with themselves.

Additionally, most talks I’ve been to are so focused on some topic that people outside that area just are bored. E.g., I don’t do formal epistemology, and I am always bored at those talks. I bet this is the same for lots of talks. E.g., I once had a colleague who thought history talks were totally a waste of time. He would ask things like, “Okay so you’ve convinced me that Aristotle asserted that p and not that q, but so what? You haven’t explained why that’s philosophically interesting!”

Also additionally, I think that a lot people go to talks given by Big Names mostly out of interest in having gone to a talk by Big Name. I remember a talk given by Rorty that was packed packed packed. It was also an unbelievably boring (and inexplicably lengthy) discussion of his disagreements with Brandon’s take on such-and-such passages in Hegel’s Logic. I’ve been to a few Jeff McMahan talks that were totally excellent in that McMahan sort of way but oh my god they were so unbelievably dull for anyone who doesn’t do philosophy in that fashion. The talks were packed packed packed. The same few people asked really good questions and the rest struggled to get into that McMahan headspace, often taking forever in their questions to formulate thought experiments that, in the end, Thomson or Kamm or someone had dealt with and then McMahan commented on like 10 years ago, etc. (Same story with Kamm talks.) At these talks, people didn’t really care about the content, at least not in the first instance. They cared about being at Prof Muckety Muck’s talk.

Also additionally, I think that a lot of philosophy talks are so narrowly focused on the literature that they are like Rorty’s talk on Brandon on Hegel, but maybe of even less general interest, because, unlike a talk on Hegel – hey he wrote on everything – they are on Väyrynyn’s objection to Kirchin’s objection to Williams (is that a thing?). Those are all good philosophers (ok Bernard Williams was a bit of a sham – are you mad?) and this topic is really interesting to me, and these philosophers’ work really interests me (and 2 of those 3 people are super rad people). But seriously, my phil of science colleagues were gasping for air, to say nothing of the formal epistemologists, who about 5 minutes in had gotten busy updating all their priors regarding anything to do with lunch.

So, I am not sure that the assumption that general interest colloquia are for some sort of high powered well-researched philosophy really checks out. A lot of it is to create a performance space or for collecting the philosophical equivalent of Pokemons. And the talks that are really engaged with the literature are of such narrow interest that I cannot really see why we have general interest colloquia on them. What a weird waste of so much of our time.

Some departments have talks for research groups. These are smaller and often less prestigious but almost always better. Why? Because everyone in the room is interested and well-read, the assumption is that the speaker knows this, and we are not there to collect famous person points.

One last thing, by the way, there was this professor where I got my PhD whose questions always took the form of exhaustive annotated bibliographies. “Interesting paper. You know that Duns Scotus wrote about this issue in Quaestiones Quodlibetales, where he said… and then of course William of Ockham had much to say about that in his dialogues…” and so on ad nauseam. At a certain point, fuck the literature.

In the end I often really enjoy the theater of general colloquia, although the busier my life gets, the less I have time for them.

While I admit it’s non-ideal to know nothing about the literature related to what you are talking about… I don’t think the argument “can you think of other disciplines where this would possibly be acceptable” is successful. At least two reasons: (a) yes. I’ve been to many artist talks (there are, in fact, art departments at universities) in which other artists are largely not discussed and at which it would not be a matter of shame if someone asked a question about some other artist (not the speaker) and the speaker didn’t know much about that artist’s work. Also, I think in many cases in mathematics there is no need to “know the literature”. All you need to know is that no one has proved the thing you are trying to prove yet, and you need some tools (both conceptual and formal) to work with. You need to *think* about the problem, and try to come up with an answer to it (or maybe you need to come up with the question/problem in the first place, what I said still applies). (b), Related to (a): Thinking about arguments/questions/objections/theories doesn’t seem to me to require being informed about the background literature. Often, it seems to me, quite the opposite is true: the philosophers who know the least about some area of philosophy will ask some of the best questions (they also probably ask some of the worst questions, but…). If philosophy has anything to do with either art or mathematics–and I think these are the two disciplines it is closest to–I don’t see why we should be required to know the background literature to come up with and defend a view/put forward a theory. I do think we shouldn’t *completely* re-invent the wheel; but I actually don’t think genuine wheel duplication happens that much (or when it does, it is about some small narrow point, which, who cares). I think people sometimes come up with different versions of theories that may have been advanced before, and sometimes that is helpful (and if it is *too* close they will find out fairly quickly!). Just my two cents: I don’t think this is much of a problem. I think at least some of the time knowing too much background literature often causes people to come up with less interesting, exciting, compelling, big-picture, bold, new ideas than when people approach a problem without learning about every single little thing that someone said.

I have never seen anything like this happen.

Moreover, the contention that talks are not for getting feedback, but for sharing finished research, strikes me as peculiar. First, because we already have a mechanism for sharing polished research—publishing. Second, because in this discipline we judge and hire based largely on research output: talks, publications, and supportive letters which are essentially predicated on one’s ability to network with, and impress, prominent members of the discipline. “Don’t give a talk until there is nothing to improve in the project because talks aren’t for getting feedback” is a bizarre norm which essentially requires young scholars to produce publication-quality work in isolated bubbles. And at that point, why bother with the talk? Third, because specialists on the very specific issue at stake are not always prevalent, not always able to give feedback in a timely fashion to a total stranger they’ve never seen before, and not always open to the merits of a different view. Giving a talk on unfinished work is a great way to figure out what a more general audience will take away, what will confuse them, and so forth. I know what my adviser finds difficult about my work; I don’t know (without presenting) what others will find difficult.

Now, if the post is solely about *invited* talks, OK, that seems like more of a fair point. But then it just sounds like Handfield’s department is bad at choosing who they invite. Only twice have I seen invited talks at my department where the speakers seemed obviously unprepared for serious questions, and I suspect it was a factor of their sub-discipline, not their knowledge of the particular literature to which their talk responded.

Might this be a regional difference? As a North American philosopher I’ve *never* experienced this in the hundreds of talks I’ve attended. (It’s worth noting that the one named commentator who reports the same also works in NA). But North America has different norms for conferences than Australasia. In particular, I have been reliably told (by former organizers) that the AAP does not referee papers and just accepts any abstracts submitted to be presented at the conference. Such practices would remove one of the most effective safeguards against the problem that Handfield points to.