What Aren’t We Philosophizing About, But Should?
“The singular magic of philosophy lies in its pairing of imaginative liberty with analytic clarity, but the field has come to privilege the latter at the expense of the former”
That’s Mala Chatterjee (Columbia) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reviewing All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld, the non-fiction book critic for The Washington Post and self-described “(lapsed?) philosopher”. She continues:
analysis is merely our tool, our vehicle for exploring and making sense of the world. Empty in itself, it is only animated and rendered valuable by the inquiries we have the imagination to ask. It can only take us where we are adventurous enough to go.
In her review, Chatterjee focuses on ways in which Rothfeld’s book shows that contemporary analytic philosophy—“a method in which I am as devoted a believer as any,” she reassures us— is “too small”:
first, the range of inquiries that we regard as philosophical; second, the materials that we deem appropriate to discuss; and, third, the forms and conventions to which our writing must conform. To my mind, the essence of analytic philosophy is the care and precision with which it approaches the question of what follows from what… But it seems to me that our discipline too often operates as though the stringency of the philosophical method somehow requires stringently constraining our philosophical inquiries, materials, and forms.
Three works from “Some Narrow Views: (Either Tall or Wide)” by John Baldessari
If her account of analytic philosophy as too narrow is correct (and I suspect some readers will think it isn’t), what’s the explanation for that narrowness?
We have become comfortable—too comfortable—with the limitations we have imposed on ourselves. It’s easier to determine what exactly follows from a set of materials when they are unambiguous propositions rather than, say, works of art, our lives, or any other phenomenon that does not already present itself to us in forms most amenable to our methods. Thus, we find ourselves increasingly siloed in the conversations others like us are already engaged in, and in the forms that they most easily take.
Then, since she knows her audience all too well, she adds:
But philosophy is supposed to be hard.
Chatterjee picks some pieces from Rothfeld’s book as examples of the types of places analytic philosophy could go. These include an essay that uses horror films and analytic philosophy about transformative experiences to discuss love and consent, an essay that dissects a cliche and inquires into the insatiability of desire, and several essays on pop philosophy and self-help trends in popular culture, like Marie Kondo’s “tidying up” and the literature on mindfulness.
The latter examples may seem not worth our time, but Chatterjee thinks Rothfeld is onto something:
What’s refreshing is her recognition that these are substantive philosophical contentions, and thus worth taking the time to seriously engage with: to make arguments rather than simply dismiss or assert.
So, dear readers, of the various aspects of our lives and culture and world we don’t currently produce much philosophy about, which should we recognize as “worth taking the time to seriously engage with”?
Interesting post Justin. I think there’s really two things here, each worth discussing. The first is Chaterjee’s claim that analytic philosophy is both a method and body of content such that analytic philosophy can’t take up certain subjects:
first, the range of inquiries that we regard as philosophical; second, the materials that we deem appropriate to discuss; and, third, the forms and conventions to which our writing must conform
The second is the claim you end the post with:
So, dear readers, of the various aspects of our lives and culture and world we don’t currently produce much philosophy about, which should we recognize as “worth taking the time to seriously engage with”?
I don’t think these two are the same and the only real aim of this post is to explain why I think Chaterjee is wrong but that, nonetheless, philosophers may not be paying attention to certain questions. The way I was taught about (and have practiced) analytic philosophy is not as a content-limiter but as a method/form. One can philosophize about anything analytically from sex to games to the fundamental nature of the universe. Ned Block once waxed analytically about orgasms.
So I think it’s wrong to say that analytic philosophy has content-limitations built in to it because it’s analytic. There’s a kernel of truth in what you’ve quoted from Chaterjee here (I haven’t read the book or her review) in the sense that sociological factors (the overwhelming liberal middle-classness of philosophy most of all but perhaps also its American-ness) created norms that make certain discussions seem impolite, rude, or verboten to discuss in peer-reviewed venues but these are not due to the fact that most of these philosophers approach things analytically.
I always find tirades complaining about how philosophy should be different somewhat tiresome. Don’t tell me that philosophers should be writing on X; just write really excellent philosophy on X yourself. If it is really excellent, people will notice. If you can’t write really excellent philosophy on X, then complaining that no-one seems to be able to do so strikes me as bizarre.
Are you suggesting that the term “excellent philosophy” is uncontaminated by cultural/sociological forces? You really don’t think the incentive structures governing modern academia play a role in determining what is regarded as ‘excellent philosophy’, and, by extension, a role in determining what people pay attention to? In my experience, when people complain about ‘how philosophy should be different’ they’re actually complaining about how they wish the sociological structures under which academic philosophy exists would allow for greater flexibility in how the discipline is practiced.
It’s not all that uncommon to complain first, and then to write to address the complaint later, having now got clear on what you think is wrong. People write manifestos and such for themselves as much as for others. It seems to me pretty uncharitable to read Chatterjee’s intervention as a complaint that she considers herself powerless to address.
What’s the reference class you’re judging “uncommon” against? In my experience it’s extremely uncommon for complaints about how something could be done better to be followed up by enhanced performance. That’s probably the source of OP’s frustration.
As Caligula’s Goat has suggested, I think it’s probably true that the reasons for which Analytic philosophy has developed in the direction that it has are largely extrinsic to the tradition itself, having more to do with the cultural/sociological milieu in which most of its practitioners reside.
With that being said, I want to raise an issue that I find pertinent to this sort of discussion: Analytic philosophers are trained to be very wary of generalizations. When confronted with a generalized claim, our instinct is often to retort with a counterexample demonstrating that the generalization does not, in fact, always obtain. Now don’t get me wrong, in many cases this is a highly useful and productive method, but when driven to a point of extremity it has a tendency to send our conversations into ever more pedantic circles of conceptual division.
In conversations like this one, when we’re trying to take up the Analytic tradition itself (or any other similarly complex social phenomenon) as the object of our inquiry, this aversion to generalizations tends to become somewhat counterproductive, in my opinion. If we want to be able to talk about topics as vast and involved as this, at a certain point we have to become comfortable with speaking in a general register. In my experience, any critical assertion about the Analytic tradition writ large, made to Analytic philosophers, tends to be met with (a) defensiveness, and (b) the objection that “this just isn’t true everywhere; have you considered…?” And this cycle continues until the question has been narrowed to the point of becoming almost meaningless.
Now, I wouldn’t be so hubristic as to suggest that the Continental tradition is lacking in deficiencies. In some ways, its foibles are the mirror opposite of those of its Analytic counterpart: a tendency towards obscurity, a penchant for making sweeping claims about society as a whole, etc. However, I do think we Analytics can learn a thing or two from the Continentals when it comes to the way we approach certain broad-scope questions.
One big issue that needs philosophical discussion right now is how to set up government and property rights beyond Earth. Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend who works on space law for a top DC law firm, and he was calling for philosophers to help by providing policymakers with good principles concerning these issues.
The laws that will govern space in the future are being written now. The major forces guiding the current writing are a few wealthy national governments, and profit-driven private-sector entities. The old space treaties hailed from the Cold War and helped to keep the superpowers from building monstrous space weapons. But they don’t address many of the issues that we face in this century. So new laws are needed.
Given the political forces operating now, it’s uncertain whether the new laws will be written to benefit future residents of Earth and their spacefaring kin, or some narrow interest today. But things are malleable enough at this point that good philosophical arguments for clear principles regarding political authority and property rights could give policymakers something to lean on against the demands of corrupt interests. We need laws that are fair, and prevent abuse of space technology from destroying life on Earth.
Earth can be seriously endangered by someone in space throwing stuff or diverting asteroids that kill us like the dinosaurs. Tungsten beams would be a weapon of choice because they remain solid at 3000 C / 6000 F, but even oak-plated things can survive re-entry. So it isn’t hard for something falling from space to make a deadly impact. A globally catastrophic asteroid diversion could be an intentional destructive act, or an accidental consequence of an asteroid mining disaster. It’s important for our legal frameworks to prevent intentional destruction, and high asteroid risk resulting from narrow private-sector profit.
Property rights over space materials important to future technologies will also be important. Moon rock is rich in Helium-3, which is useful for nuclear fusion and rare on Earth. The global energy supply has often been controlled by a small group of morally dubious people, and it would be great if the transition to fusion freed us from that rather than returning us to it. We need to think through how property rights should work for things like Helium-3 before someone, whom we will arbitrarily call ‘Elon’, gets a moonopoly.
Thank you Neiladri! I’ve been saying that we need a tungsten beam ethics for years now and I feel like I’ve been shouting into the void. My view is that it is wrong to shoot lasers or divert asteroids towards the Earth.
That’s a start, but there’s far more interesting questions about how issues of law, property, jurisdiction, etc. apply in space, given that most of our legal systems presuppose that activities take place on the surface of the earth, and have thus mostly divided legal authority on the basis of a two-dimensional set of borders. Sure, there’s some amount of discussion of air rights and the like, but I don’t think anyone wants it to be the case that objects in orbit are passing through the jurisdiction of dozens of different countries and hundreds of localities every 90 minutes as they orbit the earth.
Much of this work is going to be within the discipline of law, rather than philosophy, but to the extent that it questions some of the fundamental assumptions on which all law has hitherto been based, it will be helpful for philosophers to be engaged with it.
“I don’t think anyone wants it to be the case that objects in orbit are passing through the jurisdiction of dozens of different countries and hundreds of localities every 90 minutes as they orbit the earth.” Great point. One issue is that this kind of structure could undermine safety dynamics related to the ‘loss of strength gradient’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss-of-strength_gradient), which says that military strength decreases with distance. The loss of strength gradient is equilibriating, because it leads to relatively stable borders between great powers. But geographic distance is all messed up in LEO
It’s not clear to me that any of these things raise issues that can’t already be handled by straightforward applications of existing views. It’s also not clear to me that treating them as though they did raise such issues is politically attractive, insofar as it can be used to give rhetorical cover to bad actors. (“Yes, all this new tech is going to be very disruptive—mostly in ways that benefit us, but let’s not dwell on that—but maybe that’s good, actually? Given how complicated all the underlying normative qustions are, who’s to say?”)
What is clear to me, though, is that as far as levers for getting better results from policymakers are concerned, more philosophical theorizing is pretty far down the list!
BCB, do tell us what the existing views are, and which conclusions their straightforward applications support. For example, if we’re talking about Lockean principles of justice in acquisition, how do we decide how much of the moon a Helium-3 mining firm can claim?
Maybe there are more effective levers for getting better results from policymakers, but my lawyer friend thinks philosophy can help. In dealing with space, regulators and judges face new questions where there is little existing law to rely on. Philosophers can explain why some answers are more justified than others, giving them principled replies to the demands of self-interested parties.
I agree with Neil. I also think it would be very good to have proposals for governance of a future Mars colony (Red Mars explores a bunch of the potential dynamics that could arise).
I could do with more clarity as to whether the adjective ‘analytic’ here refers to the use of analysis or to the approach that distinguishes itself from ‘Continental’ philosophy. Sometimes the ‘A’ is upper-case and sometimes not, which leads to ambiguity,
Indeed, such clarification would be useful. For what it’s worth, I thought the flavor of the post smacked more of the ‘Analytical vs. Continental Tradition’ conversation than of a discussion of analysis as a simple method.
“Chatterjee picks some pieces from Rothfeld’s book as examples of the types of places analytic philosophy could go. These include an essay that uses horror films and analytic philosophy about transformative experiences to discuss love and consent, an essay that dissects a cliche and inquires into the insatiability of desire, and several essays on pop philosophy and self-help trends in popular culture, like Marie Kondo’s “tidying up” and the literature on mindfulness.”
Aren’t these all examples of places analytic philosophy not only could go but actually has already been, which would undermine the claim about its narrowness? These all seem like the sort of thing analytic philosophers have become fairly good at engaging with from their own theoretical perspectives. If anything, the discussion demonstrates a narrow view of what actually happens in philosophy more than narrowness on philosophers’ part.
I feel like much of contemporary aesthetics gets sidelined when people discuss how limited in scope philosophy is. For a couple of decades now, there’s been so much fantastic “everyday aesthetics” (to borrow from Yuriko Saito) on everything from pop media to dinosaur skeletons in museums (cf. Michel Xhignesse). I think we’re doing great!
Absolutely. Nguyen and Riggle, for instance, do very cool stuff that reaches across boundaries.
I think that potential applications of the Analytic methodology are boundless, and I also agree with you that Chatterjee is probably exaggerating the extent to which contemporary analytic philosophy is problematically narrow. As you say, the tradition has in fact already gone to many of the places she thinks it ought to go.
However, I would also sympathize with some aspects of the sort of grievance that Chatterjee is voicing (broadly construed). The things that bother me about contemporary anglophone philosophy are largely extrinsic to the Analytic methodology itself, and are instead endemic to the incentive structure of modern-day academia. For a variety of reasons, this structure tends to encourage the production of high volumes of essay-length publications (rather than monographs), and has a special affinity for pieces that “contribute to a conversation”. Now, we can argue about the particular reasons for this (like I said, I don’t blame Analytic philosophy qua Analytic philosophy), and even whether or not it’s an inherently bad thing, but for the time being I mainly want to stress the fact that it is happening. And, yes, people like myself — who tend to be less than exuberant about the high-volume-essay-length-publication trend — do find the current direction of academic philosophy in the Anglosphere to be somewhat troubling.
One topic I wish there was more philosophy of is geopolitics, especially outside of ethics. For instance, there are so many conversations—some of them very consequential, conducted in the “corridors of power”—which casually traffic in talk of long term desires and intentions of highly diverse and disunified entities like nation-states. I feel such talk could use some careful philosophical analysis, and how different conceptual categories here might lead to different kinds of decisions.
There is some literature in International Relations (IR) that deals with some of the philosophically-inflected questions you’re pointing to. For example, Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999) defended the view that nation-states are “corporate actors” that have, or should be treated as having, intentions etc. This position sparked some debate; there is a contrasting tradition in the subfield of foreign-policy analysis of disaggregating (for lack of a better word) the state.
That said, more philosophers directing attention to international relations and geopolitics couldn’t hurt.
‘Chatterjee picks some pieces from Rothfeld’s book as examples of the types of places analytic philosophy could go. These include an essay that uses horror films and analytic philosophy about transformative experiences to discuss love and consent, an essay that dissects a cliche and inquires into the insatiability of desire, and several essays on pop philosophy and self-help trends in popular culture, like Marie Kondo’s “tidying up” and the literature on mindfulness’.
Is there really a dire shortage of such material? There are three entire book series on philosophy and pop culture from Blackwell, Open Court, and Rowman and Littlefield with over 150 books between them. Very many of the contributions could be considered analytic.
This is a very US-centric answer, but I would like to see more discussion of transit issues besides autonomous cars. I think ethicists could contribute to public conversation about problems we are facing now like the pedestrian crisis (pedestrian fatalities are at a all time high), “car bloat” (the share of large vehicles on the road), and other moral problems stemming from living in a car-dependent society.
I don’t know where he sees himself fitting within the analytic/continental space but Shane Epting does interesting work on urban mobility. Quill Kukla’s book, City Living, is also great and uses tools, concepts and literature that analytic philosophers are familiar with.
I’m working on a paper on this topic. My impression is that car bloat is a big contributor to the pedestrian crisis. Getting hit by heavier cars s even worse, and a lot of these larger vehicles make it harder to see pedestrians, especially children.
TL;DR: There are huge gaps in analytic philosophy. They exist because of uncritically accepted socio-cultural biases of analytic philosophers.
Take a look at the SEP to see some pretty big holes. (And I take it that the SEP is a decent proxy for what philosophers think of as “mainstream” or “worthwhile”.
Consider music. It’s one of the most highly developed parts of all human cultures. The SEP has three highly general survey articles on music. The entire history of Western music (from antiquity to the present) is covered in two articles. That seems like pretty thin coverage. There are no articles on specific types of music (nothing on classical, opera, jazz, rock, or metal). Since both classical and metal are often pretty philosophical, the lack here is odd.
Consider some widespread, perhaps even universal, human practices. Like magic and astrology. No articles at all on those. I’ll say it’s pretty clear that there’s a purely socio-cultural explanation for those gaps. I’ll say philosophers have accepted, without study, without evidence, without analysis, and without arguments, a certain Enlightenment narrative about those kinds of practices. Yet there’s an article in the SEP on petitionary prayer. So, yeah, there’s a pretty clear bias.
Consider animism. Animism has a long history in Western thought. Animistic beliefs and practices are widespread across human cultures. Animism is being revived in interesting ways today (especially in Continental philosophy, but also in new religious movements). But not a single article. Similar remarks apply to shamanism. Or to New Age religiosity. Again, New Age religiosity has spread around the world. You’ll find it well-established almost everywhere. Of course, you’ll find dozens of articles entirely about God. Again, a pretty clear bias. (And there also exists a growing literature in philosophy of religion about how badly biased that field is.)
Consider mind-altering drugs like cannabis or psychedelics. There’s an enormous literature on psychedelics outside of philosophy, and even within philosophy there’s a pretty big literature on psychedelics. Yet no SEP article. People around the world, all over the place, use cannabis. Is there seriously nothing philosophical to say about it?
Nothing on hunting, running, food, sleep, grief. All things lots of humans around the world, throughout time, are involved with. And they all generated some pretty elaborate parts of our cultures. Sure, philosophers do write about those things, but if the SEP is a proxy for what’s mainstream or “serious”, then it’s odd that philosophers don’t take such large human activities seriously.
If there’s a large, well-developed cultural practice, done by people throughout history around the world, then we probably ought to be thinking about it. And it probably should be considered mainstream or serious philosophy.
To do a bit of propaganda for my tradition of choice: You’ll find that certain prominent figures on the Continental side of things do discuss these sorts of sociological issues: people like Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault, Bataille, Baudrillard, and even Nietzsche to some extent. I doubt you’ll find their works fully satisfying in this regard, but I think you’ll at least discover that they’re more open to the type of thing you’re looking for. Of course, working with the Continentals presents its own set of exigencies – the 20th century French thinkers in particular have their own stylistic conventions to which one must acclimatize, but if you can work past that, it’s thrilling stuff!
Yes, you’re absolutely right! Continentalists are doing fascinating work in all these areas. But I took the OP (with its mention of “analytic clarity”) to be about analytic philosophy. Hence I’m only claiming that these (and others) are gaps in analytic thought. I think analysts could benefit greatly from more study of continental thinking.
Eric,
SEP aside, the philosophy of music is actually a _huge_ field in contemporary aesthetics, with entire books written on, e.g., jazz and rock and opera. And even more articles. Including on metal (including one by me!).
Of course it is! I’m only using the SEP as a proxy for what is “serious” or “worthwhile”. Probably an inaccurate proxy, but there it is. The problem (for analytic philosophy) is that so much is being done outside the channels that are “serious”. Why aren’t there articles specifically on jazz or metal in the SEP?
And I’d love to get a copy of your article on metal.
Try this:
https://philpapers.org/archive/XHITHM.pdf
Great paper, by the way!
I would love to see more practical work to help ordinary people evaluate sources. It seems to me that our political divisions as a society usually have much less to do with differing values than differing beliefs about what is going on.
The idea that either the ethos of analytic philosophy itself or the incentive structures governing philosophy as a profession somehow restrict the range of topics that you can write about strikes me as absurd. Here are some of the topics that I have either written about or touched on in my published works during a reasonably successful career spanning nearly forty years:
The function of morality in social life;
moral motivation (focusing on Hume);
No Ought-From-Is;
Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin,
Jane Austen’s Mr Elliiot, class-oppression and sexual oppression;
Hume’s ‘Sensible Knave’;
the court memoirs of Lord Hervey;
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus;
the nature of historical explanation;
Nietzsche and Nihilism;
Luther and Erasmus
predestination,
Popper,
imperative logic,
the conservativeness of logic (the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you have not put in);
positive truthmakers for negative truths;
the alleged abstractness of ‘abstract’ objects such as numbers,
George Orwell;
Conspiracies, conspiracy theories and the theory of conspiracy theories [over 700 citations];
The Philosophy of Mathematics;
The Philosophy of Science;
The Milgram experiments;
genealogies and subversive explanations;
Edward Gibbon and the wars of Justinian;
Terrorism;
The Second Gulf War and its ideological justifications;
The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction;
the fall of the Sassanid Empire in the early Seventh Century;
Plato’s Thrasymachus and Marx’s ‘18th Brumaire’;
Bertrand Russell’s critique of Bolshevism;
Situationism in social psychology;
Inferentialism in the Philosophy of Logic;
slurs (including racial slurs);
Emotivism and the Error Theory;
Epistemic virtues and vices;
Invisible Hand mechanisms;
Prudential reasons for religious beliefs;
Rationalism in ethics (Thomas Reid, John Balguy, Richard Price) ;
Lakatos and Hungarian communism;
Moore and the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’;
Pragmatism (William James);
Locke’s arguments for toleration;
the Stalinist show trials;
King Olaf, Earl Sigurd and the conversion of the Orkneys;
Verificationism;
Aristotelian Naturalismin ethics;
Putnamite synthetic identities;
Coercive theories of meaning,
Cicero;
evolutionary psychology and religious belief;
irrationality and the social sciences;
Adam Smith and the nature of trades and professions;
Naomi Klein’s recent book, Doppelgnager.
Now some of these topics are fairly standard fare for an analytic philosopher whose primary speciality is meta-ethics, but quite a few are not. Yet I have never felt pressured NOT to talk about any topic that interests me (though having to acquire the necessary background knowledge has sometimes slowed me down). . Indeed I am a whole-hearted subscriber to a remark the late Dan Dennett’s ‘One of the great things about being a philosopher is that you can read almost any book you like and call it work.’
Furthermore although I am perhaps more wide-ranging that most it seems to me pretty common for philosophers in the broadly analytic tradition to cover a wide range of topics.
Here are some of the subjects discussed or alluded to in print by my colleagues at Otago:
Climate Change including rising sea-levels; the Social Contract Case for a Carbon Tax, Ending Aviation Exceptionalism; “Democracy as Constraint and Possibility for Environmental Action’; “Just transition to climate resilient coastal communities in Aotearoa New Zealand”; Philosophy of Religion including animism; Extinction, Democracy and Species Conservation; Kantian Political Theory; Biodiversity (clarifying the concept); welfare; and well-being; David Friederich Strauss (the ‘Life of Jesus’ left-Hegelian); planning for pandemics; the role of ethics committees in medical policy; the public funding of expensive drugs; Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science, Theism and Explanation (How good are theistic ‘explanations’?); Religious Belief and Evolutionary Psychology; ‘‘The Act of Faith: Aquinas and the Moderns’; Islamic Philosophy of Religion; ‘‘The Rationality of Renaissance Magic’; Paraconsistent Logic, Paraconsistent Mathematics; Collective Action Problems; the Philosophy of Time; the Representational Fallacy (the idea that it is a mistake to reason from the structure of our representations to the nature of the facts represented); ‘The Evolutionary Origins of Tensed Language and Belief’; the Philosophy of Sport, particularly doping; the Philosophy of Language, including the Kripkenstein problems; Metaethics (with a wide variety of sub-topics such as the nature of truth) , ‘Lenin’s Anticipation of Bernard William’s ‘Integrity’ Argument against Utilitarianism”; “Hume: Necessary Connections and Distinct Existences”; Spinoza; Helvetius; Hobbes; ‘Hobbes’ Reply to the Fool’; the mapping of genotype to phenotype in evolutionary algorithms; ‘A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence’; ‘Evolvability and Progress in Evolutionary Economics’; and The Innate / Acquired Distinction’s the Philosophy of Biology.
There are only nine of us in this department including one colleague who very recently retired and two us who are part-time. But it seems to me that we cover quite a lot of ground.
Now a possible come-back is this: ‘That’s this is all very well, but such intellectual adventurousness comes at a cost. You may be able to publish on a wide variety of topics but you won’t get cited.’ Not so. Here are the citations totals (where available) for myself and my colleagues, as listed on Google Scholar: 1871, 1682, 704, 613, 540, 1550, 957, 5132.
People who complain that they are constrained to discuss only a narrow range of topics for fear of professional failure are like people who forge themselves a set of manacles and then complain that they are in chains. Stop it, it’s silly.
May I ask where you wrote about Thrasymachus and The 18th Brumaire? (Yes, I’m lazy.)
This one is quite recent: Charles Pigden (2023) ‘What Thrasymachus Should Have Said’ Filosofiska Notiser, Årgång 10, Nr. 1, 2023, 129–165
I will email you a copy if I can find you online.
Charles,
I share your sentiments. I do not know if my work counts as “analytic” philosophy (some of is certainly not, as it is published in other fields), but I think well trained philosophers can and have written on an endless array of topics. It is our creativity that holds us back, if anything is holding us back. Incidentally, stepping out of the mainstream list of topics also puts one in touch with many interesting people … I corresponded with a Nobel laureate for a bit because of something I dared to write about
Here’s a concrete example of the type of “incentive structure” thing I’ve spoken about above:
Specializations. In order to get hired to a tenure-track position these days, one has to be able to present oneself as a specialist with expertise in, at most, a handful of particular subfields. I suppose there might be exceptions to this, but it is the general rule. Graduate school is the time during which we are meant to select and pursue these specializations in preparation for a daunting entry into a job market (which, we hear almost daily, is only growing more abysmal).
So, at least in the later phases of our grad school careers, we’re encouraged to cultivate credentials in our areas of specialization above all else. You say that “I have never felt pressured NOT to talk about any topic that interests me.” That’s fantastic, and I wish this were universal. Sadly, though, most of the graduate students I know have indeed been discouraged from pursuing one project or another either because it doesn’t fit their area, or because it’s unlikely to be picked up by a “top” journal.
Okay, so you’re under these constraints in grad school, but what about when you’ve successfully landed a tenure-track career? Surely then it’s time to branch out and be creative. The problem here is that, assuming you’re lucky enough to even land such a position, you’re then confronted with the need to actually qualify for tenure. Most universities have some kind of publication requirement that tenure candidates have to meet, so the pressure is on immediately. Yes, in principle at this point you can publish on anything you like, but you’ve just spent the last 4-5 years becoming an expert in this one field, and getting really good at participating in these conversations, and you’re racing against the tenure-evaluation clock. So, the choice is between being creative and branching out, which brings no guarantee of success and, as you acknowledge, often requires you to ‘slow down’, or remaining comfortably within your area and churning out solid, respectable, and slightly boring, publications. Of course, one can choose to take the road less traveled, but it is a perilous road indeed, and many avoid it simply for fear of adjunctification.
So, what specifically am I complaining about which I personally have no power to change at this point? Well, hiring and tenure-granting practices, for one thing. Yes, once you have tenure, you’re afforded wonderful freedom in what you choose to write and publish on, but you have to realize that calling concerns such as mine “silly” simply because you personally have not and/or do not experience them smacks of massive privilege.
Am I privileged? Perhaps, but hardly massively so. I am starting to think that my biggest privilege was NOT going to an American -style graduate school but instead doing a lightly-supervised thesis-only PhD in Australia.. Rather than being trained to be a deferential contributor to pre-existing ‘conversations’I was allowed to educate myself a) by wide reading and b) by picking the brains of faculty in the course of casual conversations in the departmental common-room. As a result I was rather more inclined to think that I myself might have something original say, and about a wide range of topics too. Apart from that, like almost everyone I know, I had a period of precarity (and even unemployment) before finally getting a permanent job (no such thing as tenure here) at the age of thirty-one (I can well remember the immense feeling of relief when once I realised that the big gamble of my life had finally paid off.) Both before and after permanent employment I was, of course, under pressure to publish; to begin with to get a job, and later to get promotion (though I have always been rather less worried about this than some people appear to be). But it did not stop me writing, submitting and publishing papers that were outside my official AOS, even while I was a member of the precariat. I am primarily a meta-ethicist but my first (precariat-period) paper was on the analytic/synthetic distinction, a topic I had never formally studied since undergraduate days. It is far from being my most successful paper, with only 12 citations to date (though I am proud to say that Putnam appreciated it), but it got published in the first journal I sent it to (Inquiry), so not a bad move from a careerist point of view. My second paper (again from the precariat period) was on Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, a topic which I had no formal training whatsoever. Again it was published the first journal I sent it to. . The next three papers were mostly in my AOS, though one had a substantial logical component, again an area in which I had no formal training apart from the logic courses that I took as an undergraduate. That paper was accepted by the first journal I sent it to and now has a total of 159 citations. I then published a short paper on Derrida that came out in a literary journal. I had never studied Derrida prior to writing that paper. The next paper (I think from the post-precariat period) was on the debates between Luther and Erasmus and their implications for Ought-Implies -Can (though I also use modal logic to vindicate the validity of some of Luther’s key arguments for predestination and got sufficiently interested in the theological side of things to develop a semi-Pelagian alternative) . I attended no courses on any of these topics except for a Hughes-and-Cresswell based paper on modal logic that I took as an undergraduate. I had picked up Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will from a Christian bookshop. during a period of unemployment in my home town when I and my family (wife and two children) were living on the dole, in my parents house.. This paper too was accepted by the first journal I sent it to, and now has 36 citations. However the most successful of my early papers was ‘Popper Revisited or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories’. This helped to create the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories as a potential AOS, nobody else having written about this since Popper in the forties and fifties. It now has 398 individually verified citations. In the first eleven year of my career (1986-1996) 46% of my papers were on non-AOS topics (including one on the Milgram experiments and another on the Philosophy of Mathematics) and were only within my Areas of Competence in the trivial sense, that I acquired the necessary ‘competence’ by writing them. About 30.7% were squarely within my meta-ethical AOS (though even these involved allusions to such such texts as Cicero’s Letters and On the Nature of the Gods, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Bacon’s Essays) and a further 23% were what might be called AOS+ (they were in some sense about meta-ethics though they were ‘not your usual’ meta-ethics paper). Now a reminder: I did some of this as a post-doc and a temporary lecturer and the rest as a junior lecturer at a university at the ends of earth (though admittedly with a permanent job). Some privilege I might concede (since I spent less time as a member of the precariat than many young philosophers nowadays) but it is ridiculous to describe it as massive .
Moral; If you have been crippled by your education or if you lack the breadth of culture to produce out-of-the box, genre-bending papers on a variety of topics, that’s fine But don’t kid yourself with the excuse that that producing such papers is incompatible with professional success or that it presupposes ‘massive privilege’. It doesn’t.
Look, it’s not 1986 anymore. It’s cool that you enjoyed a freedom we don’t. Thanks for reminding us.
I spent all of grad school having my supervisors telling me that doing anything other than some hyper-specific meta-ethics work was a waste of time. All the hires where I want to work have written nothing but uselessly narrow papers on the same one thing their whole careers.
I ignored their advice, and am still waiting for my first TT interview.
Reply to Nat and Look to the Continent
Well it seems that I owe you guys an apology and a retraction. All my professional life (including my period as a member the precariat) , I have been writing about topics that weren’t part of my original AOS and only became ‘areas of competence’ in the process of writing about them. Furthermore, even within my AOS,I have been writing papers that challenged the reigning orthodoxies or were offbeat in various ways. For instance, I have argued (citing Cicero among others) that Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ its riddled with historical errors; that the central argument in Grice and Strawson’s ‘In Defence of Dogma ‘ is obviously fallacious (and that the paper contains historical errors); that though Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is is provable, it provides no support for a fact-value distinction (let alone non-cognitivism); that it is a mistake to suppose (as many people do) that Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is and Moore ‘Naturalistic Fallacy Argument come to much the same thing; that Geach fails dismally in his purported proof that ‘good’ is an attributive adjective and that Aristotelian virtue ethics is on a hiding to nothing; that the Cornell Realist (or Putnamite) project of establishing synthetic identities between moral and (apparently) non-moral properties is either redundant (because it presupposes analytical identities) or impossible (because no such analytical identities exist); that Prior’s critique of inferentialism in the Philosophy of Logic can be used to discredit ‘generalism’ in the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, and that Thrasymachus’s ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger ‘ thesis can be reformulated and vindicated with the aid of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, and that as reformulated it puts the kybosh on Plato’s claim that it pays to be just. And I have gotten away with it too, since I am reasonably well-cited and most of my articles having been published in the first or second journals that I sent them to.
But I have been talking to a friend from another university who has convinced me that my interlocutors may be correct and that, at least for junior philosophers, the free-wheeling days when one could get away with this sort of thing may be going or gone. . My friend is about five years younger than I but he is both better-published and better-cited. Furthermore, he too has published on a wide variety of topics and has not been afraid to challenge the reigning orthodoxies. (He has published on causation, personal identity, the Philosophy of Time, Conceptual analysis free speech, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, quantum gravity, the metaphysics of dispositions, risk aversion and its implications for ethics, conceptual engineering, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, decision theory, moral motivation and meta-ethics; some of his papers being cross-overs from one AOS to another.) But he tells me that his junior colleagues (there aren’t any in my department as we are all over forty) envy the breadth of his interests and publications but do not dare to emulate him. The difference between now and then (that is between the relatively recent past and the present) is not the pressure to publish which has remained a constant for fifty years or more, nor the precarious nature academic employment for junior staff, which may have increased but has been a Thing throughout my academic lifetime. The difference lies in the growth of an increasingly conservative editorial culture in the leading academic venues. Papers go to referees who won’t accept challenges to their paradigms and demand copious citations to the paradigmatic literature which are likely to be lacking in more heretical pieces. So what you get is Kuhnian ‘Normal science’ but without the science, puzzle solving within a paradigm. Furthermore the referees are often rather narrow so they simply cannot cope with cross-over papers which use (real or supposed) insights from one area of Philosophy to illuminate another. Thus papers of the kind that I and my friend have been accustomed write are less likely to be accepted. (This phenomena is likely to be masked for late-career academics, especially reasonably successful ones, since a lot of our publications are invited.) A straw in the wind: My friend cowrote a paper with an even more distinguished colleague, challenging the orthodoxy wrt a particular problem. In their opinion it was well up to their usual standard. It was rejected seven times.
Young philosophers, being aware of this, write the kind of thing that LookToTheContinent and Nat complain that they are incentivised to ‘churn out’–solid, respectable, but slightly boring (just ‘slightly’ boring?) publications or ‘hyper-specific work’ in their AOS. This is not a happy situation and I am glad that it has not been mine. Moreover the incentives are, from a teaching point of view, perverse. In small-to-medium departments breadth and versatility are at a premium. You simply cannot provide adequate coverage if everyone sticks to their offical areas of specialisation or competence. In my department for instance, the paraconsistent logician teaches existentialism, the Philosopher of Time teaches ethics, the Spinoza specialist teaches Lakatos and one of the meta-ethicists teaches, Marx, Mandeville and little bit of the economics of Adam Smith and David Hume. From what Nat and LookToTheContinent are saying it seems that in order to get a job teaching philosophy, you have to become less capable of teaching philosophy. Something needs be done, though I don’t know what or by whom.
There is still a serious lack of reflection on the ethics of philosophical inquiry and argumentation. Especially since we live in a time when there is so much reflection on the conventions, moral and prudential of public discourse generally.
I think part of why analytic philosophy is this way comes from how philosophy papers are assessed, either in the classroom or in a journal. Most papers typically add to some conversation in an established area where there is a well developed canon, such as ethics or metaphysics. A paper can add to such a conversation by operating at the margins of such canons by questioning some established premises or by trying to extend the canon. And then assessing the paper is a matter of judging whether it’s conistent with the canon and then maybe if what it adds is interesting. This isn’t a rule but just a description of what seems to often be case.
If someone wrote a paper where there is no canon, then assessing it would have to be a matter of just judging if the conclusion is true. But in a new area, the conclusion likely won’t be true, or specific enough. Areas with established canons have a host of terms and a long history of theories that were considered wrong but then improved upon. So to write on new things, there needs to be more of a culture of assessing if papers are interesting or if they can help inspire better theories, not only if they are true or not.