Exploring the Future of Philosophy: An Independent Philosophy Institute? (guest post)
What is the institutional future of philosophy?
Various demographic, economic, and technological developments raise concerns about the long term survival of traditional institutions of higher education, and over the past decade or so we’ve seen many colleges and universities reduce their philosophy offerings, or eliminate philosophy programs entirely.
These changes may prompt us to ask whether serious philosophical research and teaching is going to continue to thrive beyond the campuses of the most elite universities, and if so, how?
A team of researchers have recently embarked on a project to take up this question. The project is led by Anthony Beavers (Visiting Associate Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Indiana University; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Evansville) and includes Catherine Kemp (Associate Professor, Philosophy, John Jay College CUNY), Corey McCall (Elmira College), Peter Suber (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Earlham College; Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard University), Mark Valenzuela (Project Manager, Academic Compliance and Accreditation, Washington University in St. Louis), and David Weinberger (Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society).
In the following guest post, Professors Beavers, Kemp, Suber, and Valenzuela describe their project and as well as opportunities for others to become involved with it.
Exploring the Future of Philosophy: An Independent Philosophy Institute?
by Anthony Beavers, Catherine Kemp, Peter Suber, and Mark Valenzuela
As regular readers of Daily Nous know, academic philosophy has seen significant losses in the form of budget cuts, faculty layoffs, closed departments, dropped majors, narrowed curricula, and declining enrollments. Philosophers are aware of these losses anecdotally as well as through trackers like the one here at the Daily Nous, among others.
We are pleased to announce a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to document the defunding and shrinkage of academic philosophy in the United States. This project will go beyond anecdotes to trends, and quantify the cuts to the field in the past several decades, primarily in the United States.
We aim to release an open-access report of the results in the fall of 2026.
We are a group of academics, mostly philosophers, with nearly a century of collective college and university teaching experience. We’re greatly concerned by cutbacks to institutional philosophy in the US, and began meeting in October 2022 to think about new ways to support the teaching and study of philosophy.
Our discussions keep pointing in two directions—first to the need to document the problem, and second to the need for an alternative and complementary institutional home for philosophy.
We’re tentatively calling that complementary institutional home an Independent Philosophy Institute. The core idea is for a nonprofit organization to offer small, online philosophy seminars across a wide range of topics, texts, figures, periods, movements, and cultures. It would be administered primarily by philosophers, and exist outside conventional colleges and universities, not subject to their budgets, curricula, staffing levels, or enrollment expectations.
Our hope, perhaps after a start-up period, is that the Institute’s faculty could be paid and students could earn transferable credits. (We realize that not all faculty will need to be paid and not all students will need credit.) A related hope is that many or most of its courses would be free of charge, even if it charged tuition for other courses to raise revenue to pay teachers and cover basic operating expenses. The idea is still in the planning stage, and we’re thinking hard about finances, quality control, curriculum, accreditation, governance, and infrastructure, among other central issues.
We’re hoping to hear from members of the discipline interested in our research project or deliberations about the future of philosophy. You can find out more by visiting our website, here, where you will find instructions for signing up to our mailing list, forms for volunteering, and a sign-up page to participate in an important data-gathering survey.
Philosophy lives in its conversations among scholars, students, and teachers. When its figures, texts, topics, periods, cultures, and movements disappear from traditional institutional curricula, philosophy itself is at risk of disappearing. We want to find a way to preserve it. Join us!
I wish we lived in a world where academic philosophy had a bright future, but since we don’t, this seems like a good idea. Getting money for it is going to be a big challenge, but they seem to have made a good start with the MacArthur grant, and I hope they succeed.
Check out The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation – we’re already doing all of this, and we don’t even need to charge folks because our overhead is so low. Universities have already sent their students to us to teach independent studies. http://www.lcpfoundation.org
It makes me tremendously sad to hear such an exciting idea utterly wrecked by preposing the very implementation model that has accelerated the devaluation of philosophy:
The online “seminar.”
There are maybe fields that are sufficiently moving in solitude – literature and music, for instance – that they could be studied alone, and others that have sufficiently clear application to capitalist industries – like engineering and computer science – that they have external motivation.
Philosophy, at least analytic philosophy, however, finds its value in inspiring people to not just read or study philosophy but to “do” philosophy – to think seriously, deeply, systematically, and in challenging discourse with others who have some shared understanding of what arguments are valid and worth considering, of what questions are surprisingly difficult and exciting. Doing philosophy isn’t a solitary or dry enterprise – at least not doing it well by 21st century standards. We write philosophical work to enable our thoughts to be made clear and easy to interrogate – it matters that they are being clearly conveyed and engaged with by someone, and the quality of the engagement matters for the subjective value of the enterprise.
…but when the people you’re in conversation with are not just people on your laptop, they’re a gallery of people you have never met and don’t expect to meet, the subjective quality of that engagement is only a tiny fraction of face to face conversation. It is all that is taxing about trying to understand or convey difficult chains of reasoning with very little of the euphoric reward of having moments of mutual understanding, of progress made meaningful because it is shared between people with authentic human connections.
It might be controversal to say, but it seems that we’re embodied beings with the psychology of social creatures. Meeting in person has social friction, it has cost, it has logistical hassles – but it’s also pretty central to thoroughly valuing and feeling like one is valued by others. You do not get the spark of mutual recognition – even if in interesting disagreement – across a microsoft teams meeting or zoom conference call – that you do face to face, able to make eyecontact and feel real time reaction in a way that allows you to feel in sync with another person or group of people.
You can do this if you are meeting in a seminar room, a park, a cafe, living room salon or going for a group walk – but you can’t do this online. It is a psycho-socially impovershed empty calories version of actually meeting with someone.
If the future of the discipline are “Independent Philosophy Institutes” that are online only, I do think these will complementary institutional homes to university departments – because they wont be institutional homes at all. They will be what people point to as a way of learning philosophy without paying for a useless degree – they will quasi-“house” the teachers a university administrator or college counselor can point to when a student expresses an interest in majoring in philosophy only to be steered towards something regarded as irreplacable.
If you want an answer for why philosophy feels optional to so many people who hold its funding, ask why actually meeting to do philosophy in ways that cost more than de minimis amounts of money and convenience feel optional.
The best structure would be a worldwide network of locations for in-person discussions and seminars and so on. But I don’t think that a new institute can plan to start with that structure, unless it has huge amounts of resources backing it. Given the smaller amount of resources available, the choice is either one (or a small number) of in-person locations, or an online format. I can see the case for either. But online seems like an easier way to get started these days, particularly when the organizers are themselves not all in the same geographic region.
We’re already doing both over at The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation. We do in-person courses and events in Philly, and we have our online LCP Academy.
You are seriously overshooting the value of Analytic “Philosophy”, which more than anything, is why philosophy programs aren’t surviving and enrollment isn’t enough.
Undergrads are usually coming to class because they got interested in someone like Nietzsche. I’d seriously doubt many people get into philosophy and take classes because they suddenly discovered Quine or Kripke. Analytic philosophy tends to bore students and drive them away.
This seems almost impossible for Analytics to admit, so I doubt I will convince anyone in saying this unless they already have a disdain for the Analytic tradition, but it is killing western philosophy and sucking the life out departments.
Programs will survive when more options are made available to prospective students.
Could not agree more. What I learned from analytics was “find something else.” More and more about less and less interesting stuff until I learned everything of no interest at all- or, for me at least, of no life value.
Soooo frustratingly true that analytics will twist themselves into knots to avoid acknowledging any defect in their preferred methodology. When they’re not doing that, they’re busy insisting that (a) “analytic philosophy” doesn’t actually exist in any meaningful sense and the so-called traditional divide is a myth, but also that (b) everyone must write, act, and research in a way that flatters their distinctively analytic conception of “clarity” (and of course, anyone who doesn’t do so is simply larping as a Derrida or a Heidegger).
Undergrads are usually coming to class because they got interested in someone like Nietzsche. I’d seriously doubt many people get into philosophy and take classes because they suddenly discovered Quine or Kripke. Analytic philosophy tends to bore students and drive them away.
Different strokes for different folks and all, but as an undergrad I found Russell, Ryle, Wittgenstein, Austin, Carnap, and often even GE Moore super interesting and exciting. I enjoyed a fair amount of Nietzsche when I read him as an undergrad, too, but I’d already been hooked by many of the classic analytic philosophers (and others with some similarity, like Hume.) So, I’d strongly recommend not making such strong generalizations from your own case.
Strokes and all, but my teaching experience (decade-plus long, at this point, so not overgeneralising, I don’t think) is that the vast majority of first-year students who *come in* a philosophy class and are looking forward to it/curious about it is because of topics that at least until fairly recently used to be anatema to the analyticals. (That seems to have changed now that these questions are in vogue?) Whether, after being fed the analytic diet, they get hooked on that is a different question. I’ve been teaching in Western Europe, so maybe this is a Western Europey thing. For what it’s worth, this was my experience too and I’m not from Western Europe.
“X was not true for me, therefore I reject your assertion that X is true for many people”
It would be very useful to see data on which courses are most attractive to students and which subjects interest them the most. I don’t mean simply whether they show more interest in analytic or continental philosophy. If anyone knows of any good sources that look at multiple institutions, let me know. As we fight to survive, we should probably be keeping a close eye on this.
what sorts of alternative options do you have in mind? by my lights, continental philosophy, for example, is at least as likely to bore students and drive them away — you come in wanting to think about the meaning of life and instead end up decrypting laborious texts about how everything is a text, or every text undermines itself, or whatever. (Justin, if you think this is unacceptably flippant and dismissive: I am deliberately matching the tone of the person I am replying to in order to make a point.)
as with any field with bona fide expertise, a layperson’s initial attraction is inevitably going to be a massive oversimplification at best and wildly inaccurate at worst. part of education is learning what’s really going on. so what?
You’re being deliberately dismissive to make a point, you say, but this attitude is absolutely the unironic attitude of numerous establishment anglophone philosophers. What’s more, I’d be very interested to see whether you would, if asked, be capable of composing a charitable and accurate gloss on the idea that “How everything is a text, or every text undermines itself, or whatever”. Tell us, as well, precisely who thinks that and where they say it.
Speaking for myself, it wasn’t suddenly discovering Quine or Kripke that mattered. It was appreciating the intrinsic interest in the kinds of topics they were addressing, and virtues of the methods they were using: apply the new logic to develop more-or-less systematic views about the nature of mind and language, and the limits in our construction of different views. When I teach this material now, I try to give students a sense both of the way these frameworks have equipped us with more conceptually sophisticated and explanatorily adequate views about thought and speech across a bunch of fields in the last half-century. That’s a place where analytic philosophy is still alive as a program, although it’s been interbred with so much of the special sciences by now that it’s more a philosophical temperament than a banner under which one teaches or does research.
As it happens, there’s not a very wide sense of the intrinsic interest in that kind of thinking. But then philosophy’s a big tent, and there’s plenty of other work for students to delve into, much of which is also in the analytic tradition. Think of Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, for instance, or Korsgaard’s “Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant”.
A lot of people I know, including myself (does one know oneself?), got into philosophy because they were smart and curious people who started off in science but couldn’t hack the higher-level math. I was intially drawn to questions usually associated with analytic philosophy, but not to analytic philosophy as such (I was also not put off by analytic philosophy as such, at least no more than by continental philosophy). I’ve met very few people who had a favourite thinker or sub-field before beginning their formal philosophy studies. Publicizing philosophy broadly as a known alternative for people wanting to do rigourous thinking and intellectual discovery is IMHO much more important than emphasizing any particular part of the philosophical tradition.
I came for Nietzsche but I stayed for analytic philosophy. Many such cases
Exactly. I don’t know why everyone is obsessing over the question of what brings people into philosophy – presumably all sorts of misunderstood nonsense can do that. What matters is why they stay. In my experience, it is rarely the same thing that brought them in.
I think this eloquent barrage misses some important points about the upsides of organizing philosophy events/seminars on Zoom, to wit:
I could go on, but the point is, not everyone feels the way you do about the comparative joys of doing philosophy in person. Some of us actually kind of enjoy the Zoom thing.
Time and money constraints heavily favor Zoom.
There is no such thing as “eye contact” over Zoom. This is because such contact is necessarily mutually felt and acknowledged. But when a pair of eyes appears to be looking in your direction, and you know that the same pair of eyes could be shopping for appliances or drafting an email, this mutuality is missing. The psychology of real eye contact vs. screen contact is well-studied and I urge you to think more carefully about this profound distinction. There are powerful reasons to think that you cannot have the experience of being paid attention to on Zoom. That may not be just a cost or a tradeoff, it means that “philosophy” as an activity turns into something else entirely. We “save” the discipline by turning it into something else.
That said, I appreciate that the organizers have little choice here. But perhaps we can use this opportunity to stand back and reflect on the ways in which austerity+tech company takeover=further social disengagement, disembodiment, and fragmentation.
“There are maybe fields that are sufficiently moving in solitude – literature and music, for instance – that they could be studied alone, and others that have sufficiently clear application to capitalist industries – like engineering and computer science – that they have external motivation.”
Computer science is also sufficiently moving in solitude that it can be studied alone (though it helps to have a computer). No external motivation needed! (I don’t know enough engineering to comment in that case.)
Not that I disagree with this (in fact, I agree very much with it), but I just wanted to note that, contrary to what you seem to imply above it, this is also applicable to many other disciplines/fields. I don’t think meaningful progress in any field is made in pure solitude. The atomizing effects you’re describing are perhaps most pronounced in philosophy, and most urgent to address in philosophy given that its departments and practitioners are facing these challenges acutely, but I have no doubt that such effects would be deleterious whatever the field.
That said, I also think it’s important to make philosophy—academia generally—as accessible as possible (see Some counterpoints’ points here), but maybe that’s a different conversation from the one being had here. I don’t know.
I’m glad that there are people taking on the important work of thinking about possible new institutional structures for philosophy.
However, a couple of issues with the present proposal. The first is that I don’t see how it can “save the discipline of philosophy” if it’s not finding a way to fund new research in philosophy. There can’t be a discipline of philosophy without new work in philosophy. How is an IPI going to support that? The “benefits for professors” say that teaching at an IPI will let professors quit exploitative jobs, so I suppose the thought is that professors will make enough money that they can teach part-time and do new work part-time. But I struggle to see how teaching some online courses part-time is going to make anyone enough money to spend another big chunk of their time doing research.
A second question is who is paying for this.The proposal suggests that existing colleges and universities will pay for these online courses. But then this seems like a proposal for accelerating the dissolution of philosophy departments: admins will jump at the task to hire temp staff to teach one-off courses, instead of having permanent faculty with job security, health insurance, unions. I know this isn’t the intention, but the IPI seems a bit like a proposal for an ‘Uber-fication’ of the future of philosophy. This doesn’t strike me as good for either philosophy, or philosophers.
Again, I’m glad that there are people doing this kind of institutional thinking. But there are some serious problems with this proposal.
It’s about patronage, always was, always will be.
Should the public (in the form of tax revenue) fund the work of scholars in every field?
I think so, but this is inherently a political question.
If you want your paycheck to be derived from tax dollars, you’d better be informed about the political realities that entail that, and be prepared to be active participants in political efforts (organization, lobbying, voting, etc.)
If you cede the playing field to individuals and groups openly hostile to public education generally, universities in particular, and who plainly loathe science and the humanities, well, you might not have a job as a result.
Minimal scrutiny reveals substantial differences between how the two major political parties in the US value public universities and scholarship in science and the humanities. This might merit more consideration and discussion for those fretting about the future of their academic discipline.
I think we all probably agree on which political party in the US least values public universities and scholarship in science and the humanities. Is there some action we should take in light of this? Try to publish more philosophy in venues that might reach conservatives?
Depends on whether seeing more of it will make them more hostile or less hostile. I could see it going either way.
I’ve yet to see any evidence that it is how science and the humanities are presented that has ever been the basis for the hostility towards science and the humanities. As if it is somehow the fault of researchers and scholars themselves, because they fail to adopt the appropriate tone and manner of communication, and so cause the hostility. In other words, they bring it on themselves.
(It’s comparable to saying ‘It’s not the people who storm into libraries and pull books off the shelves who bear responsibility, it’s the librarians and authors who insist on putting texts on the shelves that those inclined to burn books don’t care for.’ As this is a site dedicated to the practice of philosophy, I’ll leave it to the group to consider the robustness of the logic of this all too commonly expressed canard.)
The hostility towards science and the humanities arises from the immediate challenge they pose (have always posed) to individuals and groups whose worldview relies on confabulated narratives of justification for claims of demographic superiority and associated presumptions of special political and economic status.
These confabulated narratives of justification are exposed as farcical when subjected to scrutiny by researchers and scholars. Some well known examples include: the earth is approximately six thousand years old, and is the fixed center of the universe; slavery is a benign practice; autism is caused by vaccination; homosexuality is a form of psychopathology to be treated.
Each of these preposterous claims, by the way, are promulgated and broadcast to this day. By individuals who compose the same cohort displaying the greatest hostility to science and the humanities.
None of this new, of course. (Ask Galileo.)
It’s also not new to blame, to vilify, the scholars, the researchers, the students, the universities, the museums, the libraries.
Those most hostile to science and the humanities have never shown an interest in good faith dialogue. But sure, let’s keep debating it.
We’ve taken public money without ensuring that the public understands what benefit they get in return and why it’s worth their money to pay for philosophy. We can acknowledge that without absolving “those most hostile to the sciences and humanities”, just as calling for more effective policework doesn’t absolve criminals. It’s important to be aware of the forces standing against us, but being aware of their wrongdoing still leaves us the question of what we are going to do.
The public has little notion of what is “worth their money” in most cases. People have scant appreciation of what infrastructure spending gets them, let alone a diplomatic corps (yet nobody doubts the military, curious) and all the various agencies that they never even have heard about. The obsessive focus on higher education is different.
What I was pointing out, and I think what Ian is backing up, is that not everything is a messaging problem. We cannot always convince people of the worth of our work if we become better at “reaching” them. Sometimes, they are opposed to something worthwhile because they are opposed to that which makes it worthwhile.
If the honest and dogged pursuit of truth is opposed to some ideology or other, then “reaching” these ideologues is not going to make them more appreciative. It might in fact make them more hostile.
What are we to do? Maybe stop trying to appease those opposed to that which makes our work worthy, and instead try to shore up an alliance of those who aren’t.
No, not everything is a messaging problem, but we have a massive problem in that the public who pays for our work has little to no idea of how they benefit from our work and why they should pay for it. It’s hard to imagine how philosophy could possibly last under those conditions.
How do you think we should stop appeasing and how do you think it will improve our chances for survival?
Who are you thinking we should be allying with and what do we actually do once we have allied?
As said, the public pays for a lot of things it doesn’t understand. For our survival, there’s many more pessing issues. Get students interested in our classes (some of us are good at that). Introduce philosophy in pre-college education (some of us are doing this). Make parents and employers realize that our graduates have valuable skills.
Stop appeasing means stop trying to agree with those who’d see us gone regardless. Instead, take a credit for our own achievements and for the value that we bring, even if this makes the conservatives yet more hostile.
I take it the issue is whether good-faith engagement with critics of higher education is “appeasement” in the relevant cases. In another thread recently, someone accused Heterodox Academy members of being bad-faith actors that we should not engage with. If one thinks that the critics of higher education are acting in bad faith, it will seem rational to suppose one shouldn’t engage with them in good faith. But if those critics are indeed acting in good faith, or if enough of them are, then refusing good-faith engagement is only going to exacerbate the problem. And if there are enough people in the middle on an issue, then speaking in good faith can have the effect of winning more of them onto one’s side. My experience convinces me there are more than enough sensible people in the middle on most issues. For this reason, I find it’s best to speak to that segment, with the purpose of talking to people’s better angels, and to let the fruit of that purpose come to term as it naturally does.
This can sometimes make it prudent to communicate publicly even with the extreme partisan of a view. Not with the hope of convincing that partisan (although hope springs eternal), but rather to help the sensible centrists better appreciate the shape of the debate. That needn’t be appeasement, and done in the right way it would count as “tak[ing] credit for our own achievements and for the value that we bring“.
‘I take it the issue is whether good-faith engagement with critics of higher education is “appeasement” in the relevant cases.’
The issue is that good-faith engagement has been attempted, as well as extensive accommodation offered, repeatedly with those who display hostility to science and the humanities, despite their unceasing efforts to commandeer or simply shutter the institutions housing the study and practice of science and the humanities.
This good faith engagement, over generations, has simply failed in its purpose of reducing hostility to science and the humanities. It’s also never been reciprocated- there is a glaring absence of efforts from those hostile to science and the humanities to approach those who endorse the work of science and the humanities with the sincere intention of establishing mutual understanding.
Yet decade after decade, as if de novo, admonishment to ‘engage the opponents’ is trotted out as the solution.
Those reasserting the mantra ‘you haven’t tried hard enough to engage’ lay the fault entirely on those aligned with science and the humanities, rather than simply acknowledging the observed pattern- reaching out to those who wish to dismantle the institutions of science and the humanities has not deterred the attacks, and in fact the attacks have magnified and accelerated.
Not because those opposed to science and the humanities ‘fail to understand’, but because they understand quite clearly that scholars produce findings that undermine the preferred narratives and worldview of the opponents of science and the humanities.
So I suggest the question is- Why we are implored to repeat an approach that has already been demonstrated to be counterproductive, and in doing so waste time, energy and money that are already in short supply?
The logic escapes me.
My supposition is that those who insist on further engagement with those hostile to science and the humanities want to believe that more talking will solve the problem, and so finding the right tone and vernacular is all that’s necessary.
The alternative is contemplating the implications of what is already evident- millions of individuals want the institutions of science and humanities eradicated from our society.
Accepting the reality of this entails fraught emotional and moral considerations. Deeply uncomfortable. We’re at the point where such considerations are unavoidable.
I can understand how someone who held this view of the situation would think the thing to do is to refuse to engage on account of worries about bad faith. My sense is that most people don’t see things this way, on either the left or the right, and that there are enough of us more-or-less in the center that it’s valuable to have voices adopting a more irenic stance, and to ensure those voices are heard alongside the more extreme partisans of each side.
The Pew Research Center has been keeping tabs on this for decades, for instance, and there’s a clear pattern: while the professoriate has markedly shifted leftward since the 1990s, out of step with the rest of the Republic, and while more than 50% of the left and the right now hold not only “unfavorable” but “very unfavorable” views of the other side (up from 15% in the 1990s), people on each side now substantially overestimate the number of partisans on the other side that hold the most extreme views. So given that there are so many of us in the middle, who agree with each other about more than we realize, and who are unaware that we’re in this situation because the din of the extremists drowns out the voices of the moderates, it helps to have people on each side speak publicly to the center. I suspect that’s a duty every generation must shoulder, but it’s more important now given the way things have played out over the last few decades.
Your view is far too abstract for me to assess in any meaningful way. You paint with very broad brushes and draw equally broad conclusions. I don’t know who the “sensible centrists” are in your description, nor do I know whether they indeed are “sensible”.
Take anti-vaxxers vs. medical science. Who are the “sensible centrists” in this?
Are they the ones who say “while I believe in vaccines, we should hear out the opposition, maybe they have some good points, and also there are very vew anti-vaxxers in academia, so there is evidence of bias”?
Because that is not sensible at all.
I was addressing your replies to HNM regarding the need to communicate with the tax-paying public, much of which doesn’t understand what we do, so that they have some sense both of what we do and why it’s important. Engaging with these people in good faith is not “appeasing” anti-vaxxers or “those who’d see us gone regardless”.
HNM said their preferred answer to “what to do” was to specifically address conservatives more. I was responding to this.
Okay, thanks, that helps. Conservatives pay taxes too, and not all of them hold the most extreme views (e.g., anti-vaxxer views) — indeed, given the Pew data we tend to overestimate how many of them do. So to clarify, I think we should be aiming to engage with those people.
Sorry, but it doesn’t help me. You could have just as well said:
“Anti-vaxxers pay taxes too, and not all of them hold the most extreme views (e.g. eugenicist views) — indeed, given the Pew data we tend to overestimate how many of them do. So to clarify, I think we should be aiming to engage with those people.”
Paying taxes isn’t a pertinent dimension and everything can be made to seem moderate by appealing to something more extreme. What characterizes a “sensible centrist”?
Right, but my point is that despite what too many of us suppose most conservatives are not extremists, and so because they are taxpayers it behooves us to speak to them. And we don’t need to define what a centrist is (sensible or not) in order to see the value in speaking to them. As I said, even if we won’t convince the extremists we can still help them see where they may have misunderstood what we do, on account of their own mistaken supposition that the extremists in our corner are more numerous than they are.
So you decline to give any sort of account of what extremism is (or its contrary, centrism). Your claims about what’s extreme and whats centrist are then… what, manifest facts?
Note that the language of center and extreme is yours. I myself don’t think these are useful categories, and only use them to engage with you.
My stated view is just that we shouldn’t invite to the table people who’d smash the table — regardless of whether you’d call them moderate or extreme.
I understand that’s your stated view, QP. I’m pointing out that there’s a good chance your sense of who and how prevalent are the table-smashers is misguided. This is all pretty standard stuff in social science research on U.S. political sentiments. You might look here, for instance:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/social-science-partisan-perception-gap/
https://perceptiongap.us/
I get the data, but I fail to see its relevance. I didn’t really calibrate my view according to how many table-smashers I think there are. It’s important that — whoever they are and however many there are — we can come to a consensus to not invite them to the table.
I’d like you HxA folks to have a serious conversation about where the line is (because everybody has a line) and what to do with people on the other side of this. Then we could have an actually honest debate about academic freedom and the like: What makes a view fall outside the line? What do we do with such views?
Okay. Thanks for taking the time to illuminate your view. For my part, I think it’s important that those of us interested in talking across these boundaries keep doing so, and doing so publicly — not so much because of the hope that we’ll convince the extremists of either side, but rather so that the centrists come to better understand how many of us there are.
Well, let me know how many centrists you come to know during your “conversations across the line” at the next International Conference on Creationism.
It’s been a bit of a trip to read this exchange, to be honest. I can only summarise it thusly: to hold ‘conversations across the line with the centrists’ is often the privilege of a few. For the rest, it’s not a ‘conversation’ that’s in the books.
Sorry, duplicate post.
Does it matter that “we tend to overestimate how many of them do [hold anti-vaccine views]” when those views are now the prevailing views of the government?
I’m with Ian on this; I think it’s bizarre how we are told that we have to continually “reach out,” make very modest appeals to some mythical moderate or “sensible centrist,” while our opposition is apparently, per the data you’re citing, not only out-of-step with the general public (and potentially even those inclined to vote for them), but also feels no pressure at all to “make its case,” much less make it in terms amenable to moderates. Where does the recent AI-generated slop of dropping faeces on protesters fit in this “reach out to moderates” scheme?
Yes, it matters. Precisely because so many people are now voting for what they perceive as the lesser of two evils, it is incumbent upon us to make clear that we’re not the evil they take us to be. And that means we need to be fielding voices of moderation ourselves. Again, just look at the perception gap data — the more one is politically active for one side or the other, the more distorted one’s own view of the “other side” is liable to be, while there is a sizable majority that is more-or-less in the middle of the political spectrum that agrees with one another about more than they realize, but they don’t realize it because we’ve let the fanatical extremes take up so much of the conversation.
But that isn’t true, Preston. One party has given us MAGA, Jan. 6, and a would-be king who delights in imagining himself shitting on protesters. The other has constantly droned on and on—for years—about how it’s important to have a “strong” Republican Party, how they value “bipartisanship,” as well as extolling the virtues of compromise. Are you telling us that so-called “sensible centrists” aren’t able to tell the difference between the two? That the party that bends over backwards for their insipid centrism is incapable of convincing even the “sensible centrists” that they’d be better off voting for them and not for the former reality TV star with an addled brain?
I’m just confused as to why we’re still pretending that there’s “two sides” here and that one needs to “reach out” to the centre, even though it’s been doing that for years, whereas the other is permitted to radicalize from top to bottom while the same “sensible centrists” look on or, worse, vote for the radicalized party and then exonerate themselves by saying that they couldn’t vote for the party that’s actually trying to appeal to the supposed centre they represent—because it’s “too radical.”
I’m sorry Felix, this just doesn’t fit with my perception of the state of the debate, or where most people sit on these issues. But yes, as it happens that party was incapable of convincing enough of the centrists to vote for them, which suggests the party isn’t as centrist as you might like to think. I’m not sure what more there is to say, although I am reassured by the kind of thing that HxA and the Perception Gap study are doing, and I hope more people start paying attention to it.
At any rate, we’re quite a ways away from the topic of this thread (which, again, I think is a great initiative and I hope it succeeds), so feel free to have the last word.
I agree that the party isn’t centrist; it’s right-wing. And the advice you’re proffering is, whether it’s intended to or not, calculated to make them even more right-wing—as if emulating the policy of the more extreme right-wing party (the GOP) is the surefire way to appeal to “the centre,” while that more extreme party itself forgoes even attempting to appeal to “the centre” to begin with. It simply isn’t bothered by it. It tells “the centre” where to go; it seeks to set the narrative rather than merely reacting to it and trying to mold itself into something that appears desirable, per someone else’s political narrative.
As Ian points out, the strategy of simply reacting to it, and trying to negotiate with it, hasn’t exactly played out well, despite decades of it happening in one form or another—just look at the current situation. Moreover, apart from the terrible consequences of this strategy (enabling cruel and reactionary policy to become the prevailing policymaking norm), it arguably does not even work (i.e., does not translate to expected electoral gains). So I’m not sure why we should continue with it. There are likely to be no gains from it, and a slow (though presently accelerating) decline in higher education because of it. Is that the best we can hope for? A long, drawn-out demise where every degrading move is justified as necessary to win over some ill-defined “sensible centrists” who nevertheless apparently aren’t won over by it? Should we do as the great philosopher Bartholomew Simpson does?: “That’s not enough! More asbestos!”
No, I did not.
You said: “I’ve suggested publishing more in venues that are liable to be read by conservatives, but you didn’t like that. So what do we do?”
That’s right. I did not say that it was my preferred answer regarding “what to do”.
In case it helps to clarify, I certainly am suggesting that we publish in venues likely to be read by conservatives. However, that’s only a part of my preferred response. I focused on that element because I thought it might be common ground with Prof. Rushlau. It seems that it isn’t.
Bingo.
I’m partial to a parable of my own design, the parable of ‘How many arsonists are we required to permit on the condo association board?’
As an abstract, idealized proposition, ‘sensible centrists’ will insist that, in the interest of ‘all voices must be heard’, the contingent of arsonists among the residents are entitled to representation on the condo board, and their motions to remove fire extinguishers and disable fire alarms must be put to a vote. And we must overlook threats to immolate residents who oppose these motions by the arsonists, certainly we are not to suggest such threats are disqualifying for continued participation in condo governance.
The ‘sensible centrists’ will wag accusatory fingers that in suggesting threats to immolate opponents are disqualifying actions, we are simply proving we are insincere in our claims we favor a pluralistic, democratic form of condo governance. and it is we who are a real threat to the condo association’s principles.
And if the condo is reduced to ash (with lives lost), well, that’s just one possible outcome (and entirely acceptable) of upholding our abstract, idealized notion that at least we ensured everyone has a say in how the condo is run.
Of course, when it comes to those hostile to science and the humanities, the threats and acts of violence are not confined to parables and thought experiments. This brute reality is what is elided and obscured by the abstract idealized ‘arguments’.
Do you deny that there are more centrists who agree with each other than we realize, because we overestimate the number of partisans on each side who hold the most extreme positions?
‘Do you deny that there are more centrists who agree with each other than we realize’
This is a wish, not consistent with any observed evidence.
It also assumes to be ‘centrist’ is always morally defensible, and that when two perspectives are in opposition, each may be considered equally ‘extreme’. That’s merely insisting on applying the same simplistic frame to every situation (a linear continuum, with two end points and a midpoint, and the midpoint is defined as inherently preferable).
So yes, I reject the contention, and the premises upon which the contention rests.
It was a question, not a wish. And there’s plenty of evidence that Americans overestimate the number of partisans on each side that hold the most extreme views — particularly when we ourselves are partisans for one of the extremes. You might find it interesting to see how much evidence there is for this.
https://perceptiongap.us/
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/social-science-partisan-perception-gap/
https://www.philosophersinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Education.pdf
Preston, I think you may be misreading the data. It shows that the prevalence of any one extremist view is overestimated. But it might still be that there are 100% extremists, if each of them holds a different extremist view.
This also matches the apparent inner structure of the right as a loose alliance of people with very different but equally monomaniacal resentments.
This is related to another “centrist” error: the belief that there is an “modal voter”. Sure you can tally some survey and average out the numbers, but this does not mean that any one person holds these beliefs, or that you will gain a single voter by adopting them.
The Political Life is messy. People are individuals with complex beliefs, each and every one of which falls somewhere else on the left/right scale. The “center” might just be a statistical artifact.
That’s an interesting suggestion, QP. We’re so far away from the topic of this discussion board that I’d like to bow out, but let me just riff on this for a moment. I’d certainly be open to seeing whether extremist positions are more evenly spread out among Republicans than Democrats, or vice versa. I try to stay on top of this research, and based on my sense of what we’re finding my suspicion is that we’d discover there’s a lot of comorbidity, with advocates of one extreme view holding most of them. But at any rate, that’s not what this data examined, and I apologize if I gave that impression.
Instead, what the Perception Gap data shows is that on a range of issues (e.g., “properly controlled immigration can be good for America” and “the U.S. should have completely open borders”), the more committed one is as a Democrat or Republican, the more likely one is to overestimate the number of people on the other side who strongly agree with these claims. So it’s not that the views themselves are extreme — it’s that we overestimate the degree to which the group as a whole clusters at one extreme over the other.
Take the two immigration questions, for instance. Democrats think less than 50% of Republicans agree with “properly controlled immigration can be good for America”, whereas it’s over 80%. And Republicans think only something like a third of Democrats disagree with “the U.S. should have completely open borders”, whereas it’s closer to two thirds. And as Stevens points out:
It’s certainly been my experience that my college-educated Republican friends and family in Montana overestimate how prevalent are my academic friends and colleagues’ commitment to things like open borders, whereas my academic friends and colleagues overestimate the degree to which my Republican friends and family are anti-immigration full stop.
And to pick up on something you said upthread, if there were a Creationist Conference in the area and I had the time, I’d be thrilled to attend. I suspect I’d find that the people there are not the crazy partisans of the view that we imagine when we see how the fanatics behave. I went to Anthrocon when I lived in Pittsburgh, in 2015 or 2016, which at the time was the largest furry convention in the world. It was a blast, and I learned some interesting things about the furry/therion/otherkin/fictionalist subculture that would have been hard to get a non-distorted view of had I stuck to the usual sources of information. Now I’m not saying anyone else should go to a Creationism Conference or a Furry Convention. But if you’re open to it, give it a shot. You might find it helps you get a better sense of a group of people you were antecedently disposed to misunderstand.
It isn’t just that the public doesn’t understand philosophy. It’s that they don’t understand how it benefits them. I don’t need to understand medical research to understand how it benefits me.
I don’t believe that the public is going to be willing to keep paying for philosophy if they don’t have some idea of how they are benefiting from it.
I’m running out of different ways to say that people simply don’t have that much agency about “their tax dollars”, for as much as pretending that they do is a political talking point. The opinion of Joe and Eileen Bailey on what they personally get out of the diplomatic corps doesn’t really matter, and neither do his feelings about higher education.
We neither need, nor want, nor can realistically get the support of the intellectually incurious. Not going to happen.
“The public” is far too broad and abstract a term for this discussion. There’s concrete parts of the public that we can specifically address to garner their direct support (by enrolling in our courses, hiring our graduates, etc.).
People have some idea of how they might benefit from the diplomatic corp. Most people have no idea of how they benefit from the work of philosophers or why it’s in their interest to pay for it.
The public comes looking for answers in hard times. We here at The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation try to be a beacon of light, attracting those folks who might otherwise turn to extreme groups or restrive religion.
http://www.lcpfoundation.org
‘If the honest and dogged pursuit of truth is opposed to some ideology or other, then “reaching” these ideologues is not going to make them more appreciative. It might in fact make them more hostile.
What are we to do? Maybe stop trying to appease those opposed to that which makes our work worthy, and instead try to shore up an alliance of those who aren’t.’
This is exactly right, every word.
‘We’ve taken public money without ensuring that the public understands what benefit they get in return and why it’s worth their money to pay for philosophy.’
This seems like a restatement of the framing (‘it’s the scientists and scholars who are at fault’) I was emphasizing in my comment.
Note the asserted locus of responsibility is those employed in public universities haven’t ensured ‘the public’ understands. It’s the scholars who have failed to properly make their case to ‘the public’.
Which public are we speaking of here that doesn’t understand?
It’s not the majority of Americans who support continuing to fund universities, or the majority who endorse the value of science and the humanities education. But the majority is not composed evenly of members from every ideological and demographic cohort. It’s a wildly skewed distribution.
The hostility to science and the humanities is found almost exclusively from those among one ideological perspective, and dominated by a narrow demographic. They are also a decided (highly vocal) minority of the population. None of this is mysterious.
Rather than ascribe the problem to a failure to communicate effectively, we can more productively ask what to do about millions of people who have displayed no interest in listening. It’s not like generations haven’t already tried various approaches to ‘reaching out’. Not a new thought.
Yes, that’s right. I’m claiming we are at fault, which in no way absolves anyone else from being at more fault.
Not that blame matters, since if we weren’t at fault, we should still be doing all we can to fight to survive.
The majority of Americans do not know how philosophy benefits them or why they should pay for it. This includes those who are broadly supportive of the humanities. It’s hard to imagine philosophy surviving under those circumstances.
You ask “we can more productively ask what to do about millions of people who have displayed no interest in listening.” Well, what do we do? I’ve suggested publishing more in venues that are liable to be read by conservatives, but you didn’t like that. So what do we do?
Pinning my thesis to the door of an evangelical church as we speak… I think they’ll appreciate the symbolic nature of the gesture.
Yes I agree. That was the point I was making to HNM.
And get accused of “corrupting the youth” even more?
More seriously, I don’t think there’s anything to be done beyond opening up academia as much as we can and letting the chips fall where they may. The problem is that academia itself has a culture (or cultures) that aren’t always immediately intelligible to those outside of it. We see this within science, for instance.”Why aren’t they running new RCTs for every single variant of a vaccine?” might seem like a sensible question to ask, and you could even frame it as a concern about reproducibility, or as part of a narrative about scientists having “something to hide.” There are usually answers to these sorts of questions though, but knowing them requires actually engaging with the relevant disciplines/fields, and the hucksters most likely to promulgate that sort of narrative rarely engage with it or are opportunists at the fringes of their field anyway.
Public understanding of science suffers as a result. I don’t think philosophy would fare any better. As I alluded to half-jokingly in the first paragraph, history suggests otherwise.
The solution though can’t be to become more insular, more isolated from the public and from each other. That only perpetuates the image of the ivory tower, the obscure wordsmith doing occult things out of public view. The solution has to involve demystifying philosophy, science, etc., while at the same time taking care to avoid oversimplifying—as oversimplification can often be construed as lying, and those segments of the public already suspicious of academia are sensitive to what they perceive as lies. I don’t know. It’s a hard problem.
Do you think there is more danger of oversimplification than we face in teaching Introduction to Philosophy, or other introductory courses?
We’re already doing doing what this institution is proposing *and more* with such low overhead and strong grassroots fundraising that these funding concerns are nonexistent over at The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation. 😎 I founded The LCP Foundation with no institutional support whatsoever. Yet my work speaks for itself so clearly that universities have sent their students to us for accredited independent studies, and universities partner with us for community events. Check us out!
http://www.lcpfoundation.org
Just wanted to give a shout out to one such ‘independent institute’ which already exists: the Catherine Project (https://catherineproject.org/). It’s a nonprofit that does exactly what these authors suggest, although they also offer seminars on non-philosophical texts and conduct language reading groups as well I think. From what I can tell they have been very successful so far.
I was also reminded of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/
Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Institute is only for ivy grads in NYC. They have Arendt scholars teaching about Emerson, but do not sully their hands with actual real life Emerson scholars at public state schools.
We have a new Hannah Arendt intro course over at The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation 😎 membership in our LCP Academy is free! And our work is high-caliber enough that universities trust their students with us for independent studies 🤘
http://www.lcpfoundation.org
Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS) is addressing this problem pretty directly. Their undergraduate and graduate programs are debt free, the quality of curricula is on par with top ranked institutions and there is ample engagement with other students as well as professors and a network of philosophers actively conducting research across a variety of institutions.
I applaud this project as a way to do more with less, but if we want to save philosophy, we need to convince the public that they should pay for it. Most of the public by far have no idea how they benefit from our work or why they should pay for it.
Why not start small and see if it has traction and scales?
Undergraduate-level basics, beginning with informal logic, aka, critical thinking, would appeal broadly and work well as test case.
Try both in person and virtual and compare retention and reviews.
Next? By popular demand (or common core):
epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, politics, Plato, Aristotle, rationalists, empiricists, science, religion, aesthetics, language, mind, etc.
Core fields for any well-rounded BA.
Professional-level independent philosophy institutes might come later, but the biggest bang for funders’ bucks would be engaging a much larger populace.
A professional-level independent philosophy institute already exists: The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation 😎
Universities already trust their students with us for independent studies. We offer online courses for free, and we’re deeply engaged in community building, offering free in-person philosophy courses to vulnerable populations.
http://www.lcpfoundation.org
In our library we have a physical discussion group every 2nd and 4th Friday of the week
Philosophical discussion not physical
This is a great program, and it strikes me as the sort of thing philosophy in particular is well-equipped for. Those poo-pooing video interaction must not be attending the right online discussion groups. That’s one thing I found particularly enjoyable about the COVID quarantine — people from otherwise disparate parts of the planet got together and talked philosophy. We should be playing around with these tools, and trying out new formats. Online instruction like this won’t replace in-person instruction, but it can offer new ways for more people to take part in philosophical study and discussion.
You had me until “online.” Philosophy is not well suited for zoom boxes and canned lectures. It’s best when real people have real discussions.