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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Best philosophical stylists for students to emulate?

Brian Leiter

A student writes:

I wanted to know your thoughts or thoughts from readers on some of the best philosophy writers for students to model their writing style. Modeling someone's writing style seems like a great way for students to find their own voice as a writer. I began my philosophical career modeling my writing style after John Rawls. At the time, I enjoyed the direct clarity with paragraphs starting with "First" and "Second." However, this changed later when I read someone like Susan Wolf who is a brilliant writer and surpasses Rawls. Knowing the differences in philosophical writing really helped me and I would appreciate any help.

Thoughts from readers?  I take it the question here concerns writing styles that students might profitably try to emulate as they develop their own philosophical style, as opposed to great stylists along various aesthetic dimensions (Rawls probably is a good case of the former, but not of the latter).

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50 responses to “Best philosophical stylists for students to emulate?”

  1. Elizabeth Picciuto

    I don't consciously try to emulate him, but I'm always blown away by Bertrand Russell. I wish I had his clarity. His material for lay audiences, in particular, reads breezily.

    Reply
  2. Doug Stalker

    John L. Austin, as in Sense and Sensibilia and his Collected Papers, if not How To Do Things With Words.

    Reply
  3. Carl

    Donald Davidson.

    Reply
  4. Brian Leiter

    Please add some explanation for the philosophers you identify as good models for students to emulate–that will make the recommendations more useful and also easier to evaluate.

    Reply
  5. George Iordanou

    Well, Brian Barry without the arrogance.

    Reply
  6. Jonathon Martin

    In my view the chief virtues of a writer of philosophy are clarity and lucidity. The two are linked of course. I feel Russell wrote precisely and economically, but he is not an easy read. The same goes for Rawls.

    The best example in my view is A J Ayer. Crystal clear and prose like melted butter.

    Reply
  7. Steven Hales

    Roderick Chisholm was my teacher, and I always admired his prose. Towards the end of his career it tended to be overly compressed and even cryptic. But his writings from the 60s, 70s, and early 80s was beautifully precise, casually learned without being showy, and obviously motivated by a quest for the truth. I know he is gently parodied for "chisholming" away at definitions, but there was never any mystery about his views, never the fog of war (like reading Davidson, IMHO). You might agree or disagree with Chisholm, but you always knew where he stood. That quality is admirable for a philosopher. I'm sure my first few papers were influenced by his style. In general, though, I think it is a mistake for students to try to emulate any writer–who thinks it is a good idea for anyone to emulate the style of Nietzsche, brilliant though it is? But it is a fine plan to be sensitive to elegant writing as one looks for one's own voice. We all have our influences, philosophical and literary.

    Reply
  8. Nathan

    David Lewis. Humour? Rigorous formalism? What's not to love?

    Reply
  9. Jerome Neu

    W. V. Quine for conciseness and clarity, Stuart Hampshire for elegance.

    Reply
  10. Jerome Neu

    I would add that Wittgenstein is the worst to imitate. Not because of defects in his own style, but because some become tempted to aim for apparent plainspeaking paired with cryptic allusiveness. It may work for geniuses, but not for most of us.

    Reply
  11. Michael Rosen

    Some of the greatest philosophical stylists are not people that one should try to imitate.

    Wittgenstein is the most obvious example. The writing is arresting and the more you read him, the more you realize that what he was trying to do philosophically and his way of putting it into language are inextricable. Which makes Stanley Cavell all the more remarkable — someone who has tried to practise philosophy in a Wittgensteinian spirit without writing pastiche Wittgenstein. He is equally inimitable. Others to admire but not imitate: Bertrand Russell (unless you are a self-confident aristocrat with an exceptionally high IQ who enjoys shocking bourgeois prejudice) Robert Nozick and Isaiah Berlin.

    Ideals to aspire to.

    Davidson, Goodman, Putnam and Quine are all incisive, penetrating, readable and express themselves without jargon. However difficult it may be to come to terms with their philosophies, no one could ever blame it on their prose.

    Some personal favourites.

    Jerry Cohen — how to write philosophy that doesn't skate over details and subtleties while remaining as lucid and precise as the limits of the language allow. Charles Taylor — not a style that you notice for its beauty but one that is admirable for dealing with complex and elusive issues so vigorously and directly. Elizabeth Anderson — particularly her ability to argue passionately without descending into rant. Jeremy Waldron — a master communicator, always balanced and lucid, never pompous. Ronald Dworkin (at his best: Taking Rights Seriously and A Matter of Principle, for example): elegant, incisive and with the remarkable ability to address the reader's objection before she has quite formulated it herself. Dan Dennett (at his best: the essays in Brainstorms and the Locke Lectures, Elbow Room) — so easy to read and so enjoyable that he makes one forget how complex and difficult the ideas are that he is conveying.

    Reply
  12. V. Alan White

    Actually you're a good, clear, and often forceful writer Brian, and set a good example for the community on a day-by-day basis.

    Among contemporary philosophers one I've admired for clear and uncluttered prose combined with the highest standards of analysis is Kris McDaniel, Syracuse. Though my own writing still suffers from a lifetime of self-indulgent, overwritten sentences too often peppered with asides, I have benefitted (believe it or not) from keeping Kris' very direct, no-nonsense style in mind as a model to try and follow.

    Reply
  13. Eli Weber

    My adviser suggested I try to write like Derek Parfit, which I took to mean that, for every sentence, I should decide whether its inclusion is absolutely necessary, and then try to make the sentence as clear and easy to understand as possible.

    Reply
  14. Anonymous ABD

    Clarity, I take it, is the main virtue we look for in philosophical writing, so, naming Davidson is a bit tendentious. I get the sense that even his fans agree that his writing is difficult to understand — this is the reason, presumably, why there is so much literature dedicated to figuring out what his views were and why he held them. Even if lots of people love Davidson's writing, it's a bit risky to try to write like him because 1) you're not Davidson, and your readers will wonder why you sound like Davidson, and 2) lots of people also can't stand Davidson's writing.

    I would recommend using anything by Timothy Williamson — except for The Philosophy of Philosophy — as a paradigm. Whether you agree with him or not, it's difficult not to understand what he's saying. In addition to being exemplary in its clarity, Williamson's writing generally has (again, Philosophy of Philosophy excepted!) what might be described as a neutral style, largely devoid of rhetoric and attempts to be witty or jokey. When you're just starting out and trying to get your work into journals, it's probably wisest to adopt a style that will offend the least number of referees and editors. And if that's the goal, I think Williamson's style is worth emulating.

    I would also recommend Kit Fine for the same reasons why I recommended Williamson.

    Williamson and Fine sometimes present arguments in a highly compressed way. For someone who is clear but tends to err on the side of pedantry, check out Scott Soames.

    Also, I recommend this exercise: read Soames' classic papers on the "Davidson program" in semantics. Then read Davidson's papers on the Davidson program, and ask yourself: which set of papers was easier to understand?

    Reply
  15. Tim Schroeder

    I read Fred Dretske's Explaining Behavior the week before I started grad school, and it worked on me like a duckling stepping out of its egg and staring up at Konrad Lorenz. Bam! Instant imprinting. Fred's style is incredibly clear and direct, while still being graceful (no "first I'll do this, now I'm doing it, next I'll do the other…" sort of frumpy didactic clumsiness). His use of examples is a model I'd love my students to follow. Writing just like Fred is something a student is unlikely to achieve, but writing in a way that aspires to be like Fred is likely to produce better philosophical writing, I would guess, and that makes him a good model.

    Reply
  16. Jean Kazez

    I admire people who are crystal clear, capture what is deep and puzzling about issues, write with color, keep things palpable, and maybe even have a sense of humor. Examples: Peter Singer, Jaegwon Kim, Susan Wolf, J.L. Mackie. A common problem in philosophical writers–extreme density. It sure makes the writer seems smart, but wastes time and inflicts suffering on the reader. The burden should be on writers to make themselves intelligible, not on readers to figure out what's being said!

    Reply
  17. Robert Gressis

    I really like Peter van Inwagen. Not only is he quite clear (not only do I almost always know *what* he's arguing for, I usually know *why* he believes just about every premise needed for his conclusion), he's also engaging (I find it hard to put any of his writings down) and bold (he's perfectly happy to tell you that one of his views is quite weird and hard-to-believe…though he usually adds that the competitors are even worse off on that score). In addition, I also enjoy his use of parables — for some reason, reading a story that is then unpacked really works for me. For all that, though, I don't know if he's someone students should try to imitate or not.

    Reply
  18. Paul Kelleher

    I have greatly benefitted from the advice offered by Jonathan Bennett and Samuel Gorovitz: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/bengor.pdf

    Reply
  19. Tom Hurka

    Rawls wrote precisely and economically? That's something I never thought I'd hear.

    My ideal is Ross in the Right and the Good — utterly clear and with more good ideas per page than you find in any philosophical writing today. Too many qualifications, replies to objections, needless technicalities, etc. nowadays. Also Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia — just sparkling.

    For humour, Nozick and Bernard Williams could be very funny as could C. D. Broad, though he was at his best when being savage.

    The main vice to avoid, because it's so common these days? Pretentiousness. Your ideas just aren't that important.

    Reply
  20. andrew

    Steven Hales makes a point I cannot help but pick on:
    "who thinks it is a good idea for anyone to emulate the style of Nietzsche, brilliant though it is?"
    Nietzsche was not shy about his emulation of the Roman historian, Sallust (see late works: Ecce Homo, Twlight of the Idols.). I think, via simple transitive properties, to emulate Nietzsche to any serious degree would be to emulate Sallust. Quintilian, however, despite his respect for Sallust's writing style (it was great, as was Nietzsche's), warned students against his writing style! Michael Rosen makes a very apt point about philosophical greats NOT to aspire to, I just wanted to point out that this is not at all a new idea – we have been warned against it for almost 2000 years, maybe longer!

    Nelson Goodman. He is absolutely clear, but, more than that, he makes you want to keep reading, and, as luck would have it, all of his works are quite short. His 'On Likeness of Meaning', in seven pages, does maybe as much work as 'Word & Object' or 'Meaning & Necessity' – of whose style, I think, Carnap>Quine. Goodman's introductions are perhaps the best written intros of his time, and certainly the most fun to read. And, a quote I will never get enough of, "Obvious inadequacies are for the convenience of critics" (Ways of Worldmaking, intro).

    Reply
  21. Mark Silcox

    I'd advocate a two-step process. Step one: emulate A.J. Ayer, who can't be beat for unvarnished frankness, economy, and clarity. Step two: _cautiously_ emulate John Searle. 'Cause there really is such a thing in philosophical writing as 'voice,' and if you're going to develop one, it might as well be pretty loud.

    Reply
  22. Dennis Des Chene

    People to learn from:
    William James — how to make your points without pedanticism and with exactly the right words to lend your prose color.
    Ian Hacking — he does all the things a paper has to do so gracefully you hardly notice them. The opposite of pedantic.
    I think imitation in the classical sense of that word (as in Pope’s “imitations”, i.e. remodellings) of Horace is a very useful pedagogical device. It’s a good sign if a student falls under the spell of Wittgenstein to the point of successfully imitating his style—as long as the spell is broken in due time.

    Reply
  23. Eric

    I would second the mention of Peter Singer, who is clear and direct. I would add Jonathan Glover, who doesn't mince words but still writes in a very powerful way. Of a younger generation, I would include Jeff McMahan, whose writing makes difficult concepts easy to follow, and who reminds me a good bit of Parfit in his style.

    Reply
  24. Matt Drabek

    Personally, I found Barry Stroud's work really helpful when I was first getting into writing style issues in late undergrad/early grad school. Stroud is someone who is able to balance a clear presentation of philosophical questions and issues with an (appropriate!) element of "surprise" in the article (see in particular his "Understanding Human Knowledge in General"). He has the positives of the "tell them what you're going to say, say it, tell them what you've said" approach without the negatives of that approach.

    Reply
  25. Benj Hellie

    Development of a personal style is a concern for those with tenure. Students (and typically junior faculty) should be more concerned to learn to write solid /Phil Review/-style essays. Chalmers's papers are a good model: clear at the sentential and structural level (to the benefit of skimmer and close reader alike); 'encyclopedic' in that each paper purports to benefit the outsider with total (within reason) coverage of the topic at hand. Especially relevantly, dispassionate and without distinctive stylistic quirks: aping Chalmers, one would never seem to be /aping Chalmers/.

    In addition, everyone should go reread their Strunk and White.

    Reply
  26. Eric Schliesser

    I find most of these suggestions baffling. Means (style[s]) and ends (journal article publication, truth, insight, burden-shifting, career-ambition, creating an oeuvre, etc) should be commensurate. Note the plural in means and ends, please. This implies that emulation of a favored model should be guided by one's philosophic self-conception, which is very hard to figure out without a lot of trial (and even more) error.

    Reply
  27. Roger

    This video series should be helpful to the topic, and if nothing else it's extremely interesting:

    Reply
  28. Carlos Narziss

    Being more concerned with attaining clarity and comprehension, I have found the writings of Harry Frankfurt (e.g. his book The Importance of What We Care About) to be a good example, as well as the writings of Nietzsche scholars like Leiter (e.g. his book Nietzsche on Morality), Hussain (e.g. "Honest Illusions"), and Katsafanas (e.g. "The Concept of Unified Agency"). I personally prefer more mechanical writing styles (with many included numerical separations) that try to make everything very explicit, over anything that tries to be poetic, humorous, or even to those rigorous writers like Stroud (e.g. his book Hume) who try to cram too many details without enough explicit, separating boundaries.

    Reply
  29. dmf

    I would second DDChene's recs and add John McDermott and Richard Rorty for similar reasons, plus trying to put other peoples' complex/innovative ideas into clear and useful language seems ideal for students (Rorty obviously took some liberties in re-presenting other folks' ideas but since we are talking style).

    Reply
  30. ben w

    JL Austin is undoubtedly a great writer, but emulating him would be no mean feat: see Christopher Ricks' "Austin's Swink".

    Reply
  31. matt s.

    What Eric Schliesser said.

    Perhaps the best things to do are: (i) read a lot of philosophy.; and (ii) listen what people you respect have to say about your writing.

    Reply
  32. Demonax

    Perhaps anything by Judith Butler. Study it, then do the opposite.

    Reply
  33. Grad Student

    I agree with the previous comments that Rawls and G.A. Cohen are both clear, but each can be a bit wooden (Rawls more than Cohen, admittedly). For clarity plus elegance, I’d recommend Peter Singer, Bertrand Russell, Michael Huemer, Anthony Kenny, and early Alasdair MacIntyre (Short History of Ethics and Marxism: An Interpretation).

    Reply
  34. Jeremy Proulx

    Hume. especially the Enquiry. It's got elegance, subtlety and concision, things all philosophers strive for. More recently, Susan Neiman. Her books, articles, and incidental pieces (both in English and German) seem to me to blur the line between academic philosophy and popular writing, something we could all afford to do more often.

    Reply
  35. Sam

    In my view, Michael Smith's "The Moral Problem" is exactly what a first book in philosophy should be like. The structure of the book is perfectly clear and the major arguments are laid out explicitly and honestly, but the tone is never pedantic and the explication is never boring. Nor does the book sacrifice depth or originality at the alter of clarity. Many other papers by Smith, Philip Pettit, or both of them together also have these attributes.

    Reply
  36. Allen Hazen

    A disproportionate number of the great philosophers have also been mathematicians, and I suspect that that has an effect on their prose: spend a few years proving theorems and writing them up and the habits of making your argument clear become second nature.

    As for philosophical stylists to read and hope you grow up imitating, look to the logicians: Tarski, Gentzen, Herbrand (start with their shorter, more popular pieces, then work up to the ones where they actually prove theorems), or, nearer our own day, Feferman. … Gödel is the greatest as a logician, but for some reason his prose is often crabbed: so all rules have exceptions.

    Reply
  37. Raj N. Patel

    I think that the other part of this question is the kind of writing style you do NOT want to emulate. Judith Butler, Derrida, and other pseudo-philosophers who have an exceptional ability to say absolutely nothing that is worthy of mention in an entire 300 or 400 page book are the kinds of writing style (I refuse to call a Butlerian or Derridean mass of words "philosophical writings") one should avoid at all costs.

    Reply
  38. Graduate student

    I agree with Eric Schliesser and matt s., and add that people form sentences, in speech and in their heads, in different ways, and think in different ways, and so on. Surely one's writing style should reflect this: it's the best way to guarantee that you end up saying what you're trying to say. To adopt someone else's writing style without also adopting their way of thinking looks likely to lead to confused writing. And of course, adopting someone else's way of thinking is perhaps impossible, perhaps philosophically unhelpful.

    I guess, however, that some basic pointers can be given: be sparing with sentences, adjectives, intensifiers, universals and the conditional mood (don't say "I would like to argue" when you mean "I will now argue", for example), for example. This kind of advice is probably not insignificant. But it's not all there is, nor do all great writers follow it.

    Reply
  39. Matthew

    There was a thread on this a couple of years ago:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/philosophers-wi.html

    I'm not sure students should be thinking about style, if that's taken to refer to what people are talking about when they talk about Lewis' or Quine's style. Taking their ability to write grammatical English for granted (something I wish I could but unfortunately don't most of the time), I'm more interested in their clearly setting out premises, chains of reasoning and conclusions. The kind of clarity, rigor and explicitness that philosophers are concerned with doesn't come naturally to most students. As examples I'd want students to emulate, I think it's hard to beat Trenton Merricks, Ned Markosian and Bryan Frances.

    Reply
  40. Brian Leiter

    I will just note that I'm rather skeptical that writing style entails a way of thinking, such that one can't recommend to students good examples of philosophical writing that can be put to good use. There are some philosophers about whom it may be that style and content are tightly linked (Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, perhaps McDowell are examples), but no one would recommend any of them as a model. By contrast, a lot of philosophy (perhaps even a lot of McDowell?) would be a lot better if it were written as Jaegwon Kim writes.

    Reply
  41. David Livingsone Smith

    Descartes, Ayer, Quine, Kripke, and David Lewis. All are lucid, occasionally humorous, consistently engaging, and conspicuously non-pompous.

    It might be interesting (although potentially offensive) to specify writers who should NOT be emulated as literary stylists (excluding obvious targets like Butler and Derrida mentioned by Raj Patel). I nominate Locke and, of course Kant.

    Reply
  42. AnonymousAllenite

    In "Husbands and Wives" Woody Allen says "You can't teach writing. You expose students to good work and hope it inspires them. Some can write, others will never learn." I'm only a grad student. But I think Allen is right. I read as widely as I can, and try to adopt what I think are the best aspects of the philosophers I read; I strive to be understood, to use interesting thought-experiments and counter-examples, and lively and clear analogies, wherever I can. And to say what I mean as concisely as possible without any bullshit or gilding. Though I frequently fail.

    Reply
  43. Not Bill Lycan

    Sorry, there is an outright winner in the "succinct and utterly clear" category. William G. Lycan. Read his intro to phil language–it is a miracle.

    Reply
  44. (Other) anonymous ABD

    Some writers who have particularly impressed me are Joel Feinberg, Kendall Walton, and Pamela Hieronymi. All of them help remind me that you do not need to be fancy to write with a wonderful philosophical voice. I feel like they all have such voices but they get them just through trying to write as directly, naturally, and thoughtfully as possible.

    I also try to keep Bernard Williams in mind as someone *not* to emulate. He is good for this because his elegance can make it much more tempting to emulate him than it is to emulate other eminent philosophers, but trying normally just makes one harder to understand. (I think this is aggravatingly true for Williams himself. It is often hard to know when a short Williams passage is an offhand remark and when it is an intricately compressed argument.)

    I find much of Stephen Sondheim's advice for good musical theatre lyrics (from his recent book) writing helpful in writing philosophy as well. His prose style is also exemplary itself.

    Reply
  45. John Alexander

    Brian; this seems to be a good topic for one of your polls.

    Reply
  46. Owen Flanagan

    For great essayists, I'd pick Thomas Nagel of Mortal Questions and Dan Dennett of Brainstorms as the very best.

    Reply
  47. J. Jocelyn Trueblood

    I admire the styles of W. T. Stace, A. C. Ewing, and C . D. Broad. In our times these styles may have an old-fashioned flavor, but they're excellent just the same. Well worth examining.

    Reply
  48. Peter Kail

    Might I add Colin McGinn and Edward Craig? Craig is very witty but not at the expense of content, and McGinn is jargon-free and very smooth. Bishop Berkeley takes some beating for concision and that is worth emulating. Hume is a great stylist, but any attempt at emulation would result in either pretension or parody.

    Reply
  49. dankaufman!

    my colleague, alastair norcross' paper on puppies, pigs, and marginal cases is a perfect combination of rigorous philosophical argumentation, accessibility, and hilariousness. emulate it, suckas!

    Reply
  50. Chilango

    Totally agree about Dennett. Always brilliantly clear and readable, packed with memorable and succinct neologisms and fantastic thought-experiments. Though perhaps a budding philosopher should not try to emulate the comic aspects of his style (likewise for attempting to write like Fodor).

    As a paradigm for lucid prose, and for a sane, reasonable, non-point-scoring attitude, I would like to nominate Tim Crane. I direct my students to Crane as an example of how to write philosophy . . .

    Reply

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