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

You Can’t Just Talk to Each Other

Darlene Deas

I know some philosophers find telling laypeople that they are philosophers or explaining what philosophy is tiring. On the other hand, some philosophers give a veritable conference paper to the simple question, “What do you do?”


I’ve rarely heard a philosopher explain what he or she does in a way that was easily understood, interesting, and accessible to non-philosophers–which brings me to this: develop a 90-second elevator pitch.

I know some people reading this will bristle at this sort of business-y advice, but a 90-second elevator pitch is a fantastic way to quickly and succinctly explain what philosophy is and why it’s important to lots of different audiences in lots of different situations.

Here are 5 key components to creating a powerful 90-second pitch:

  1. Talk about what you do, not what you are: most people won’t know what an epistemologist is, but they will understand a description of what epistemologists do.  
  2. Use plain language: please don’t pepper your speech with technical phrases like supervenience, heuristics, or ontology. Unless, of course, you'r trying to alienate your audience. Seriously, how many people in gen pop know what you're talking about?
  3. Keep it conversational: try not to sound like you’re standing at a lectern, and instead think more along the lines of chatting with someone waiting to get their tires rotated. 
  4. Make a connection: help your listener make a personal connection to what you do qua philosopher. 
  5. Invite questions: the best way to invite questions is to first ask questions of your listener.

All kinds of people need to know and understand the value of philosophy—not just people who read “The Stone” or who take philosophy classes, right? Otherwise programs are cut, parents dissuade students, and the general public begins to see philosophy as an exercise in navel gazing that society can ill afford.

I would wager that university governing board members who vote to eliminate philosophy programs and departments have never taken a philosophy class nor had anyone explain to them exactly what it is philosophers do or why the discipline is important.

Now, admittedly, if you’re at a top tier school this won’t be of much concern to you. But, whether or not you have an elevator pitch and execute it might impact your colleagues teaching at state or regional universities. As Peter’s Uncle Ben said, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Explaining what philosophy is, what philosophers do, and how it may relate to your audience doesn’t have to feel burdensome. In fact, it should feel like a privilege. So, how do you explain metaphysics, epistemology, consciousness or, consequentialism in chance daily encounters, to your plumber, the person next to you on a plane, your mechanic, or the woman at the bus stop?

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25 responses to “You Can’t Just Talk to Each Other”

  1. Charles Pigden

    My basic spiel to be adapted in the course of conversation:
    You know when people say ‘My business philosophy is such and such’? Or ‘Our policing philosophy is whatever’? What they mean by ‘philosophy’ here is the underlying system of ideas that justifies what they do. Well that’s not too far from what philosophy really is an academic subject. It’s about the underlying systems of ideas that justify what we do, not only in business or policing or education but in science and everyday life. Except that we don’t just take these ideas for granted but examine them critically. Take science for instance. We tend to assume that the science is an especially good way to know things. But what exactly is scientific method? What’s so great about it? You do philosophy of science and you hopefully wind up with a better understanding of what science is and why it’s worth doing. Or you might wind up thinking that it’s not so great after all. More generally we can ask when it is reasonable to believe something. Is it ever reasonable to believe something just because you would like it to be true? [If asked I can tell them about William James versus Bertrand Russell.] We also look at the big questions that you’ve probably heard described as philosophical, such as ‘Do we have free will?’ ‘Given the laws of nature and the configuration of matter a hundred years ago could sufficiently a powerful computer have have predicted what everyone will do?’ ‘And if it could, what difference does it make?’ Then there is morality: ‘Is there some morality that is objectively true or is it just a matter of different people with different moral codes’? ‘Given the terrible things that he did, was Hitler objectively evil, so to speak or just evil according to you and me?’ [I presume I am not talking to a Trump supporter.] Then we ask questions a not *about* morality but *within* morality . For example: when, if ever, is it right to got to war? My favorite famous philosopher thought ‘sometimes but not often.’. I protested against the Iraq War Tony Blair continues to insist that he did what he thought was right. Is there anything rational that we can say about this dispute? Another thing about philosophy is that that generally speaking philosophical questions can’t be solved in an obvious or straightforward way by experiment: you can’t do test to determine the right answer. This isn’t to say that science and experiment are not relevant or that you can do philosophy without taking the established facts into account. But if a deep philosophical question can be solved by some kind of experiment, this won’t be in an obvious or straightforward way. But that’s true of some scientific questions. So what this means is that there isn’t a very sharp distinction between (say) the philosophy of biology and theoretical biology. {I can talk a bit about Dawkins and the Selfish Gene.] What’s the good of philosophy? Well first philosophical questions are just plain interesting. So if it worth having people whose job it is to answer interesting questions in physics (say) surely it is worth having people whose job it is to answer interesting questions in philosophy. Isn’t it worthwhile trying to understand the world and our place in it? But getting back to marketing, if somebody’s marketing philosophy is crap they are not likely to be much use at marketing. If we can improve the underlying systems of ideas that justify what we do then we are likely to do it better, whatever ‘it’ happens to be.

    General strategy: Get your interlocutor hooked on the questions.

    Reply
  2. Vogel

    I know you mean well. But, to be honest, I don't know what to feel about this. And I'm curious to hear what others think. I understand the benefit of being able to do that. But sometimes I find it a bit patronized when a layperson, for some unknown reason, insists that I must be able to tell him/her what I do very quickly in a way such that he/she can quickly understand and also feel interested in the issue. It happens to me many times in the past. It seems that many laypersons have this impression that somehow it is the nature of philosophy that philosophers must be able to do that. My thought is, it can be done for some philosophical questions or issues, but not others. As I said, I can see it would be nice for a lot of pragmatic reason if one can do that. It'd be nice too if one can win the lottery. But I don't see where does the idea come from that it can always be done, as if it follows from the nature of philosophy. You don't see people demanding that from, say, mathematicians. Sometimes, I feel that, if people really want to know, I am happy to explain it in detail, which would take some time. After that, if you are not enthusiastic about it, I'm totally fine, that is why I am doing it and not you. People are enthusiastic about different things; there's no reason to think that everything people do can be turned into a TED talk. It's no one's fault. But if people don't really have the patience and genuine interest to really hear me out and acts like "you got 90 second, chop chop", then why pretend to be interested and ask in the first place. There are a lot of other things in the world we can talk about.

    Reply
  3. Ted

    I think Vogel makes an insightful comparison with TED talks. I know many "academics" and educated people really enjoy them. Then they think they understand something really deep on a subject outside their area of expertise. They are enthusiastic, etc. But if you ask them a question or two about the topic or the talk, very quickly their "understanding" unravels. Really, what they enjoyed was being entertained by some very engaging speakers. That is fine. But it is no shortcut for really getting an understanding of topic. These elevator talks may be effective public relations exercises. But we are kidding ourselves if we think we are educating people about our field. And they are kidding themselves even more if they think they now know what philosophy is.

    Reply
  4. Charles Pigden

    In response to Vogel and Ted. In my homeland of the UK and in my adopted country New Zealand as well as in Australia where I was financed to study philosophy for four years, philosophy is mostly a tax-payer supported enterprise. If I were too stuck up to explain to other tax-payers both what I do and why it is worth doing, then I don’t think I would deserve all that funding. I think I owe my fellow-tax-payers some sort of an explanation as to what I do to earn my not inconsiderable salary since it is coming out of their pockets. If Ted’s and Vogel’s attitudes are predominant in the profession it is hardly surprising if funding is drying up, and if it *is* drying up in part because of such attitudes, then it serves us right for our collective ingratitude and arrogance.

    Reply
  5. V. Alan White

    Inquiry is usually taken to be about "who?, what?, when?, where?, and why?"

    Snapchat is an app about "who?"
    Facebook is an app about "what?"
    Twitter is an app about "when?"
    Yik Yak is an app about "where?"

    Philosophy is an app about all apps including itself–"why?"

    It's the most apt app to ask the biggest questions.

    Reply
  6. V. Alan "Hair-splitter" White

    . . . And to Charles Pigden: Hear Hear!!!

    Reply
  7. Larry

    I cannot agree more strongly with what Charles Pigden has written. It is 100% true.

    The arrogance (or perhaps naivete?) of many philosophers — the notion that they are entitled to spend taxpayer money on what they find interesting but not bother even in minimal terms to justify or even explain what they do — is what explains reduced funding, decreased interest from students, and scorn from the general public. I work in law and philosophy; even highly intelligent folks such as federal judges roll their eyes when they hear that philosophers spend their time (and others' money) thinking about generics or mereology or what Leibniz meant to say in that one obscure passage in that one minor publication. If you're going to do that, at least feel some degree of obligation to explain why it's worth doing!

    Reply
  8. Vogel

    I'm afraid I'm not so sure what I said is in any way in conflict with what you are saying. I am only arguing that a TED talk like quick and dirty explanation won't be possible for many topics — and also, I am not talking about ALL philosophical topics, I'm just saying there are some topics where a TED talk is not obviously possible. Again, do people expect that from mathematicians? And we are not talking about what philosophy, or ethics, or epistemology, etc., in general is; we are talking about very specific research topics that we work on. Secondly, it is difficult to tell what counts as successfully justifying a research project to a layman — tying back to what they care? Many people don't even care about morality. How are you supposed to justify doing ethics? Tying back to what they SHOULD care? Then what good is that explanation if they don't care what they should care?

    My main point is a skeptical one: why think that such a quick and dirty explanation to laymen is always possible? As for that slightly personal remark about "ingratitude and arrogance": I think talking about "gratitude" here involves some very substantive assumptions in political philosophy that I am not ready to engage here (also, in what sense do we "owe" them an explanation, what kind of obligation are we talking about here; just because part of the funding can be ultimately traced back to the taxes? why does it make us "owe" them anything), and about the "arrogance" bit, well, I didn't say that that makes us better or what, just like there are things that other people work on that I won't go about and say to them "tell me what you work on in 90 second, chop chop, and btw, make sound interesting to me". Admitting that they probably can't do that for me doesn't make me inferior. It's just how it is in a highly specialized academic world. So I think there is no need to guilt-trip ourselves too quickly. Just my two cents.

    Reply
  9. David Wallace

    @Vogel: I don't think there's anything about philosophy in particular that means it ought to be particularly easy to explain to lay people. But I don't particularly read Darlene Deas as saying anything philosophy-specific. It's an equally reasonable thing to ask a scientist. And most scientists I talk to can indeed give good short lay accounts of what they do. (I suspect the grant culture increases the pressure to get good at it.)

    @Ted: understanding is not all or nothing, and "not a deep understanding" isn't synonymous with "no understanding". Not being a specialist in any of them, I only have a shallow understanding of natural selection, object-oriented programming, Keynesian economics, or virtue ethics – in each case picked up from a combination of popularizations and short conversations. But that's much better than nothing in each case.

    Reply
  10. Michael B

    When I was a philosophy student I got asked a lot what philosophy is or what is the point of it. I usually just trotted out a few examples of the Greeks, anticipating by a couple of thousand years, evolution, atomism, heliocentrism and the fact that stars are suns that are very far away.

    That leads immediately to philosophy as generating big ideas well before we know how to experimentally test them and why partial credit is lacking re. enormous scientific discoveries. I might have thrown in how Copernicus referenced the Greek philosophers in his manuscript but deleted it when it was published. Or how Einstein said something nice about epistemology.

    That usually sends people off surprised and mildly excited within two minutes.

    If they ask what the difference is when a scientist or artist or etc. comes up with a big idea, I say there is no difference. There is no difference between my running an athletes' – we can both run; yet I can't run a marathon. Same for thinking creatively and carefully. You get good at what you do.

    I think that's short, mildly engaging ('Darwin wasn't the first person to think of evolution?!), not terribly misleading, and inclusive – everyone can do philosophy and you probably already do without knowing it. Plus, if you want to get better at it, you can.

    Reply
  11. Jane A.

    To your fine list of suggestions, I would add that one should begin with "I’m a professor of philosophy" or "I teach philosophy" rather than "I'm a philosopher." … This is a little humbler, perhaps, but it's both more true to the facts and it avoids the impression that one walks around all day in a toga asking questions or has set up an ashram and is looking for converts.

    Art historians don't call themselves artists, English professors don't call themselves writers, etc.

    Reply
  12. Derek Bowman

    In response to Charles Pigden:

    I agree that insofar as we ask for public funding, we owe a public justification for the importance of what we do. But I don't see how that diminishes the very substantive worries that Vogel and Ted raised. Part of what is valuable about philosophy education is learning to recognize the limits of what we know and how to conduct inquiry into important questions about meaning, reality, and human life in spite of those limits. TED talks and 'elevator pitches' too often are based on the assumption that complex matters can be broken down into something simple and easily digestible. But philosophy is often about revealing the hidden difficulties and complexities behind the simple, and so much of philosophy is antithetical to that form of boiling things down. Indeed, if philosophy *were* the sort of thing that could be easily boiled down in that way, it's hard to see why we would need to employ a class of specialists to focus all their time on it.

    So I guess the question is whether we want to merely convince people that philosophy is worthwhile, or do we want to genuinely teach them what it is and why it is valuable. If it's the latter, then I think we have good reason to be wary about the limits of 'elevator pitches.'

    Reply
  13. Steven Hales

    Here's some things I've said.

    "I'm interested in luck. For example, if you if you make a guess at something and you're right, you don't really know it. It was just a lucky guess. So what does knowledge have going for it that lucky guesses don't? It's surprisingly hard to say. Or maybe you think that you're lucky to be born into a wealthy first-world nation. But given who your parents are, you were almost certain to be born where you where. So how was it really luck?"

    "I do metaphysics. We think about weird stuff like how many holes are in a paper towel tube, or how many parts of a thing you can change out before it's really a different thing, or why is there a universe at all instead of not."

    "I think about where knowledge comes from. Is it all just a matter of perception and experience? Well, what about memory? Or what about knowledge of mathematics? That doesn't looks like perception. Helping to sort this out underlies science."

    If the interlocutor is still interested after that, then we can get into a more detailed conversation. If none of those remarks piqued their interest, we can move on to the weather. I don't pretend that I have fully educated the listener. So what? If they think this philosophy stuff sounds sort of interesting or cool after talking to me, I feel like I was a good ambassador for our profession.

    Reply
  14. Ted

    Sorry for contributing to some misunderstanding here. Nothing I said was meant to imply that we should not "showcase" our discipline and its value. Sure, we need to be able to engage the public, and other audiences. I am required to do it all the time, with administrators, for example. But realize, as Vogel and Derek Bowman suggest, we are not thereby really educating the public about philosophy. We are often entertaining them, engaging their interest, etc. Real philosophy is difficult, often counter-intuitive, and that is that. Another aspect of my job, at a College in the USA, is to teach students to write. I cannot teach them how to write with one short assignment; just as I cannot teach the public about philosophy in three minutes. The reason my students' writing improves is because I give a number of well designed assignments that enable them to overcome difficulties they were having with writing when they arrived at College. Our jobs are difficult. And we are certainly not telling the public about our jobs when we try to engage them in 3 minutes.

    Reply
  15. post-doc

    I totally and utterly agree that it is much better and more humble to say "I teach philosophy", "I'm a philosophy professor" etc than "I'm a philosopher", which sounds terribly self-important/pretentious etc.

    However, I don't like the comparison contrasts: Art History vs actually making Art, English Lit vs actually writing Lit. Philosophy is not (or should not be) fundamentally the history of philosophy! Philosophy is (or should be) like math or science at least in this respect. Average or mediocre math professors and science professors are still doing/creating real mathematics and science. They may be much less good or clever or original than Euler or Einstein but they are engaged in the same enterprise or discipline. Likewise, my unremarkable and mostly unread philosophy papers still count as genuine philosophy. I'm engaged in doing the same task/discipline that Kant and Frege were doing – but, alas, just much much much less well! In contrast, even the finest Art Historian is doing something fundamentally different to what actual artists are doing when they make art (great or mediocre). The activity of writing books/papers in the discipline/subject of English Literature is categorically different to writing novels or poems.

    (Of course there may be borderline cases of texts or activities that are hard to place, or which are perhaps both literary criticism and literature. But these borderline cases don't impugn the usefulness of the general distinction here, which I take Jane A. to accept in her post.)

    Reply
  16. a member of General Population with an actual 90 second pitch in the Business World

    Philosophers are ridiculous lol. Darlene's original post offers a difficult and useful challenge which tests many different aspects of intelligence at once. The “90 second pitch”, in this game as in business, is only intended as a general purpose, battle-tested conversation starter. It succeeds if it branches naturally into an open human discussion about a topic of which the conversant is unfamiliar but which is significant to you, not if it explains the paper you’re trying to get accepted or transfers excitement about your little sub-sub-field or radiates your brilliance to all within earshot. Of course, for a skilled and patient conversationalist, any of those ends and many more can be achieved in due time! Or, you know, you might just experience a human connection and light up the life of another person in a way they did not expect.

    I only poke fun because, having failed at elegantly explaining philosophy many times myself, I’m actually interested to see what the experts come up with. Surely at least a few of you pontificating paragraphs out there are capable of combining synthetic understanding with pithy wit and actual flesh-and-blood empathy!

    Addendum: I hope you forgive the weakness of discipline compelling me to pedantry in adding to C. Pidgen’s more pragmatic response:

    I think Ted’s remarks on TED talks and what real education involves assumes a strikingly small vision of our epistemic life. Given how philosophers these days like to keep their professional gaze on such phenomena as dynamic models of neuron populations, Eddington's eclipse experiment, and f=ma, it's easy to overlook just how much we act (often with good effect and for good reason) on little snatches of knowledge, tantalizing but weakly grasped concepts, exciting stories grounded in the actual world but which for us link into no shimmering sets of generalizations or rule-guided machinery.

    I don’t personally care much for TED talks—partly for the reason Ted gives, partly for their distinctive combination of self-unawareness, earnestness, and maddening drawl—but I stop short of denying their value as one educational tool among many. Surely no one claims a TED talk will make you an expert or impart a deep understanding, but a good one can easily light a flame which gets increasingly fanned over the years, or inform about the existence of a new theory or result, or give just enough knowledge to not make an embarrassing blunder when you later butt up against that topic in other work, or make you more aware of the projects and passions of others, or be recalled when browsing the book store for the next thing to read, or furnish your mind with a wide enough span of facts that you can bring out the best in other people when conversing. It's easy to keep going, and I hardly need to be explicit in mapping these observations onto the value of a well-crafted “90 second pitch"…

    Reply
  17. Jane A.

    Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with everything you say as a description of the disciplines, and I thank you for the correction of my hasty and inappropriate analogy, owing most likely to my belief that the discipline of philosophy should be more like the history of philosophy than it is. I'm glad finally that you agree with the main point that much would be accomplished in talking to non-academics by replacing "I'm a philosopher" with "I teach philosophy."

    Reply
  18. Michel X.

    You know, it was just a few years ago that it was a standard piece of job market advice that we have a 30-second elevator pitch ready for the APA, and targeted at slightly different audiences.

    The job market might not be APA-centred any more but, as Darlene observes, the advice still seems totally sound. Since the shift away from the APA is very recent, most of us should already have the skeleton for this kind of pitch lying around, just waiting to be dusted off. This post is a very nice reminder that it's actually a multi-purpose pitch, not an idiosyncratic job market hoop.

    Reply
  19. Ian

    I have to say, I think your analogy is a weak one that betrays a certain Platonic myopia. To separate "actually" doing as in philosophy from what you call a categorically different enterprise of (What ought we call it? Exegesis?) interpretive work, historical or otherwise, in art history or literature is both to make a faulty comparison and to betray a certain chauvinism. The question is whether philosophical thought self-justifying. You seem to think that it is because it "actually" practices philosophy, by which I assume you mean thinking well, and thinking well is clearly a good thing, therefore philosophy is self-justifying and does not need history or exegesis based on anything other than argument and logic. The problem with this view is that some of the greatest philosophers don't actually agree. We can say a lot about Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault to name only a few, but one thing we cannot say about them is that they considered philosophy self-justifying or radically separated from its human conditions (social life, history, economy, religion, etc.). What this in turn allows is a critical distance from particularly philosophical thought that cannot be achieved when the latter is assumed to be self-justifying. This of course is not simply history of philosophy, or even history of thought, but the taking of philosophical thought itself as an object of study, one that is alienated at least heuristically from the philosopher. Without this kind of perspective or critical distance, one is subject to forces of ideological hegemony. It is for these reasons that what you appear to take for a weakness in other humanistic disciplines is in fact their greatest strength (cf. Adorno's aesthetic theory, Benjamin from "Goethe's Elective Affinities" on, Hegel, Nietzsche and Foucault on history and so on).

    You're right to say that people in Art History and Literature departments take a different view of their objects of study than some philosophers do, but that is not because they want to (or should be) "actually" doing what they study. Rather the critic–in all the good senses–insists on foregrounding and acknowledging separation and distance from the object. This is what allows her to really "see" it (think Aristotle in the Poetics) in a way that most "actual" doers do not. Sit down with a literature PhD (interpreter) and a fiction MFA (doer) sometime and you'll see how away from each other they really are. The latter may have more insight into "craft" and even human psychology, but the former will certainly have a great deal more insight into what it is we talk about when we talk about fiction, for example.

    I'd even go so far as to argue that the notion that philosophy of the analytic species is self-justifying is the real weakness. If one of the pressing questions for academic philosophy in the US right now has to do with the ways in which the field has hitherto failed to attract a more diverse group of people, we might entertain the notion that the disavowal of exegetical and historical approaches is one reason. The central claim of "intersectionality" is that identity informs ways of feeling, thinking, and being in the world in such a way that thought of every stripe is conditioned, if not determined, by many outside factors. We can debate the merits of that claim, but for now we need to understand that despite the danger of slipping into irrationalism the claim is powerful precisely because it allows for a critical distance on all manner of things–colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so forth. The argument is that those persons who are not middle-class white males cannot "actually" do in a way that is divorced from their social position. That's not to say they can't think philosophically, they most assuredly can, but they don't have the privilege of ascending out of the cave of lived life up into the ether of pure thought without a great deal of intense reflection. The clear touchstone here is Du Bois on double consciousness, and as Du Bois says it is both a blessing in the sense that it allows for distance, and a curse in the sense that one can never "actually" be simply oneself. All this to say that maybe the reason the "other" humanities tend to draw a more diverse crowd of majoring students has to do with the way in which the other humanities take the critical stance as central to their work, while philosophy–at least as it seems to be portrayed in this comment–considers itself above the critical fray.

    Reply
  20. post-doc

    I am afraid I do not understand everything that you wrote in your reply.
    But I would ask you please to read my post again:
    I did NOT state or suggest anywhere that philosophy is "self-justifying". I did not state or suggest that philosophy is "radically separated from its human conditions" (whatever that means). I absolutely did NOT state or suggest that other "humanistic disciplines" have any kinds of "weaknesses" whatever. And I certainly did not state or suggest that philosophy is or should be "above the critical fray".
    Nor did I suggest that the history of philosophy is not real/actual philosophy. I said that the discipline of philosophy is not FUNDAMENTALLY just doing the history of philosophy. The contrast case (from Jane A.'s post) was Art History – which pretty clearly IS FUNDAMENTALLY just doing the history of art. Whatever other differences there may be to philosophy (no doubt there are many), Mathematics as a discipline is also NOT fundamentally the history of mathematics.
    I do not wish to engage any further in the perennial debate about how central or important history of philosophy is to doing philosophy, but I am very happy to accept that it is more important than, say, history of science is to science or history of math is to math.

    And if we are going to speculate about why people may or may not be put-off from studying philosophy, I would suggest that the sort of long-winded and opaque prose style that you employed in your post could well be off-putting to many people. Likewise, failing to properly read what someone else has written and/or interpreting them with a total lack of charity and then launching into a moralistic rant is unlikely to win our discipline many new converts . . .

    Reply
  21. Aaron Lercher

    Russell says (beautifully), "The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty." (Thanks for the link, Brian!)

    There are many ways to build on this just a bit, for 90 seconds. The briefer the better! How one does this might depend on philosophical views, taste, or on the interlocutor. Here's an attempt:

    Philosophy focuses on questions that aren't fully answered by reliable methods of inquiry. One should use reliable methods when possible, and not exclude any. But, as Russell argues, some questions still demand, or even command, human interest, despite our inability to settle them by accepted methods. Philosophy then seeks acceptable or possible answers to such questions, and you [the interlocutor] and I can try to do this, if you'd like. I'd like to believe, like Russell and other philosophers, that philosophical thinking liberates us. But whether it does or not is a good question, and one that is both worth asking and lacks an accepted method for answering it. So it is a philosophical question.

    One could then go on to a specific example that might interest the interlocutor, perhaps a question related to the interlocutor's own work, or else a problem in applied or normative ethics that might worry someone who considers the problem.

    But in the end, I don't think there's any obligation to engage in philosophy. Dogmatic adherence to authority is a viable way of life. Not the best way, but viable.

    Reply
  22. Ian

    It is fair enough to say that you didn't say that philosophy is self-justifying, i.e. that it has no fundamental need for the history of philosophy. But it struck me that you very clearly implied it as well as fairly clearly implying the superiority of philosophy to other disciplines in the humanities in which interpretation takes precedence over "actually" doing. This sounds very much to me like the old cant that teachers, here non-philosophers, are those who can't do. Philosophers do, art historians don't. It may be the case that in your view there is no normative claim implied regarding the respective value of this distinction. I would argue that within the context of our culture–that is, US culture–the normative claim is clear enough. In fact, it's the same claim Donald Trump's campaign makes.

    I would say two further things–1) Claiming that you don't understand something due to "long-winded and opaque" prose style seems odd when you also ask someone to "properly read" your work. Just as obtuseness is sometimes a cover for lack of depth, "clarity" that ignores the fairly obvious connotations and implications of what is being said is hardly clear.

    I am interpreter. I interpreted your remark, which seemed to me to implicitly make a claim for philosophy as a kind of self-justifying core discipline in distinction to exegetical disciplines. Again, it's true that you didn't set up that distinction on the literal level but I think it's fairly clearly there. It is a distinction that disallows, in my view, a self-reflexivity in philosophy as a discipline–these are the critiques of Nietzsche and Foucault. The great philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel understand that interpretation of philosophy as thought is contextual, historical, and in no way sui generis or self-justifying. This strikes me as a fairly uncommon view in mainstream analytic philosophy in which history of philosophy is regularly pooh poohed.

    Reply
  23. post-doc

    Oh I did 'properly read' your original post. I read it a number of times. But I still could not understand much of it. And so I refrained from coming up with an 'interpretation' of it which found a whole bunch of 'implicit' claims hiding in there.

    And forgive me if this is just another example of my misguided, conventional desire for clarity (or should that be "clarity"?) . . . But it is normal when starting a paragraph with: 'I would say two further things — (1)" to then go on to mark the second thing you 'would say' with the numeral (2). As it stands you seem to say a whole lot more than two further things.
    Also, you might want look up the definition of 'obtuseness'. Obtuseness is not really the sort of thing that could cover for a lack of depth – it just IS a lack of depth. Did you get mixed up with the word 'obscurity' perhaps?

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  24. Charles Pigden

    According to ‘Ian’ analytic philosophers think that philosophy is ‘ self-justifying and does not need history or exegesis based on anything other than argument and logic. The problem with this view is that some of the greatest philosophers don't actually agree. We can say a lot about … Descartes … , but one thing we cannot say about [Descartes et al] is that they considered philosophy self-justifying’.

    Two points
    1) I am not entirely sure what the claim that analytic philosophers think that philosophy is ‘ self-justifying’ means, but in so far as the claim can be made sense of it is simply false. Arguments proceed from premises and analytic philosophers derive their premises from a wide range of sources, often extra-philosophic. Thus they do not typically suppose that philosophy is self-justifying if this means that it proceeds from premises that are evident only to philosophers. Even the Oxford style conceptual analysts derived their arguments from alleged truths about the way that non-philosophers talk and think, premises that were supposedly evident to all.

    2) If the claim that philosophy is self-justifying means that philosophers can arrive at substantial truths about the world by means of logic, argument and self evident truths without taking much account of the history of the subject then not only did Descartes ‘agree’ to this thesis but it was a thesis that he championed in the ‘Meditations’ a work in which (so far as I can see) no other philosophers are so much as mentioned and which makes an ostentatious break with the philosophy of the schools. (The index to The Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol 2 suggests that he did not talk about other philosophers unless prompted to by his critics in the ‘Objections and Replies’) Now it may very well be that he was wrong to do so, but he was definitely trying to develop a philosophy that was both self-justifying in this sense and largely emancipated from the history of the subject. He thought that he was making a new beginning, in which everything doubtable was to be set aside *including the views of earlier philosophers*. Of course his emancipation was not as complete as he believed it to be, but ‘Ian’ is simply wrong to enlist him as an ally in his campaign against the supposedly self-justifying pretensions of analytic philosophers. For he was one of the most pretentiously self-justifying philosophers in the history of the subject.

    As we have seen in earlier disputes on this blog, those who talk biggest about the need to do the history of philosophy often display a startling ignorance of the history that they insist we ought to be aware of.

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  25. Charles Pigden

    I must confess I am a bit disappointed with this thread. Instead of series of short spiels designed to give people a rough idea of what philosophy is and why it is worth doing, (which I presume is what Darlene had in mind) we have got sidetracked (or maybe uptracked) to a meta-level discussion about whether such spiels are desirable, whether they have deep down educational value etc, etc (Some of the posts remind me of Douglas Adams’ fictional philosopher Vroomfondel who has just failed to see a massive financial opportunity which would put him on the gravy train for life: ‘‘Think our minds must be too highly trained, Majikthise’.) Having already given my proof of the possibility of such a short spiel (in the form of a short spiel), and having read the very interesting short spiels of Michael B, Stephen Hales, Aaron Lercher and V Alan White, I am rather hoping for other examples of such spiels with a view to improving my own. So please, could we hear from those who think they can do it rather than those who think it cannot or should not be done (let alone those who take the topic as text from which to preach undereducated sermons on the alleged vices of analytic philosophy)?

    Also, following David Wallace and ‘a member of General Population’ let me disarm the syllogism that leads some to suppose that devising and deploying such a short spiel is not a worthwhile exercise. Here’s the syllogism.

    1) You cannot give anyone an in-depth understanding of what philosophy is and why it is worth doing in an elevator talk.

    2) It is not worthwhile explaining X to anyone unless you can give them an in-depth understanding of X.

    3) So it is not worthwhile explaining what philosophy is and why it is worth doing in an elevator talk.

    Since it often better for people to have to have a superficial understanding of an issue rather than no understanding at all, and since we often acquire such superficial but worthwhile understandings from short explanations (eg from Wikepedia which I have used just this morning to enhance my understanding of history of Cyprus), it is not in general true that it is not worthwhile explaining X to anyone unless you can give them an in-depth understanding of X. Thus 2) is false. In particular, it is a good thing from the point of view of professional philosophers if *voters* have some understanding of what philosophy is and why it is worth doing (an understanding which, if it exists, is pretty much bound to be superficial in most cases), since philosophy as a profession is in various ways dependent on the support of the voting public. If they can’t see the point of it they may cease to support it. Thus there is a prudential (as well as in my view a moral) obligation to explain ourselves to those who in many cases pay our salaries.

    Let me conclude by passing on the sentiments of my son-in-law, not a philosopher but a plasterer by trade. I was talking about this thread before dinner the other day. Some of the contributors I explained seem to think that it is simply impossible to give an adequate understanding of what philosophy is in a short spiel. Well, he replied, ‘if they can’t explain what philosophy is, then perhaps they are in the wrong line of business’.

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