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MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 20–SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME
…but that was not always so. Mill, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, Aristotle et al. were not writing for other academics (in some cases, the category "other academics" did not exist). How has this changed philosophy with a moral or political point (including moral and political philosophy), for better or for worse?
I guess it means that such philosophy isn't exploring arguments that would be persuasive to non-academics (and/or non-academic-philosophers). Is this good or bad? Seems like for the authors you list above, having a more open-ended audience to persuade allowed them to be more creative with their arguments and argument-styles. E.g., It takes an academic (I think) to write off Nietzsche due to the alleged "genealogical fallacy".
Peter Singer has definitely written books for non-academics, and I have Patricia Churchland's book, "Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition". Other than that, I've seen books about evolution and altruism, and ones analyzing the culture wars and societal divisions, such as "Moral Tribes" by Joshua Greene. And there are all those books about the Trolley Problem.
It seems to me – as a non-academic trying to learn – that quite a bit of academic moral philosophy is about defending a camp – Kantian, utilitarian, etc. – or about whether or not it is even possible to say anything about morals. I'll read this stuff, but I doubt it will help many people in their work and lives.
I read a lot of animal ethics work, and many of the big players in that field (both individuals and groups) engage in lots of public-directed communications. This includes media interviews, accessible publications, multimedia works and public events. There is quite a gap between the complexity and abstraction of issues in public communications vs issues in academic works (e.g. "should we should ban zoos?" vs "what is assisted agency in the context of human-animal relationships?"). As such, I would consider them largely separate endeavours performed by a largely overlapping set of people for largely overlapping reasons.
While the authors Brian mentions many not have been writing for academics per se, they were writing their philosophical works for an audience that could understand and consider their arguments properly, which is not the public at large. "Widely read" in a historical context refers to a much narrower readership than in the present day.
I read a lot of animal ethics work, and many of the big players in that field (both individuals and groups) engage in lots of public-directed communications. This includes media interviews, accessible publications, multimedia works and public events. There is quite a gap between the complexity and abstraction of issues in public communications vs issues in academic works (e.g. "should we should ban zoos?" vs "what is assisted agency in the context of human-animal relationships?"). As such, I would consider them largely separate endeavours performed by a largely overlapping set of people for largely overlapping reasons.
While the authors Brian mentions many not have been writing for academics per se, they were writing their philosophical works for an audience that could understand and consider their arguments properly, which is not the public at large. "Widely read" in a historical context refers to a much narrower readership than in the present day.
I'm pretty sure that the absolute number of philosophical works written for public audience is at record high. For one thing, the absolute number of books written in most disciplines is at record high. There is supply, but for better or worse there is not enough demand or at least uptake.
(I say "for better or worse" because do we really want the public to read "How Fascism Works?"? :p)
What you note above seems to be a phenomenon of analytic philosphy.
I just took my afternoon walk and passed my neighborhood bookstore (Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile) and at a glance in the shop window saw several works by philosophers for an educated lay public, books by Carlos Peña (Chilean), Diana Aurenque (Chilean), Paul Preciado (Spanish), Alain Badiou (French), Byul Chul Han (Korean/German) and Judith Butler (U.S.). I didn't bother to note several books about other philosophers, works on Marx and on Hegel. All the works I note are original reflections on political and/or ethical issues.
Are the philosophers mentioned on the same level as Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche? No, obviously not, but that is another problem.
I was turned on to philosophy by a Nietzsche expert at a community college in the early oughts who in addition to teaching Plato and Aristotle and Descartes in our introductory survey course also introduced us to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Since I loved engaging with those thinkers and I assumed that doing so (+logic) is what philosophers did, I transferred to a University of California campus as a declared philosophy major.
Then I got to my (relatively small) philosophy department where the faculty was split roughly 50/50 analytic/continental, and I quickly learned if I didn't look outside of the philosophy department then I'd find myself spending most of my time reading secondary sources intended for graduate students and academics rather than
primary source material from great thinkers. As a result, I began taking political theory courses in the politics department and theory courses offered by an interdisciplinary graduate department in order to read the primary sources I wanted to read and to engage with faculty who wanted to discuss "big picture" moral and political ideas rather than technical points in academic literature.
Which is to say that for me as an undergraduate, the technical turn in moral and political philosophy caused me to turn away from the philosophy department for meaningful engagement with moral and political ideas and thinkers. And I think that's so much the worse for philosophy as an academic discipline, if not necessarily for philosophy as an intellectual undertaking.
To say the obvious, it has to do with the changing nature of the university into a business, and the changing nature of philosophy into a profession and career, i.e. a job. The two together lead to the emphasis on specialization and the need to justify what one is doing. The specialization can get to the point even where even other academic philosophers cannot understand or see the meaning of what one is doing at times, nevermind educated laypersons. Peer reviewed journals often require such specialized writing along with the cross referencing of other such writings and conformity to whatever the epistemic and rhetorical frame of the journal. On the other hand there are philosophers who do write for the general educated public, Singer has, Sen has, Nussbaum has, Sandal has, Appiah has …. but the ability to do so requires a certain status so as not to care about one's academic job. And, of course there are always the Ken Wilburs and Jordan Petersons of the world.
Very interesting observation. I'm definitely not qualified enough to make a thorough, global analysis. However, I would like to point out parallels I see to other fields, especially in the arts… Is it not the case that a similar development can be found in artists, who increasingly produced art (e.g. paintings and sculptures) that was hardly being liked by people, except artists themselves? It seems that many of them have stopped altogether to produce art that the general public likes; the characteristics the people loved (like "beauty") are mostly gone. But they please other artists. Perhaps, moral writings by some philosophical academics have begun to fail to represent the values of the people in a similar manner. I certainly see that to be the case for myself; but I'm wondering what others think about it
The work is less original, with an analogy to contemporary and earlier 20th century psych being apt. Contemporary academic psych is less original/inventive/productive then psych of the early 20th century because 1) there was no industry reinforcing norms and standards on how to treat patients/do psych and 2) there was no psychological database (DSM) reinforcing norms and standards on how to diagnose patients; therefore psychologists were at greater liberty to invent as means to treat parents— hence greater originality in research and method and practice etc. The same seems true of academic philosophy: norms and standards in regards to how political philosophy should be done lead to less originality both aesthetically and in terms of the philosophies themselves. This applies to popular/well known political philosophers who come from academia more then people would assume: a brief comparison of the inventive writerly aesthetic of 17th-19th century philosophers and contemporary I think probably shows this
For worse
Re: Mill — Perhaps it's worth saying that, only 15 years or so after he published Utilitarianism, another celebrated defence of the same doctrine was released — a long, intricate tome that seemed tailor-made to bore non-academic audiences to tears, and that even made a virtue of a certain sort of insularity and elitism. And wouldn't you know it, that book was about a gazillion times better than Utilitarianism. (I'm talking about Methods of Ethics, of course…)
Reinforcing the suggestion that the "professionalization" of philosophy (rationalization in Webers sense?) and the increasingly bureaucratic norms in universities (cf. Leslie Glazer, comment #7 above), take a look at th professional literature (articles in academic journals). Some time back I had occasion to look at a Journal of Philosophy volume from the mid 1910s (*): the articles are, on average, much shorter than those in today's Journal of Philosophy, and I found myself wanting to use the word "essay" to describe their literary genre: not a word that often comes to mind in connection today's product. Something that been gained (in rigorous of argument and, one hopes, likeness to truth) but clearly something has also been lost!
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(*) Trivia question: what was I looking up? Hint: I work on modal logic.
Norbert Weiner on Russell and Lewis on Implication?
That was in response to Hazen's trivia question.
Wiener not Weiner!
Calls to mind Grace Mallon's amusing tweet from several years ago:
PhD student, c.2020: Here's a limited argument I made based on years of specialized research. Hope it's OK
Philosopher dude, c.1770: Here are some Thoughts I had in the Bath. They constitute Universal & Self-Evident Laws of Nature. FIGHT ME.
https://ifunny.co/picture/grace-mallon-gracemallons-phd-student-c-2020-here-s-a-RXbNWOg49?s=cl
If Mercier and Sperber are right, and the function of human reason is to justify oneself to others in a social context, then the quality of any bit of reasoning will depend on the quality of the challenges and objections that are raised against it. In one way, writing for a professional audience should improve the quality of your reasoning, since the audience will have the capacity to make cogent objections. However, if the community of philosophers is homogeneous in many ways, then their common assumptions and habits of thought will never be challenged. The result will be very big blind spots, and the more homogeneous the group, the bigger the blind spots.
There is definetely a public audeince for moral philosophy. They just gravitate to new age or self-help BS since philosophers have largely given up on speaking to them. A huge portion of YouTube / Tumblr / Twitter is people poorly arguing moral and ethical ideas they are unequipped to explore coherently. I wouldn't say Twitter is a good venue to engage with, but onYouTube, podcasts, or more traditional print media you can often find plenty of neo-sophistry. So, why have we quit the battlefield?
The explanation is largely structural. I would love to do more "public philosophy" and try to figure out how to do it in a way that makes non-academics more nuanced thinkers. Yet, investing time in such things is straightforwardly detrimental to your career. A dozen YouTube video-essays (however well made and watched by thousands) are worth nothing compared to one paper in a middling journal, read by twelve people. Even an article in a more traditionally respectable venue like a newspaper is worthless, and takes time away from writing the millionth unread article on evolutionary debunking that will help you get into a program / postdoc / TT.
There are other structural problems, of course. I'm Canadian, and senior faculty from Canada have pointed out that a great number of our faculty are imported from the U.S. and have no interest in ethical or political issues of the day here. They either use our universities as waystations on their way back to the U.S., or ignore the politics on their doorstep and write about American concerns. So, even people writing on contemporary moral / political issues in a Canadian philosophy department will be unequipped to speak to the public around them about the moral issues they actually are worries about.
In the nineteenth century one could have approached this question from the opposite direction: Philosophical writing with a "moral" or "political point" is now almost exclusively written for amateurs…
…but that was not always so. Aquinas, Ockham, Scotus, Suárez, et al. were all writing for other academics
There must be a lesson here but I don’t know what it is
BL: I'm not sure scholastic theologians were "academics" in quite the relevant sense. Or maybe they were and that's the lesson?
I'm interested in your possible parallel with art and artists, but am not sure what you're saying is right. I wonder what time period you're talking about? Is it quite recently, or what? I'd suggest that although artists do make things now that are more "artworld"-centric, this extends beyond just making things for other artists. There's a larger world of collectors, curators, writers, and more generally, museum and gallery-goers, and such people can find challenging work by contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter or Anselm Kiefer of great interest. There are many African American artists making work that "speaks" to people beyond offering "beauty". I'm thinking of the interesting and quite popular portraits of the Obamas done by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, now touring the country and attracting crowds, or of the striking installation works by Kara Walker at, e.g., the Tate Modern ("Fons Americanus"). Other examples that attract lots of attention are public art by Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, and James Turrell. Turrell's Skyspaces attract many visitors, Eliasson's work is ingenious and visually appealing while often making strong political points, and although Kapoor surely counts as a museum artist (an "artworld" figure), he has also made public works like Cloudgate in Millennium Park, Chicago (the "Bean") that are enormously popular and appealing to visitors of all types. Art's reception by a broad public more generally seems to change over time more than philosophy's does, with various avant-garde artists whose work was initially shocking now becoming so popular that they verge on kitsch.
“Philosophical writing with a "moral" or "political point" is now almost exclusively written for academics… for better or for worse?”
I’m still trying to think about the question.
In some ways for better — even in the areas of ethics or politics where debates have become “scholastic” (e.g., the different kinds of moral realism or of equality) — the quality of the best work is really impressive. But, yes, in other ways worse. There is a popular demand for discussions about how to live, and it’s mostly provided by pop writers and some columnists.
I think the overspecialization of political philosophers in philosophy programs may be responsible for the neglect of political economy and sociology and history, and this has been bad. I don’t blame A Theory of Justice for this, as the book was widely read outside of philosophy and Rawls was widely read and thought it important to be so. The growth of PPE programs may change this. But there is a problem that may always plague us: specialization has benefits and costs. Interdisciplinary work will often falls short of the standards in the individual disciplines.
Years ago (the 70s?) Brian Barry published an article on the differences between political philosophy/theory in philosophy and politics programs, pointing to differences in the people making the initial judgments for promotion and tenure. Political theorists in US politics programs tend to be better at writing work accessible to a wider public (e.g., Michael Walzer, Bill Galston).
But I’m not sure about this.
Literature (in its purest journal form) from other academic disciplines (e.g. engineering, psychology, …) is heavily used by non-academic readers (e.g. in the industries & finance) (e.g. in product design & developement, people management, company IT architecture, business strategy, etc.). It seems that our philosophy debates (with our argument setup, our focus on conceptual-logical issues, instruments and our "strict measures of coherence") are simply not cutting the non-philosopher's (and mostly also the other-academic's) nature at its joints.
Bioethicists sometimes get invited take part in public discussions. Of course, all they ever manage to say with a mic in their face is "Don't!" to whatever is being debated, but hey, at least they sometimes get to say their "Don't!" into a live mic!
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