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

Korsgaard’s Dewey Lecture

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–A COUPLE OF COMMENTS WERE CAUGHT IN THE SPAM FILTER, THEY HAVE NOW APPEARED

The text is here, and there is much that is interesting.  I excerpt some of her remarks about pressure to publish and the pernicious effects of peer review:

Young people are expected to produce an absurdly large number of papers, preferably published in refereed journals, in order to get tenure, or even in order to get jobs.  Some people even try to publish papers in order to get into graduate school.  The papers are supposed to be blind reviewed, and these days many referees for journals require that papers should respond to the extant literature on the topic, whether responding to the extant literature enhances the author’s argument in some way or not. Because the sheer mass of the literature is growing exponentially, people draw the boundaries of their specializations more and more narrowly, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of time.  The extant literature necessarily becomes the recent literature, which is a philosophically arbitrary category.  Big, systematic philosophy of the sort we find in Kant and Aristotle, philosophy that is responsible to the ways in which one’s views in one area fit in with one’s views about everything else, has become nearly impossible, because someone trying to do that kind of work would supposedly have to know the literature in too many areas…

I also have some doubts about how helpful the system of peer review is in philosophy.  For one thing, philosophy is not like the sciences, where there’s a fairly widely accepted method, and your peers can check whether you applied that method correctly or not.  In philosophy, our methods themselves are as much up for discussion as anything else….

Peer review can be used as a way to enforce a kind of conformity that is not  appropriate to our subject.  I take it seriously that philosophy is a subject in the humanities, or as one might say on the “Arts” side of “Arts and Sciences.”  Like artists, we go for expressing universal truths, but in an individual voice.  I think that many young people in philosophy right now feel that they are not being allowed to find and express their individual voices.

Readers reactions welcome.

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21 responses to “Korsgaard’s Dewey Lecture”

  1. Eric

    "philosophy is not like the sciences, where there’s a fairly widely accepted method, and your peers can check whether you applied that method correctly or not."

    I can offer some anecdata on peer review in science. In my work as I lawyer, I sometimes get to read referee reports for journals in various disciplines. They can seem as arbitrary and as petty as those in philosophy. I remember an extreme example from a paper in experimental genetics (cancer research, specifically). The authors and reviewers were all major players at top-tier research universities. Reviewer 1 said, in effect, 'This paper is a significant advance in the field. Publish it immediately.' Reviewer 2 said, 'This is good research, but the paper should be revised.' Reviewer 3 said, 'This paper is worthless. The methods don't make sense, and the data don't support the conclusion the authors think they do.' That's the kind of thing that might make one feel better about philosophy, or worse about peer review. Possibly both.

    Reply
  2. David Velleman

    Thank you, Professor Korsgaard.

    The lecture continues with many more insights into the state of the discipline. Although her negative comments are spot-on, in my view, I'll quote her positive description of what philosophy should be:

    Philosophy is very hard, but it is not inevitable that philosophy should be esoteric; we just need to keep in view a certain conception of our reader. Our reader, our proper audience when we write philosophy, is not a journal referee, looking for a reason to reject our paper. Our reader is not a harsh philosophical critic, eager to catch us out in contradiction. Our reader is not someone who is unwilling to entertain a surprising hypothesis long enough to see where it goes. Our proper audience in philosophy is a reflective human being who is puzzled and confounded by her own condition, and who seeks understanding, meaning, and moral clarity. Philosophy is so difficult that we are afraid to try to address ourselves to readers conceived simply as human beings prone to philosophical perplexity. But if you think about it, you’ll realize that you understand the needs of that reader, because that reader is you. This is why I believe that when we write philosophy, we should shut out the inner voices of the journal referee and the harsh philosophical critic and the impatient skeptic. Instead, we should try write things that we ourselves would find it rewarding to read. Only then do we have any hope at all of reaching the readers to whom philosophy should aim to speak.

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  3. Vitor

    As part of the very methodological plurality that Korsgaard advocates, philosophy can also be done occasionally in a more scientific voice. But I believe she is right in pointing out that the humanistic side of philosophy has been increasingly cast aside.
    I'm not sure her claims about peer reviewing follow from her concerns. Appropriately open-minded reviewers could in principle accommodate differences in method.
    Apart from that, I agree with the general tone of her excerpt.

    Reply
  4. Phil

    I was dead set on studying Philosophy when I was at school, very much on the basis that it would consist mainly of me stroking my (as yet non-existent) beard and having deep thoughts about the cosmos. A relative persuaded me a) that it would in fact consist of reading footnotes to the canon and writing footnotes to the footnotes, and b) to do English Literature instead. Many years later I've found my way into the outskirts of philosophy – via sociology, criminology and law – and I am happily engaged in writing footnotes to the footnotes. That said, the writers who have really made an impression on me – from Becker to Kelsen via Garfinkel and Pashukanis, to say nothing of Debord – all share the quality of writing unornamented, lapidary prose, which doesn't trouble itself greatly with what Dr A said about Professor B but simply sets out a way of looking at the world. Perhaps it's the difference between being a philosopher and being an academic philosopher.

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  5. Richard

    The witty rejoinder which Prof Korsgaard has yet to make might roughly be: "And I'm sure that some of the students from Princeton should be extremely intimidated by the fact that there are people here from Illinois".

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  6. Dean C. Rowan

    I read the entire lecture, which was a pleasure and entirely accessible to a non-philosopher like myself. I'm pleased she considered turning to librarianship. Given Korsgaard's discussion of women in academic philosophy, I couldn't help but think of Dee Garrison's article "The Tender Technicians: The Feminization of Public Librarianship 1876-1905." I get the feeling Korsgaard is not opposed per se to peer review, but to what she deems "over-professionalization," too much of a good thing. Peer review and other mechanisms for writing and publishing have their places and serve their purposes, but they become counter-productive in the ways she describes when hyper-professional ambitions obscure the specificity of their tasks.

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  7. Michel Xhignesse

    "Like artists, we go for expressing universal truths, but in an individual voice."

    For what little it's worth, I'm not sure that's what artists do or even what they think they do! Certainly, that's what philosophers writing about art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought _great_ artists did. But I don't think that accurately captures artistic practice under either the system of patronage, or the commercial system that replaced it. (It may do a better job of characterizing a larger share of scientific research under patronage, but even then, it's an awkward fit!)

    More broadly, I actually think that the increased publication volume _has_, on the whole, improved the quality of the work that's out there. I recently had occasion to read (in a short time) around 500 articles and books in aesthetics from the last sixty or so years, and there's just no question in my mind that the subfield is better and healthier than it was. Goodman and Wollheim first shook things up in 1968-9, and things have only improved since. The work published today seems to me on average much more nuanced and rigorous, it covers a much wider set of questions and cultural activities, and it features a much greater awareness of historical and geographical issues. Contemporary aestheticians, on average, just seem to know a lot more about a lot more art than they did back then. And the conversation is much less dominated by a few central figures and issues than it was. Good ideas are flourishing from all quarters–and a good thing, too, since aesthetics is disappearing from top research departments in the US.

    All that is to the good, and I think it correlates directly to the aesthetics publication booms of the '90s , '00s, and '10s (for what it's worth, I see these as separate booms, rather than continuous).

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    On the narrowness of academic work in philosophy. I agree this is a problem. My sense is that what happens is that, given the difficulty of writing in philosophy (finding something to say) and the breadth of the subject, there's a type of scholar who says, "Well, rather than write about areas A, B, C, I will become the specialist on A!" and then proceeds to spend all their time on A. Professionally this makes sense, but what happens is that lots of papers by others on A get sent to this scholar to referee (or similar people). Because the discussion is so specialized one's papers have to be very narrowly written to pass, and one cannot spend time thinking about bigger issues. The worry is that society needs people who think broadly and philosophers used to be well placed to do this, so this seems like a loss to me.

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  9. Dean C. Rowan

    I thought the obvious response would have been the well-known joke about the yokel strolling on the Ivy League campus who inquires of one of the self-important students, "Excuse me, can you tell me where the library's at?" Since it's well-known, I won't conclude the joke.

    Reply
  10. N

    I'm a phd student at a leiterific institution and the stuff I'm most interested in (metasemantics and the relationship between mind and world) is not what I'm working on, because there is no chance that the sort of stuff I want to say about this would get published anywhere that would actually help my CV. (Sorry not going to do formal semantics or weird probabilistic BS. Math is lovely but how can it possibly be helpful here??)

    But then, naturally, journal acceptance rates are so impossibly low we're all struggling to publish anything anyway. It's pretty f*cked. (And ofc my profs got their jobs without publishing anything.)

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  11. a hobbit

    Dean
    Can you tell the punch line of the joke … I neither know the joke nor am capable of anticipating the punch line (I am glad I am not in a cave playing the riddle game with Golem).

    Reply
  12. Werthers Original

    This comes from a german perspective but I feel like the difference between the academic systems is slowly shrinking as we tend to emulate the american way of doing things more and more.

    I think that the image of an academic as a "professional" is a detrimental development for academia as a whole. It turns it into a mundane enterprise and basically puts academic endeavors without any financial, reputational or broadly social "gain" under pressure to justify their existence. Thinking of academics as "professional writers" with a steady output also means that you can't overcome uninspired phases of your life and emerge victorious with a new idea – you have to write your shitty intermediate thoughts down which leads to a lot of uninspired reading material without any long term value.

    For me the last two prominent "real academics" in a classical sense were, from a german perspective, Niklas Luhmann and, from a broad philosophical perspective, Saul Kripke. This is also an interesting comparison in terms of being prolific – Luhmann wrote about 700 journal articles and 50 books and Kripke wrote about 50 articles and a couple books. Luhmann, who might not be familiar to a lot of english-speaking people, wrote the last "grand theory" (systems theory) of sociology in Germany, a notion that has fallen into disregard in the last 20 years for more piecemeal, empirical studies – which in turn generate more grant money and publications. Kripke on the other hand was a profoundly weird person who spoke up when some genius idea sparked up in him – leading to heaps of discourse and new paths taken.

    I feel like the time of those examples has faded away, making place for a new managerial class of scientist bureaucrats who write reports about current literature and not much more. But this phase will end sometime as well – maybe not in our lifetime but soon enough. Just keep in mind that scholastics also died as a discipline when people realized that nobody is doing any commentary on the bible anymore but only engaging with the opinions of other scholastics who were so far removed from scripture it basically constituted a new religious text.

    Reply
  13. Fredrik Stjernberg

    Must be this:

    "Sir," came the sneering reply, "at Harvard/Yale/etc we do not end a sentence with a preposition."

    "Well, in that case, forgive me," said the visitor. "Permit me to rephrase my question. Would you be good enough to tell me where the Library is at, jackass?"

    Reply
  14. Dean C. Rowan

    Thank you, Fredrik, and my apologies, a hobbit. I'm just seeing this now. The version I heard used a more coarse noun to cap the sentence.

    Reply
  15. LFC

    I'm not a philosopher, but I found interesting her remark that (I'm paraphrasing now) a complex philosophical system is not a set of dogmas or fixed views but a living, evolving, adaptable thing. I'm not really competent to comment on, say, Aristotle or Kant in this connection, but the mature Marx certainly had "fixed views" on certain matters. Maybe "complex philosophical systems" are more of a mixture of fixed views and adaptable elements, rather than just one or the other. But her broader point about drawing on historical figures when writing about current issues, and not making a sharp distinction between history of philosophy and "systematic philosophy," seems right.

    Also, I like what she says about writing style and the bad effects of writing "defensively." (And still haven't finished reading the whole thing yet.)

    Reply
  16. Anonymous

    I agree with almost everything she says here but if things are going to change then hiring committees need to start putting less weight on early career publications (and the specialization that having these publications entails). So long as you cannot get hired without having published then no one can expect one iota of change.

    I would be interested to know whether Korsgaard herself has tried to change the hiring processes at Harvard in order to achieve this end.

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  17. Another Anon

    1) Anonymously peer-reviewed publications (not invited publications) are an important bulwark against the classism (and other forms of discrimination) that Korsgaard mentions. People have a chance of making their own way if they experience these or other forms of wrongful treatment.
    2) A strong distinction between anonymously peer-reviewed publications and invited ones should remain. That a paper is anonymously peer-reviewed in a respected journal tells us (if imperfectly) that it passed a high bar; not so with invited publications (assuming no or very light review). This should not be confused with the question whether the *content* of two pieces, one in each of these categories, is of differing quality.
    3) Responsible citation practices of the kind we are now familiar with are also doing a lot more to ensure that people, regardless of group membership, are being given credit for their ideas.

    Reply
  18. Mikhail Valdman

    You can't just moralize your way out of a collective action problem. A different outcome requires different incentives. I'd start by scrapping dissertation requirements — which encourage just the kind of hyper-specialization Dr. Korsgaard decries — and replace them with standardized subject tests in all major areas of philosophy, graded anonymously by an APA appointed committee and not the student's home department. Ideally this committee would produce a ranking that could be used in lieu of letters of recommendation, which have become useless, thereby making hiring fairer and more efficient. This way, graduate students would have an incentive to learn philosophy (*all* philosophy) and departments would have an incentive to teach it. Or we could just preach the virtues of breadth while doing everything in our power to thwart it.

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  19. Anonymous

    She articulated very well what stopped me from trying to go into academic philosophy. Systematic philosophy (a la Kant and Aristotle) is what drew me in to philosophy in the first place, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what drew others in as well. The narrow specialization and focus on publishing shut potential talent out.

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  20. Gary Kemp

    When I was coming up in the 1990s, the complaints were: Pressure/requirements to publish, and overspecialisation. I take it that the readers here think this has grown worse. What sort of evidence do we have?

    Reply
  21. Nishi Shah

    What struck me is Korsgaard's claim that it is a notorious fact that a lot of philosophical writing is awful. Indeed! I think one reason for this is the assimilation of philosophical inquiry to scientific inquiry. (This model of philosophical inquiry was what we were taught at Michigan in the 1990's.) Beyond its pernicious influence on our understanding of philosophical problems, adopting this model makes for boring and unlovely prose.

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