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Idealism and realism about philosophy and its role

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Jimmy Lenman kindly gave permission to share this amusing and striking comment he made on FB:

I have moments of idealism. In my moments of idealism I think philosophy should be to bullshit what the medical profession is to disease. And I have moments of realism. In my moments of realism I fear how all too often philosophy is to bullshit what the munitions industry is to warfare.

So which are you, an idealist or realist?  Explain why.  (Comments require a valid email address, which will not appear.  If you wish to criticize specific philosophers or journals, you will need to do so with your full name.)

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14 responses to “Idealism and realism about philosophy and its role”

  1. Early career academic

    For me it's definitely both. Excellent philosophical work has been severely abused and misused by politically motivated fields of inquiry, which in turn were referred to for absurd political change, including vicious attacks on academic freedom. A recent and ongoing example is Miranda Fricker's excellent work on epistemic injustice, which has brought great clarity to people who are genuinely interested, but also been abused by corrupt wannabe philosophers (i.e. activists) as a misplaced, hard-to-argue-against weapon to push for absurd political change.

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  2. assc prof

    Academic philosophy shares at least one thing in common with ancient sophistry: the livelihoods and reputations of its practitioners directly depend not on the ability to get at the truth, but on the ability to defend positions in public spaces, esp. novel positions. The similarities may well end there, but that's enough for me to at least be wary of the capacity our field has for bullshitting. After all, it's possible to publish one's way to a good career without believing a single thing one publishes.

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  3. VAP

    It seems obvious to me that anyone should be both, just with respect to different ways of thinking about philosophy. Philosophy, done responsibly, genuinely is an antidote to bullshit. Philosophy, as it is actually done, often (though with room for disagreement about how often) contributes to the ever-increasing heap of bullshit in our culture.

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  4. Howard Simmons

    assc prof's point about novelty is important. Novelty is almost essential to get you noticed, but what if the truth about some subject is a position already well explained in the literature? In philosophy, as in other disciplines and in the arts, living later puts you at a disadvantage!

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  5. John Rapko

    I can't see that there's an actual alternative here. In the quote 'idealism' is an aspiration ("philosophy should be"), and 'realism' ("philosophy is") is a diagnosis. It seems to me that rather the question is: Is one (as Wittgenstein said of Ramsey) a 'bourgeois' thinker, or is there an imaginative dimension to one's philosophizing? I'm not in a position to characterize myself, but I would like to imagine that it would be something like Wallace Stevens's crow trying to be an oriole: "From oriole to crow, note the decline/In music. Crow is realist. But, then,/Oriole, also, may be realist."

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  6. Peter Schock

    I lean towards pessimism and two journals plus the case of Cofnas show why:

    1) Journal of Controversial Studies (HCS): Certain activist reviewers apparently block perfectly fine papers at other venues. Philosophers whose views are harshly criticized in (activist) journals are then barred from replying and have to resort to publishing at JCS.

    2) Hypatia: A lot of papers published there are just bad. Bad in terms of quality and often also bad in how some authors there insinuate bad motives of other authors they have barely read.

    Then the Nathan Cofnas affair: His views are definitely controversial as they run against cherished liberal believes. But first an attempt and petition by established senior philosophers to cancel him and a journal that dared to publish one of his articles and now his firing?

    The activism in philosophy is everywhere, from people trying to "improve" concepts to fit their politics to curbing free inquiry by arguing that the stakes in certain debates are so high that particular conclusions might destroy our society and hence are not worth debating.

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  7. karngrim

    Bullshitting is human, all too human. And Hume reminds us to be not only a philosopher but also a human being. So Lenmans comment aptly describes our condition.

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  8. Mike on the Internet

    It's unhelpful that the quoted statement mixes is (or "might be") statements and ought statements, but here goes nothing…

    It just seems plainly true that philosophy is useful both to the production and dissolution of bullshit. Its abuse is a sign of usefulness. Unless we want to claim that it is completely useless, or make some special case for why attempts to use it for ill backfire (which leads to "no true Scotsman" definitions of philosophy, or just-so stories similar to those employed by free speech idealists unwilling to bite the bullet on harmful speech). Does philosophy have a moral mandate? Good luck finding an objectively compelling answer to that.

    Publishing pressures would seem to increase the volume of bullshit in academic philosophy simply because publishing *something* is more important than publishing only what one believes to be very likely true, or robustly defensible, or valuable to the discipline. But that is a general symptom of academic Taylorism run amok, and not a special problem with philosophy. Ditto to bad philosophy produced under conditions of leisure, being a symptom of leisure.

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  9. Daniel Kaufman

    I am 100% in the "realism" camp. A few thoughts:

    1. I don't see idealism as being credible even as an aspiration. That would suggest that the most significant philosophical have demonstrable, determinate answers, and I do not think they do. Indeed, I believe they are almost all suffer from indeterminacy.

    2. Philosophers wildly overestimate the efficacy of arguments and their limited toolset in addressing matters of human concern. The picture we paint, via our toolset, is like a black and white picture of a flower. The colors and smells are missing.

    3. Philosophers — at least in the anglosphere — are overwhelmingly acculturated into a particular value system and politics. As we are human, this inevitably sends us searching for arguments to demonstrate what we already think.

    4. Finally, many philosophers — again in the anglophone tradition, which is what I am familiar with — take positions that they clearly do not hold in real life, as evinced by their easily observed behaviors. So there is an element of make-believe to a lot of it, and this is not limited to ethics, though it is perhaps most obvious there.

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  10. Daniel Kaufman

    Edit #1: "…that the most significant philosophical problems have…."

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  11. Kenny Easwaran

    I've recently argued in print (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phib.12328) that bullshit, in an extended version of Frankfurt's sense, while not great, isn't as bad as we often take it to be, but is the inevitable result of living in a complex society, where people don't all care about the same things, and yet we sometimes are required to do something on behalf of interests we really don't know or understand at all. I do think that good philosophy can sometimes help us understand and internalize the reasons for lots of things that we often interpret as bullshit (e.g., making it come more naturally to us to phrase things in ways that don't unintentionally exclude minoritized groups, or making us see why we might endorse a collective project of wearing masks in crowded indoor spaces in the winter), and might also help us structure our social requirements in ways that feel more meaningful than just checking boxes on Form B from the Regulations Schedule of the Ministry for Organization and Rules. But I don't know that philosophy plays any particularly special role here compared to any of the other areas of study that might be relevant for how we live together, from anthropology to water engineering. And when philosophy helps our society collectively recognize the existence of other interests that hadn't been incorporated into our practices before, our least bad response might sometimes be to impose new social requirements that feel like even more bullshit.

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  12. Shane Glackin

    There's an ongoing debate in the Philosophy of Medicine over whether medicine is, in fact, "bullshit".

    So, to quote a phrase… why not both?

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  13. Daniel Kaufman

    This all seems very reasonable, but my sense is that most practicing, academic philosophers think that the theories they traffic in are at least *in principle* demonstrable and that there are independent facts of the matter about Reality, Knowledge, Obligation, and the like that philosophers can identify and prove in one way or another. They certainly don't *behave* as if their role is the modest, heavily qualified, value-laden, dependent on all manner of social agreements thing that you are describing here.

    I'd love it if your picture of the discipline were true, but it hasn't been in my experience teaching for thirty-plus years (and recently retired).

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  14. Gordon Barnes

    Recent research in psychology pours cold water on the higher aspirations of human reason, to such an extent that Sperber and Mercier infer that the function of human reason, in individuals, is not to discover the truth, but to vindicate ourselves to others. Suppose that is right. That will apply to philosophy as much as any other use of human reason. Thus, philosophy will be just another attempt to vindicate ourselves to other people. That certainly seems like an accurate description of a lot of philosophy, throughout its history. And that sounds more than a little like bullshit, at least in some respects. More precisely, it implies that philosophical reasoning, in individuals, is an off-track process — it is not primarily aimed at truth. However, as Sperber and Mercier also point out, based on additional research, human reason seems to work much better when we reason together, in groups. If the group is diverse, in intellectually relevant ways, and it values critical reasoning and debate, then each individual gets challenged, and that can serve as a check on our cognitive biases. Consequently, I would say that the idealistic view is a genuine possibility for philosophy, but only if philosophy includes and engages a very wide range of views and arguments. That’s the only way that it will ever be more than just the groupthink of a certain class of people, who share a common subculture.

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