The view from up here

He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or in the way to become sounder.--Seneca Letter 108

In the bowels of cyberspace, philosopher Eric Schliesser (Ghent) has earned the amusing nickname "the Ghent Balloon," in recognition of the amazing amounts of hot air he can generate on any topic, no matter how trivial.  Since he is a serious scholar and philosopher, my own suspicion is that he really doesn't believe a lot of the stuff he blogs, and that he does it mainly to garner attention or to satisfy his apparently   enormouos appetite for righteous posturing.  Whatever the explanation, his latest balloon ride warrants a couple of observations.  First, regarding its juvenile title, there was no "dust-up":  Prof. Haslanger made a claim, and I disgreed with it for the reasons given.  I often agree with Prof. Haslanger on issues in the profession, but I did not agree with her about this.  That is not a "dust-up," but Prof. Schliesser apparently would like to make it one.  Second, if Schliesser does not believe that meaningful qualitative judgments are possible, and that all we can do is meet the demands of each "constituency," then he should cut through the hot air with a bracing burst of icey directness and say so clearly.  Third, his feigned uncertainty about this line from my original comments--"Only if one thought every intellectual constituency within the APA produced good philosophical work could [representing them all] possibly be a desideratum:  but does anyone really believe that?  (One need only look at the MIT faculty to see that no one there does.)"--is a bit incredible, even allowing for his rhetorical tendencies.  If anyone at MIT believed that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work, then MIT would have--maybe just once in the last 25 years, say--hired a philosopher trained at a SPEP department, or a philosopher affiliated with the Society for American Philosophers.   In fact, MIT hires (even when they hire Continental and feminist philosophers) only from a small handful of departments, about a half-dozen (Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, two or three others on occasion).  I conclude that no one there believes that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work.  I also think that is the only reasonable view to hold, and I would be astonished if it were not Eric Schliesser's view, posturing to one side.--Brian Leiter.

I have always admired balloons, from a distance. They courageously glide, silently through the sky, yet vulnerable to the unpredictable elements. They represent our noble inquisitiveness and sense of adventure, while reminding us of the fragility of our control over the environment. Piloting a balloon requires skill and judgment as well as a bit of luck. It's a lovely aesthetic; come visit us in Ghent some time (here).

But, yes, I have somehow managed to become a character in a Swiftian plot. And I know than when you have been defined in some such way, it's wiser to incorporate the new meme into one's identity than to pretend it away. After all, to give you my metaphysical thought of the day, the comedy of life is constituted by potentially contrary impressions! So, I give you an image of Ghent from a balloon as a reminder to myself that my aspirations look ridiculous to some as well as a mark of my timidity.

1. Blog headlines are not factual but invitational.
2. Schliesser believes that meaningful, enduring qualitative judgments can (notice the modality) be very difficult in the moment and in one's time (a few days ago I gave an example of how Stigler  missed the boat on Samuelson's Foundations; cf. the fate of Hume's Treatise, De Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy, Nietzsche's writings, etc.). In addition to well-known psychological and sociological factors and biases that I mentioned in the original post, there is also a further problem: given increasing specialization within the  profession, it becomes increasingly difficult to make judgments about the whole and other areas of specialization.
3. As somebody who was educated in the shadow of MIT's acknowledged brilliance and very real prejudices/oversights (ca 1990) and also saw up close how even some (now distinguished) men in its orbit felt stifled and belittled, I refuse to defer to its hiring patterns as final authority in matters of qualitative judgment. For, leaving aside such unpleasant matters, it is a matter of economy and scarcity (of time) that the folk at MIT cannot possibly hire all the folk they think might be good, if -- given enough time and curiosity to explore the best work done in an unfamiliar register --, they wanted to. Does it follow that all the APA's constituencies currently "produce high quality philosophical work?"--no, of course not. But my original point was that the APA has an obligation to try to cultivate the possibility of finding such work in its midst and a journal is an extremely modest step in that direction.

Comments

[anne jacobson]

Class act.