My favorite feature of Daily Nous is the link to non-academic hires; it's not very active, but I return to it every few weeks and I love getting a new impulse to daydream about how trained academic philosophers spread wisdom, positive affect, and conceptual acumen outside the academy serving their newfound companies and communities with integrity. I imagine that those liberated from the academy, spread their wings and flourish. This fantasy is undoubtedly a consequence of my sense that professional philosophy is inhospitable to wisdom and, perhaps, my sense that, despite the presence of collossal brainpower (and astounding resources), it has deeply entrenched means to preserve a status quo bias (perhaps that's related to those very resources).
Sometimes I wonder if I would have recognized the significance of Leibniz if I were an eighteenth century philosophy professor, or Boole in the middle of the nineteenth, or Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth. (To this day Boole's greatness is unrecognized.) I wonder if I would have been receptive to Mary Wollstonecraft or if my heart would have been stone-cold to her call to humanity. Some of these names were obscure in their life time or their best writings unfamiliar to others. And it is not impossible that I would have ignored not just the more radical authors, but also the best-sellers among them with a confident self-assurance that popular philosophy is incompatible with profundity, skill, and insight. How likely would it have been that I would familiarize myself with, say, a Danish religious curmudgeon?
As an expert on west European philosophy between 1600-1800, I recognize that the vast majority of authors from that period that are still of interest today, the ones that shaped the ideas that guide our common sense or that challenged it, when first articulated, were not university professors (yes, I have heard of Hutcheson, Kant, and Adam Smith). This is not just true of the brilliant women of the time who were denied access to universities. And, yes, I know that some of the enduring figures aspired to be university professors (Hume) or wanted to be required reading in universities (Descartes, Hobbes), or entertained offers for university positions (Spinoza). Even so, recognized expertise, based on a dissertation or a track-record of journal publication, is not the only road to philosophy; specialization within the intellectual division of labor is just one way to acquire philosophical craft--it's not a necessary consequence of historical development.
I often suspect that I am so immersed in my scholarly activities (refereeing, grant-writing, journal publication, giving lectures, PhD supervision etc.), and so consumed by ongoing scholarly discussions, that I miss the most important philosophical insights and developments of our times even if, miraculous enough, these would occur within (English language) professional philosophy. (This is not to deny that relative to the period that preceded it between, say, 1514-1781, academic philosophy has had an excellent run since Kant and Dugald Stewart.) I expect that future scholars -- my kind of people -- will scan my D&I contributions and will use it as evidence that, in fact, not even those cosmopolitan analytical philosophers that indulged themselves, and were so indulged, in reading outside the tribe were aware of the great instauration of philosophy started in 2004 in the vast metroplis of...
There is a popular genre of historical writing that is about witnesses to history, that is, people like you and me that just happen to be present at events that become part of historical memory and left a record of their observations. Yet, many of us, almost certainly the vast majority inside and outside the academy, are writing about and contributing to non-history's rapid impressions that disappear without a trace.
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