Digressions&Impressions

On the Modernity and Popularity of Public Philosophy by Academic Philosophers, and some Foucault on Kant

I sometimes suspect that advocates of public philosophy by academic philosophers [sometimes: PPAP] are (tacitly) are committed to at least two of the following three following propositions.

1. PPAP is a relatively recent invention.
2. Public philosophy is not new at all, it just is (the extension or renewal of) Dewey-ian style pragmatism.
3. Socrates, or the public gadfly, is a good model for PPAP.
4. Public philosophy is the dissemination or making accessible of existing (but otherwise esoteric to the public) philosophical knowledge.

Obviously, this does not exhaust all the possibilities. I want to make two comments about this list. First, those committed to (1.), tend to be analytic philosophers (of the sort that do not tend to understand themselves as intellectual descendants of Dewey--so that can include all kinds of pragmatists). My suspicion for thinking this is that this tribe (my own) has been going through a process of interest and valorization of public philosophy during the last (say) decade. I could point to a lot of blog posts or social media commentary to suggest this (including my own). But this thought also fits with the popularity of the 'icy slopes of logic' thesis (articulated by Reisch) that suggests that analytic philosophy retreated into the ivory tower due to the cold war.

Of course, if the icy slopes of logic thesis were true (which I have been known to doubt), then it follows, almost by definition, that 1 is not true. For, the left wing of Vienna was committed to PPAP. Let's grant that Neurath and Carnap were committed to PPAP before their forced exile. It does not follow that one couldn't say something in the spirit of 1.

One might argue, for example, that as an aspiration PPAP is not recent. But one might say, while reflecting on the fate of the Vienna Circle, that the social conditions to do it right, without danger to oneself (or society, were one takes inductive risk of philosophical praxis seriously) are relatively rare and recent. It's only when what we might call a Mill-ian ethos takes hold of elite/juridical/political institutions (even if grudgingly) and has sufficient popular acceptance then (1.) holds. And we, oh moderns, are blessed with times in which we may think what we like, and say it. Let's call this self-congratulatory stance the Millian Ethos Thesis.

For those who recognize their Spinoza or Hume (or Tacitus) in the previous paragraph, neither were professional academics. Hume famously did not get the job at Edinburgh, Spinoza prudently declined a position at Heidelberg. This failure is especially notable in the case of Hume who starts his Treatise with the express aim to 'to try the taste of the public.'

That such an ethos relatively recent achievement may be illustrated by the fate of (the otherwise well connected) Bertrand Russell, who was sacked from his position at Trinity for his public pacifism during WWI and later was denied a position at City University (for his views on sexual morality and his atheism).* I use Russell here not to argue for the suggestion that PPAP only exists when there is no limitation on what can be said in public, but rather to remind the reader the range of topical constraints that existed until quite recently on the very possibility of PPAP. (There is a real contrast between the way, say, Noam Chomsky has been treated and Russell.)

Second, Socrates is a terrible example of PPAP for mass societies like ours. By this, I don't just mean that he was not an academic and his life ended badly, but also we don't reach anything like 'the public' if we go around a popular spot in town and have elenctic conversations with the folk. (I don't diss the activity, by the way.)  Implicitly this is understood because usually when people talk about public philosophy for our kind, they talk about editorials, TV, podcasts, You Tube channels, etc. These have in common that, with luck, they reach a very wide audience. They also tend to presuppose commitment to (4.) more than (3.), and are often nudged along by grant agencies and administrators.

Of course, when people mention Socrates or Diogenes the Cynic, they really mean something like 'being a gadfly of society.' The problem with a gadfly model is that it often presupposes a kind of persistent challenge to the social and political status quo. Almost no academic has time for that alongside our teaching, publishing, and service obligations. And I know of no modern example that fits the case when one ignores PR machines and looks at the facts dispassionately. (Feel free to offer your examplars.)

These impressions were triggered by reading the following passage in a lecture by Foucault, who was, of course, a significant public philosopher in his own right, to a French group of professional philosophers:

In this definition of the Aufklärung, there will be something which no doubt it may be a little ridiculous to call a sermon, and yet it is very much a call for courage that he sounds in this description of the Aufklärung. One should not forget that it was a newspaper article. There is much work to be done on the relationship between philosophy and journalism from the end of the 18th century on, a study ... Unless it has already been done, but I am not sure of that ... It is very interesting to see from what point on philosophers intervene in newspapers in order to say something that is for them philosophically interesting and which, nevertheless, is inscribed in a certain relationship to the public which they intend to mobilize. And finally, it is characteristic that, in this text on the Aufklärung, Kant precisely gives religion, law and knowledge as examples of maintaining humanity in the minority condition and consequently as examples of points where the Aufklärung, must lift this minority condition and in some way majoritize men. What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically, I believe, the great process of society's governmentalization. Michel Foucault (1978) "What is Critique" translated by Lysa Hotroch, reprinted in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, p48. (Ellipses in original)

In the works collected in The Politics of Truth, Foucault expresses similar views, so this is something he clearly reflected on in the last decade of his life. What's neat for our present purposes is that Foucault calls attention to the fact that in "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant engaged in public philosophy, in the sense we tend to use the term today (and as assumed in this post), while also reflecting on the manner of it (and its limits).  Famously, Kant thought that in one's functional role (as professor, cleric, civil servant, etc.) one must be (passively) obedient to authority, while one simultanously one had a duty or at least the freedom to educate the public, including criticism of the authorities without adverse consequences (if one does so in a way that does not undermine now quoting Kant) "the stability of the community."

To what degree such stability really can be reconciled with the mobilizing function Foucault ascribes to Kant's conception of the public use of reason is no easy matter to settle. But it is worth noting that even a hardnosed thinker like Machiavelli (carefully read by both Foucault and Kant) praises the epistemic and social features of Rome's willingness to endure quite a bit of social rowdiness and mobilization as a means toward stabilizing the community (and the evolution of social practices.)+ As an aside, Kant here is at odds with our modern conception of academic freedom, which precisely creates some zone to be critical of one's authorities (and the authorities, and their dogma's) in one's teaching.

What's important to my present purposes is the violation of (4.) in Foucault's treatment of Kant as an exemplar. For while Kant's own view of the free use of public reason, as presented by Foucault (in non-controversial way) sounds something like (4.), the manner in which Kant defends the view is (to quote Foucault) "philosophically interesting." In fact, in a different essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault starts with a contrast between Kant's age of Enlightenment and ours, favorably to the past, in which he describes the present attitude toward in which in public speech/utterances, "there is not much likelihood of learning anything new." This makes our public intellectual life rather boring, as Foucault suggests. (Of course, I am not discussing YOUR contributions to public intellectual life, my dear sophisticated readers.) Even if one suspects that Foucault may be romanticizing the past here, he is right in noticing that commitment to (4.) tends to part and parcel of what we may call the repetitionof the known. Of course, that may still be an important public service (and I am a friend of philosophy as service of the sort Dotson engages in), but the philosophy part is underserviced by it. 

I could stop here because I think it's pretty clear now why I think 1-4 are all false, or undesirable. But I want to close with two final (related) observations on the triggering passage I quoted from Foucault. First, what he says about  governmentalization is undoubtedly obscure if you don't read the wider lecture, and/or lack familiararity with the lectures he gave in that period at College de France. To simplify, it's a species of statecraft (including the art of governing without states or their apparatus). But for present purposes, we can leave it a bit obscure. But I do want to note the connection to Kant, Foucault asserts just before (in discussing developments since the 16th century in "Western Europe) the following:

And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. Facing them head on and as compensation, or rather, as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them or, in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust, but also and by the same token, as a line of development of the arts of governing, there would have been something born in Europe at that time, a kind of general cultural form, both a political and moral attitude, a way of thinking, etc. and which I would very simply call the art of not being governed or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost. I would therefore propose, as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much. (44-45)

Kantian critique then is, on this view, not some esoteric philosophical doctrine, but the outgrowth of a much wider European ethos that itself has a considerable development. And while there is in philosophy, perhaps, a lot more to critique then the idea that one 'not be governed like that' -- the rejection of permanent immaturity -- this is its central idea. It is to be sure, no anarchism. But it is an embrace of a kind of limitation on being governed. I think it is no surprise then that in the following year, Foucault explored at great length the liberal art of government (and Kant's role in developing it) because it just is the tradition that, warts and at all, embraces the art of not being governed quite so much.

My second remark is-- and this is based not just on the quoted passages like these alone (but a more wider reading in Foucault) - that Foucault embraces the Millian Ethos thesis in its Eurocentric fashion; a version that actually embraces European/Western (cultural) exceptionalism.** But let me stop here.

On Blogging with the Big Folk at Crooked Timber

I have been invited to join the Crooked Timber blog. I have been reading that blog as long as I can remember the existence of blogs. And while I don’t recall John Protevi ever mentioning it, or any of us discussing it, it’s pretty clear that Crooked Timber was the standard we tried to emulate in the golden days at NewAPPS. So, I felt a strange mixture of flattery and disbelief when I was contemplating joining it. I hesitated about my decision primarily because I don’t want to give up these Digressions, and wasn’t sure, given the ongoing after-effects of long covid, whether I wanted the meshuggas (and coordination costs) that inevitably comes with a group blog (with different comments policy than my own) and a much larger audience, again. I also adore your loyalty and quality engagement, and the freedom I have, here. Not to mention that D&I has become a self-anchoring mechanism.

Anyway, I published my first piece at the good old Crooked Timber (see here). I intend to write essays there that are deliberately pitched to a slightly wider audience (primarily on politics and on what Foucault might call the ‘philosophy of the present’). But I won’t give up my fleeting and more nerdy (as well as autobiographical) Impressions, just yet. 😊

Smith did not hold a labor theory of value.

It's worth noting that passage...when quoted in full, explicitly involves a qualification that shows a circumstance prior to the invention of money and the development of property/rent: "IN that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land." (WN 1.6.1, 65) So, [it] involves a situation where nominal prices are absent, and where capital and rent are absent! It's akin to an early Lockean state of nature. In Marxist terms, if Smith holds a strict labor theory of value [LTV] as a measure of exchange value, then it is only well before the stage of primitive accumulation not in a capitalist economy. This illustrates my claim that the LTV gets introduced only in the context of thought experiments that go on to make more complex claims.--Eric Schliesser "Smith's Labor Theory Thought Experiment," @AdamSmithWorks

I don't have a lot of time for blogging this week. But, coincidentally, a relatively short essay appeared (here) in which I explain why it is a mistake to attribute to Adam Smith a Labor Theory of Value. (It's based on a twitter thread that went viral over the Summer, but  slightly refined and more carefully argued.) 

RIP: Arthur Wijnschenk (1971-2020); On Caravan Camp Sollicitude

This morning my sister informed me that she had learned from Maureen Wijnschenk (his sister) that my distant distant cousin, classmate, and friend, Arthur Wijnschenk died. I have known Arthur, and his family, my whole life. Before his coming out he dated my oldest living friend, Liora the youngest daughter of my father's best friend (Chaim), in high school. (I sat next to Arthur at her wedding.) We were not mates in high school, but each in our own way, we tried to escape our childhood environment by fleeing into the wider world--Arthur more boldly and with more panache. But despite cultivating a bad-boy, go-happy, work hard, party harder image, he was loyal to his roots and kept in touch. From my distant perspective, he was one of the early hackers; then let himself be paid by financial firms to protect them from attack; serial entrepreneur (including his favorite, Barcelona Car Tours), moving among Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Madrid,  Barcelona, and even our Amsterdam in restless fashion celebrating each trip with a champagne toast in first class. Even so, he would always track me down all over the world and, when I was broke or trying to make ends meet on an academic salary, would treat me to lavish meals in fancy restaurants always just before they were to become famous.  Often at the end of a night, as I went home, the night would start for him. Sometimes I saw pictures of his adventures in the clubs on social media the next day before he went to the gym.

When my family moved to London a few years, I learned I was not his only regular on his itinerary. There were other distant relatives he kept track off, happily being drawn into their family milestones--giving and accepting nurture along the way. 

I tell you about Arthur, dear readers, not just because I can't think of anything else right now, but because he is one of the proximate causes for my blogging. A decade ago, when I was trying to turn myself into a Dutch public intellectual, I mentioned to him I couldn't get a piece published by any of the main newspapers. Arthur asked to read it. Then told me he had created a website and started advertising the piece on Google up to €50 per day. The effect was shocking: I got an endless stream of hate mail, threats, including death threats, and for many years you could find my name denounced on far-right websites.* To me this was eye-opening because I recognized that one didn't need mainstream media to find an audience; and this helped me reconcile myself to my failure as a public intellectual and develop into this different kind of authorial persona. 

You can read a translation (by his friend Brian Gross) of the piece on NewAPPS. If you look at the NewAPPS archive, you'll see it is one of the very first pieces I published at NewAPPS when it was just a week old (and we had a few dozen daily readers).  Arthur read nearly all of my blogs, always welcoming the pieces in which I dropped my scholarly guard and shared my views in forthright manner. Sometimes, he would send me a quick note thanking me for the occasional, lucid paragraph in the middle of a digressions. 

Eventually Arthur stopped advertising my piece, and discontinued the webserver that hosted it. The right-wing websites that polemicized against it mostly disappeared (today I could only locate one that notes its existence).

Recently, after I won a grant to study debt, just before the corona-lockdown, I was contacted by a leading Dutch banker to come meet with her and discuss. I thought she had read about the grant in the newspaper, but it turned out Arthur had nudged her into meeting me. During our last dinner, a few weeks ago on the back balcony at “Bickers a/d Werf” during one of the endless corona-Summer days, he told me he knew her since his membership of the JOVD, the youth wing of the Dutch main right wing party, and that they had stayed in touch. 

To my delight I found a splendid essay by him (1993) in the JOVDs zine, railing against the internal shenanigans and lack of internal democracy at the JOVD's annual conference -- the article makes clear he was a regular --, and in it he unmasks self-serving careerism and opportunism and he pleads for one-man-one-vote. Anyway, behind the bad boy, there was true engagement. I dont think Arthur had much formal education, or that he was especially bookish, but, not unlike our classmate Arnon Grunberg, he had the gift of an excellent polemicist.+

I mention Arnon not just to name-drop; as it turns out that for a few years we had an intense three-way email correspondence, which started with a note by Arthur to Arnon in September 2000.**  The note congratulates Arnon on his literary success and implies that Arthur is earning money as a porno-producer.*** In our letters we recognized ourselves as prisoners/wardens of 'caravan camp sollicitude' (woonwagenkamp de eenzaamheid).

Because Arthur and I traveled a lot, we started talking about Corona in January. We were both mystified, even outraged by the utter lack of care and reaction by national authorities. We found the role of the WHO mysterious. I tried to nudge him into developing mobile and airport testing capacity. Corona has been very tough for him. It hurt his businesses and undermined his life-style. He was (quite rightly) angered by the ways governments supported better connected businesses than his own. But most importantly it threw him back onto himself.

In response, while he tried to keep his businesses afloat, he checked in almost daily, including with my mom--they both would express concern for the other to me. (Early in the lock-down with PPE shortages everywhere, he surprised her with state of the art face-mask.) I found their mode of contact reassuring, perhaps too re-assuring. 

Arthur and I came from families shaped by the Holocaust, by betrayal and by great acts of compassion and rectitude. It would be tempting here to write something about our shared sense that all of that was not an aberration, that we're sleepwalking into more disaster. So often he would ask me what we could do.

I wish I were better at capturing the cocktail of survivor guilt, perseverance, love, and hardness of those we grew up with; the focus on money-making, the impatience with official delusion; the moving between many different worlds at once; the sense of connection with distant relatives who had to stand in for never-born cousins and uncles/aunts. But we rarely talked about the past; we were immersed in a present haunted by omissions and ellipses. Adult friendship is the art of tactful silence. And during the last few years, after my dad died, and as he quietly become a more regular fixture in my life, I learned from him to be more accepting of good fortune as our lives glide too closely alongside the precipice.   

Arthur's mom, (like my own) youthful when she had her first child, died early at the age of 45 from cancer. My heart goes out to his dad, and Maureen. 

 

On Comfort Reading, James Herriot, and Love on the Rocks

Once a upon a time, my wife was having a very crappy day. As it happens the Headcorn railway station in Kent, where she was waiting to catch a train, has a bookcase for books discarded by the public that they use as a charity fundraiser. Her eye fell on the James Herriot paperback pictured below.

Once, we stayed in a delightful bed and breakfast in North Yorkshire, in order to hike in the area. It was a memorable trip because it was my first experience with hiking in England; while it was already late March, the Dales and Moors were covered with snow and had a mesmerizing beauty in their barrenness. When we drove into the village, she pointed to a house and said 'that's James Herriot's house!' Only after she started filling me in, once we were snugly settled in the BnB (which had an astounding breakfast pudding with rhubarb compote), I had vague sense of remembering a TV series, popular forty years ago, which, when it aired in Holland, was called, conveniently, James Herriot.  She had devoured the books as an adolescent. 

When she was telling me the story about the encounter with the James Herriot paperback, I was reminded, once again, that there is, analogous to comfort food, a kind of comfort book. Some books we can safely return to in times of pain. And, oddly enough, despite the fact we know the plot and characters, the sense of escape and adventure may be no less thrilling. In fact, in virtue of our familiarity with these, there is a kind of safety we also feel with old friends.   

While I was pretending to be listening and reflecting on the nature of comfort books, my wife showed me a little rock pictured below. I inferred from the fragment of the last sentence of hers I processed, she found the rock under the James Herriot in the the case. I was now full attention. She said, 'and so I was given a heart.'  (See the two pictures below.)

It turns out there is a facebook group Love on the rocks uk (Painting Rocks ~ Making Smiles). It's mission is this: "Paint a rock, write Facebook love on the rocks uk on the back, take a picture and let us know where your hiding it and then make a stranger smile when they find it! It's free it's easy it's fun! Spread the love." As I write this, it has 96,962 members. While looking for a photo of the rock my wife found, I learned that many of the rock-paintings are delightful, even gorgeous. 

Anyway, the sappy moral of today's digression is that sometimes the kindness of invisible strangers really is heartwarming. Thank you.

On Analysis

Seven or so years ago, near the beginning of my analysis, I explained to my analyst, after some frustrating experiences, how important it was to me that they always engage with the actual content of what I was saying. I took a huge amount of care in expressing myself – choosing exactly the right words, multiplying distinctions in order to communicate with laser precision – and I didn’t want to be ‘interpreted’ before the letter of what I was saying had been fully attended to....Those seven or so years ago, when I implored my analyst to take me at my word, it was, almost needless to say, only the first way, according to which it contrasts with “spirit,” that I had in mind. Two or three years after that, well into the analysis, I was becoming more comfortable and more curious. The tight control over my words – the only real power I could exert to protect myself and ensure the analysis did not unleash anything too scary – came to feel constricting, even suffocating...

 At the end I exclaimed “I’d like to go back to that injunction I made right at the start. Please make an effort to engage with the letter of what I am saying before trying to hear what is unsaid.” To which they replied, with some, subsequently confessed, hyperbole: “You do realize that is literally the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing?!” (One reason to think that the designation of psychoanalysis as “the Jewish science” may be misleading.) In some sense, of course, what they said is obvious. They are listening for what is unconscious, which is unlikely to be found in the obsessively-controlled language that I wield almost like a weapon. But it startled me nonetheless and I decided to write this post to help work through it.--Simon J. Evnine "For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life"

One recurring fascination is the common root of 'analysis' in analytical philosophy that it shares with the 'analysis' in psychoanalysis. I sometimes wonder why analyse and its cognates had such pull over late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Viennese and Cambridge) minds. I was reminded of this by Simon Evnine who regularly calls my attention to his blog, "The Parergon." I hope he does not mind too much being the trigger occasion for these impressions. I treat him here as the everyman of analytic philosophy in which all of us can be substituted into his place, opaque contexts be damned!

It is noticeable that Simon treats his precision and "care in expressing" in terms of a "weapon." Even when used in self-defense, weapons are explicitly designed to hurt others.* I have noted before (recall) the analytic philosopher's tendency to describe the toolkit of her  craft in terms of surgical (and laser-like) instruments, but in those instances the instruments are meant to heal. Of course, Simon's intent is not to hurt others, but self-protection ("the only real power I could exert to protect myself.")+ 

I do not know a better expression of the fragility at the root of much analytic philosophy. Any badly formulated phrase is a misstep of monumental proportions. The robustness of the whole collapses with the weakest link. This fragility is fueled by "frustrating experiences." Once primed by psychoanalysis, it's hard not to discern the dependent child here. 

I do not mean to suggest that the analytic philosopher's attitude toward rigor  and clarity only expresses fragility. One may as well -- and here I am inspired by Simon's "extravagant letteralism" -- read it as pure holiness (recall here on Carnap). After all, a Torah scroll is disqualified if even a single letter is added or a single letter is deleted. Every sign must be correct. 

A few days ago a lovely blog post by Liam Kofi Bright inspired me to reflect a bit on what the norms of analytic philosophy would have to be if we "conceived of conceptual engineering as a means to enter into lifeworlds of others." I asserted that the non-dominating way of doing so requires a willingness to be transformed by the experience. What I missed saying explicitly then, and I suspect this omission (recall) is part of my professional deformation, is that one cannot (non-dominatingly) enter into the the lifeworld of another without, as Simon shows without saying, being vulnerable.

On Plumbing for Capitalism; or, on Indirect Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn't rise, I don't think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is....There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.,,Recently, however, I have been noticing that this writing is being taken up by philosophy peers as a contribution to the broader public mission of the discipline. It seems, now, there's just no escape.

...

But this isn't what the neoliberal academy means when it encourages “public philosophy”. What it is encouraging, rather, is a variety of “service”, as in, that one-third of the promotion dossier that hangs there at the end, the poor cousin of teaching and research. The academy will try, to the extent possible, to subsume whatever creative work one of its own puts out there, redescribing and repackaging our work as if it were done for the sake of the guild. But there is a limit to what redescription can do. It is very adept at absorbing non-fiction prose writing, less so when it comes to fiction.

This uneasy relation to disciplinarily non-specific creation reveals a deep unease about the place of philosophy in the world, and it speaks to the dismal consequences of many decades of retreat from the world by anglophone philosophy that the only means it has to engage with the broader culture is by clunky conjunction...

One thing this dreary arrangement forgets is that there is an old and venerable model for philosophers to engage with culture, not with an “and” but with an “in”. This is what is known as “criticism”. It has often been produced by philosophers, or by people sufficiently immersed in a learned tradition to know as much about philosophy as one would come to know in the process of getting officially licensed by the guild. Lessing did it, Schiller did it, Adorno did it: they wrote about the cultural output of their time, not as a parenthesis in their philosophical careers for the sake of some light-hearted Entspannung, not to show “non-philosophers” that philosophy can be “fun”, but because they were philosophers and it was obvious to them that such endeavours, creative and intellectual at once, were within the scope of their calling. They hated fun, or at least did not consider it something to be valued for its own sake.

I hate fun too, and I have no interest in convincing anyone that philosophy partakes of the fun. I am not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time. I would be happy to do “public philosophy” in a cultural setting in which the bounds of philosophy and non-philosophy, member and non-member, specialized and popular, were differently drawn. But as things are, no way. I'll do my job, I'll do it well, and I'll clock out when I'm done. And I will resist to the end the neoliberal academy's attempt to claim for itself, aided by the emerging system of surveillance capitalism, what is in fact mine alone.--Justin Smith "Against Public Philosophy" [HT Dailynous]

In analytic philosophy, criticism does not have high status so it is no surprise that, in his Parisian (internal) exile, Justin, himself a very fine essayist, overlooks our very own (Danto, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps, Cavell) in his list of exemplary critics.* Now, Smith does not pause to reflect on the fact that to be art critic today is not a true (Weberian) calling because its main function would be to add value to the billionaire funded corporate, 'neoliberal' art-industry. The spiritual values, and the bourgeois culture that sustained them, that made engagement with art, even Hollywood, so worthy have collapsed.

Even so, it is useful to be reminded that public philosophy (for complications recall here; here; and on Dotson here) need not be exhausted by (i) the contribution to public opinion in the service of some moral or political cause(s), (ii) the dumbed down dissemination of recent pinnacles of thought to the educated in the life-style section(s), or (iii) engagement with fun, low-brow entertainment (so loathed by Justin). It can also be -- let's grant him this -- (iv) the creative expression of philosophical sensitivity not oriented to the eternal motions of the starry skies above, but rather, as critic, immersed in the shadows of one's time tracking sources of ephemeral light. Despite their many distinct skills, motives, and practices (i-iv) have in common an orientation toward a 'public.' (This is so even though it's possible even if most readers of public philosophy are philosophers and their students in some sense.) This public may be narrow or broad; the very possibility of such a public may be a projective construct of the public philosopher's imagination -- this is very much the case in David Hume's philosophy -- or may, in fact, be dispersed in millions of twitter accounts. Hence, public philosophy is aptly named.

In what remains of this digression, I would like to sketch yet an alternative patsh for public philosophy one that is not directly oriented toward a public. One may think this impossible. For, one may well think that if a philosopher is not talking to herself or fellow (professional) philosophers, now or in posterity, or to the public, there is nothing left. But this is a mistake. A philosopher can also be oriented toward a specialist community. We are already quite familiar with something like this in so far that the so-called 'philosophers of X' (biology, physics, economics, law, medicine, cognitive science, etc.) do not just talk to fellow philosophers, but sometimes contribute to, even constitute, the developments in X (recall my interest in (v) synthetic philosophy.) Some philosophy of x or synthetic philosophy is oriented toward the public, but most of it is to fellow academic experts. I hope this is familiar enough so I don't have to recount it here.

But, and now I am getting to the point, there is also expertise outside the academy. In particular, the modern bureaucratic state -- and the international institutions (IMF, World Bank, WHO, WTO, BIS, etc.) that characterize the liberal regime today-- is full of experts that keep the regulatory and administrative state going. They are also, often, non-trivially involved in the development of the details of policy. These experts serve the public, while generally not contributing to the public (unlike, say, their counterparts in think tanks, NGOs, social movements, and political parties). In fact, as Justin notes above, their professional commitments may even prevent them from doing so--or if they can be oriented toward the public, only in very scripted fashion. On the whole, their work is invisible to the public--treated as technique by even serious thinkers.

Yet, for those of us who may wish to improve our governance and, thereby, improve the institutions that shape our lives, including the lives of the vulnerable and those that lack effective voice, being oriented to these public serving, invisible (non-academic) experts may well be an important way to practice public philosophy.+ Philosophers can develop expertise in a field of governance (e.g., public health, bank regulation, defense procurement, anti-trust practice, social insurance, migration, etc.) and orient their philosophical work toward improving or reconstituting it. This already exists (not surprisingly, somewhat quietly), for example, Ryan Muldoon has helped the World Bank; and Nancy Cartwright is developing a more general framework on how to use research to build better social policies. I think of such efforts as indirect public philosophy.

Such (vi) indirect public philosophy is service oriented because it aims toward improving policy and governance; but rather than addressing the public (although that is compatible with it), it engages and collaborates with (primarily non-academic) technocratic experts behind the scenes.** My interest in (vi) is personal. Through funded research I am quietly working on developing a new normative, governance framework for financial debt. I call this -- cf. Locke -- plumbing for capitalism. Some other time, I'll share more on the practice of indirect public philosophy.

 

On Moving Tables

Divide academic reputation up into three types. There is prestige attached to position -- the department one works for, the career stage one is at, whether one has a named chair, just in general the prestige attached to occupying a role. There is prestige attached to achievement -- here I mean prestige attached to publishing, and especially in certain venues, and being cited, or winning awards, or having established priority on some novel discovery of interest, or being known to have given a talk at conferences of sufficiently high standing, etc. Then there is prestige attached to persona -- this one is a bit harder to succinctly summarise with examples, but it happens that one can get a general reputation for skill or brilliance that precedes one's publications or which is not especially attached to any office one holds. An unpublished grad student in a lowly department can none the less have a high reputation if there is a "buzz" around them, and I mean the prestige attached to persona to pick out whatever makes this possible.--"The Perception of Merit" @The Sooty Empiric

Prompted by this blog post by Daniel Hicks (congrats!) [HT Dailynous], Bright writes about the intersectional uncertainty caused by the interaction of three kinds of prestige.* The whole post is worth reading (including its judicious quotations from Auden). I agree with his phenomenology, but I want to start with a nitpick. I have not yet encountered the third type, "the buzz" surrounding an unpublished grad student in a lowly department. And while it is dangerous to infer from personal experience, I seriously doubt this phenomenon exist.

Of course, I am not denying that buzz around a grad student exists. I have encountered such (the "boy wonder") buzz around the unpublished grad student in a prestigious department (with prestigious supervisors, etc.) And for all the changes in the profession--this phenomenon still exists. Such boy-wonder buzz is a joint construction of the person principally involved and the folk pushing it (by pushing it, we don't need to think of illicit stuff; I just mean invitations to high profile workshops, attendance at the parallel session, inviting buddies to come along, offers to co-author, etc.) So, the buzz surrounding the grad student is not really prestige of the person--it requires skilled anointing by others.

Sometimes such anointing is not very subtle. I have discussed the miserable time I have had on the job-market (2001-2005). The market then was in some senses less brutal -- there were (recall) fewer expectations about publication --, but I did experience being invisible at the smoker, being told at a ball-room interview that the interview was only a courtesy to one of my supervisors, being rejected while being the inside candidate, the cancellation of one of two APA interviews a week before the convention (with the request if I "could remain on standby"), and a number of other indignities (recall here and here). Don't cry for me. 

During this miserable run, my lovely and kind senior colleague Dennis Des Chene (later we became partners in blogging crimes) convinced me to present a paper in a workshop on the emotions he was hosting at WashU. I was very ambivalent about this because I was depressed about being passed over for a job in the department (and did not want to present in front of the folks who had just rejected me for undoubtedly sensible reasons), and the early word after the APA was not promising. I was reflecting primarily on my career options outside academia. But when it rains it pours. As Spring progressed, I was suddenly the back up candidate in multiple tenure track searches. By the time the conference came around, and as the top picks settled on their dream jobs, I started to receive multiple tenure track offers at excellent departments and attractive grants for post-doc positions. When Dennis introduced my talk, he made a point of listing my multiple job possibilities. 

I'll never forget the whatitislike of what followed next. During the subsequent meals I went from the side tables to the main table at the workshop. (It was not a big conference so the effect is undoubtedly exaggerated in my memory.) From being barely noticed, I was suddenly of interest to (ahh) my peers. I recall being quite astonished about this. In the small universe of early modern, I had been anointed. To be sure, at that point I had multiple publications -- precisely because I did not  get a tt job out of graduate school I started publishing, a lot --, and I had landed a job at a very good department. So, it's not like I will ever know what it's like to have a boy-wonder buzz. (I always imagine that such boy-wonders fail to be astonished at attention.)   

My response to this was a weird mixture of gratification and suspicion. I was self-aware enough to recognize that with a few more bad breaks I was going to leave the profession; and that I was no better a philosopher in the Spring of 2005 than in the Fall of 2004. I had been very invisible at all the APAs--to this day I cherish the two minutes of interest by John Perry in my work, while we were both waiting in line at a hotel Starbucks. 

Bright notes correctly that "the quest for prestige is miserable - in our hearts we know we want the wrong thing." But he does not note it is also a bad delusion. Our profession has extremely steep prestige hierarchies. This means prestige is an extremely scarce good. Only a few will come close "to be loved alone," but the rest of us not.  While this state of affairs may produce social benefits, and undoubtedly generates some goods for those at the very top of those prestige hierarchies (although near the top, the peaks undoubtedly stand out more vividly and, so, annoyingly), participation in this professional state of affairs is irrational for the individuals involved. And yet those who claim to embrace the love of wisdom, reconcile their professional fates, like hamsters in a running wheel, to it.

On the Demise of Feministphilosophers

Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress. And if I don’t think blogs are a good place to discuss stuff, it becomes a little odd to keep a blog going. Not all of us agree with this, and there may be spin-off blogs by some of our more optimistic members, which we’ll link to. But this site will soon no longer be hosting blog posts. I feel OK about this, and really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I think the time for this blog is now past and we’ve all got other projects underway.--Jennifer Saul, "Closing down FP" Feministphilosophers.

I dislike mono-causal explanations for social affairs, but it would be no exaggeration to say that the portfolio of websites hosted  by or associated with Feministphilosophers (see also the genderedconferencecampaign or 'what is it like being a women in philosophy?) transformed public perceptions of professional philosophy. They didn't just create a whole range of #metoo moments (before the term was invented) in professional philosophy, but they generated a discipline wide discussions (activism, conferences, etc.) about a whole range of professional and philosophical issues that percolated through the profession and made headlines in the international press. What seemed like a culture of silence (recall) frozen eternally, suddenly became an avalanche of bricks in the wall crumbling to dust. As this process unfolded it generated an intense set of public and more subterranean reactions many of which unsympathetic to the (diverse) aims of feministphilosophers, which changed the incentive structure for public speech. (Recall this post.) Philosophy generated its own dark web and with the frisson associated with dangerous thoughts it became a permanent, dissonant even intimidating counterpoint  to feministphilosophers.

Before i comment on Saul's remarks (see also Yap), I turn to Brian Leiter's post which quoted remarks by one of my favorite scholars, Paul Russell:*

There is, in any case, little or nothing about the debate concerning Lenin/Bukharin/Gramsci et al in the SEP. What this shows is that there are significant movements and developments in philosophy (e.g. Marxism) that are still sorely neglected in the SEP. Despite its considerable merits and achievements, the SEP has a rather narrow and contentious conception of what 'philosophy' is. It is arguable that this reflects a deeper problem, with what could be called the "APA outlook". This is an outlook that includes a rather crude understanding of how philosophy can and should be politically "active". It is heavily focused on “professional” issues (and interests) and it is largely disconnected from real world politics and history - lacking any credible understanding of the role that philosophy has had and that it might play outside its narrow academic/professional concerns. 

It is notable that a perfectly sensible point -- that SEP's coverage of the Marxist tradition is rather thin and unbalanced  -- got submerged into a broader polemic. One could have made that point by noting that G.A. Cohen is discussed more frequently than Lenin or Luxemburg (who is curiously missing in Russell's remarks) in the pages of SEP. The SEP is a public treasure, but this kind of thing is not uncommon--there are huge path dependencies and the effects of idiosyncratic views that have shaped its development. (Just recently I noticed that a student or professional interested in the godfather of formal philosophy, and himself a pioneering feminist, Condorcet was badly served by SEP.) The nice thing about SEP is that they welcome corrective feedback and encourage new entries. It is an unfolding encyclopedia not a monument to a fixed view. So Profs. Russell and Leiter could have simply made their point and helped the editors of SEP coordinate a robust number of invitations to  develop entries that provide a better coverage of Marxism and its complex development and history.

But this perfectly sensible criticism is presented by way of contrast with the rich coverage of feminist themes in SEP and not, say, Bayes (which is discussed in huge number of entries many more than feminism). If I had followed Russell's (and Leiter's) style of argument, I would have said (in line with my priors), that the SEP's fondness for Bayes represent an APA outlook (they even use "APA appratichiks"--this gave me the giggles) that favors technocratic (or scientistic) governance, etc. (Sadly no entry on Feminist Bayesianism yet.)

Don't misunderstand me, Russell and Leiter are right to ask us to reflect on the ways (recall) the steep economic and prestige hierarchies of professional philosophy, as other academic enterprises, reflect, reinforce, and help recycle (ahh) the superstructure of society. But it is a bit peculiar that they do so in the name of encouraging more focus on "real world politics and history" by complaining about encyclopedia entries about another philosophical movement. It's especially odd because feminism has been a means to advance and develop many marxist projects. (That's actually pretty clear from quite a few entries in SEP! Standpoint epistemology, say, is indebted to marxism.)

It's not that they don't have a point: I checked the number of entries on "social activism" and "political activism" (both negligible. By contrast the number of entries that mentions 'politics' is huge). No to put a fine point on it, and I am pretty bourgeois myself, it strikes me that the interests of capital are served just fine by marxist-feminist infighting over crumbs of online space. Why, if one wishes to advance the demise of capital, one would encourage such zero-sum infighting is one of the mysteries of life that elude me. Anyway, as I have argued, with the shift of global capital toward Asia, philosophical fashions and trends, even identity, will shift, too.

Be that as it may, it's possible that the brief effervescent age of the group philosophy blog is over. Quite a few group blogs have folded, and few new ones, it seems, are breaking out. There are three challenges to such blogs: (i) a lot of coordination time is lost to maintain minimal unity of the group; (ii) it is really difficult to remain fresh (and not to keep returning to same issues over and over again); (iii) because of the prevalence of online harassment and the relative slowness of blog discussions (compared to twitter), folk are increasingly unwilling to leave comments at blogs. 

Plato says somewhere that all created things must perish. So, c'ést la vie. Even so, I worry that Saul's point -- she is "increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues" -- may reflect the success of the war of attrition against feministphilosophers waged by (what above I jokingly called) the dark web. But perhaps her new projects, and those of her collaborators , will prove to be as influential and stimulating to philosophical self-awareness. 

 

 

 

 

The Untapped Innovative Potential of Philosophy Blogs

[This is an invited guest post by Justin Weinberg at DailyNous, part of a symposium to celebrate the blog's fifth anniversary. Go read all of it!--ES]

I want to thank Justin for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I hope he forgives me for ignoring Daily Nous, Leiter Reports, Feminist Philosophers (and the rest), which, for present purposes, I’ll treat as ephemera.

When it comes to form and argument, the philosophical blogosphere exhibits little experimentation. This is surprising for four reasons: first, there are a few barriers to entry—it’s not very expensive to set up and maintain a webpage or dedicated site. Second, a few blogs, which clearly aim to attract advertisers, excepted, blogs can be a labor of love and can ignore the commercial need for attracting eyeballs. Third, and most important, hyperlinks and the ability to combine different media liberate philosophy from previous constraints, which, say, impose linearity or ensconce philosophy in written and spoken words.

Most philosophy in the blogosphere—both the outward looking stuff aimed at that magical entity, the public, as well the more recondite material aimed at the professional aficionado—is continuous with lots of pre-internet age philosophy. What’s changed is the potential, instantaneous reach of one’s conversation/dialogue or lecture (e.g., podcasts), which, together with written essays and arguments, can find truly global audiences. Even the well-funded efforts at using the internet to deliver access to courses, both for profit and not-for-profit, have, while making Michael Sandel even more famous (by academic standards) than he was, not transformed the very idea of a philosophy course or a curriculum.

I do not wish to minimize the significance of valuable online resources (e.g., the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, philpapers, books.google, etc.) and the many online communities, which make the study and research of philosophy easier and less isolated. I can access materials at some of the best libraries without leaving my study. I can participate in online discussion of Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy any time of the day with likeminded enthusiasts. Once the algorithms of Google.translate are perfected (in the manner of Star Trek’s universal translator) we can look forward to an even more globalized, philosophy blogosphere. With liberal arts colleges sprouting up all over the world, we are seeing culturally hybrid curricula shaping new kinds of minds. The cosmopolitan in me rejoices and if mankind can survive the century—not a foregone conclusion—the philosophical future seems bright.

Even so, I am baffled we’re not seeing more innovation that deploys the resources of cheap computing power creatively. Little is done to develop philosophy through, say, spatial or multi-dimensional reasoning. The clever use of hyperlinks could show what happens to arguments or premises in subtly different contexts. While there are fantastically inventive visual presentations of information or of people presenting philosophy (and many terrific memes), I am unaware of attempts to change the visual or tactile experience of philosophy on screen or in virtual reality.

Fourth, underlying the puzzle is the assumption that technology and accessibility of new sources of inspiration influence the development of philosophy. Anybody who reads Plato is reminded that Socrates thought it significant that Anaxagoras’ works circulated in scrolls that could be bought (presumably also after his exile)—see Phaedo 97b, and Apology 26de. Plato records for us Socrates’s ambivalence (or worse) about philosophical writings in the Phaedrus 275. To jump to a period I know better, much philosophical innovation by the Novatores who now have familiar names (Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, etc.) took place outside universities and monasteries; the riches of early modern philosophy were made possible by the cheapness of print and the relative reliability of logistics. Of course, early analytic philosophy was jumpstarted by breakthroughs in conceptual and inferential tools. And Islamic philosophy by translations from the Greeks, etc.

Surely the time is ripe for a philosophical, avant-garde techno-punk that reboots philosophy outside the academy. During the last decade, there has been a decisive shift in analytic philosophy (our culture’s hegemonic species of philosophy). It used to be that in it knowledge of the cutting edge, or research frontier, of professional philosophy could be mastered by one or two graduate seminars building on a fairly minimal undergraduate curriculum. Now, competent professional philosophers who mind their own business outside the major research universities may find it difficult to understand the arguments in, say, formal epistemology or modal metaphysics. Concept inflation and concept refinement are the characteristics of our age.

My point is not to be critical—I am no enemy of esotericism or the division of labor; but rather to admit that the philosophical historicist in me expects that when philosophy develops subtle refinement and technology can ferment innovation and revolt, the ground will move under our feet.*

*Thanks to Mark Norris Lance John Protevi, and helen de Cruz for encouraging nudges in writing this post.

 

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