Digressions&Impressions

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.

 

---

When a Continental Philosopher Hasn't Heard the News that The War is Over

This leads me to my conclusion concerning the present volume. It could have profited from an in-depth investigation into the conceptual and philosophical architecture of existentialism and existential thought as they have developed over the last two hundred years. This would have led to the insight that neither neuroscience nor the interaction of empirically grounded psychology and physics with the existentialist tradition are anything very recent. This is not just a matter of historical negligence on the part of the volume; it leads to a very shallow understanding of both existentialism and neuroscience among the majority of the contributors. Many of the older contributions of existentialists to the mind-body/mind-brain-problem, or to articulating the role of modern science for our self-understanding as human beings, are so much more sophisticated that the current volume as a whole does not live up to the standards of first and second-wave of existentialism. More significantly, though, I think we ought to deny that there is even such a thing as "neuroexistentialism". Yet, whatever the validity of this negative existential assertion, it seems clear enough that neuroexistentialism is in pretty bad existential shape.--Markus Gabriel, reviewing Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (eds.), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, 2018@NDPR

A decade ago, I think, analytic philosophers grasped that they had won the fraternal war with continental philosophers over jobs in the discipline. While continental philosophy maintained some of its cultural capital -- especially (recall) in the lucrative art market -- its students were increasingly consigned to seeking positions in shrinking humanities programs, whereas philosophy was tapping into science-friendly interdisciplinary programs. Perhaps coincidentally, simultaneously, analytic philosophers turned against the bullying and blood sport culture within the profession. After all, bullies, who are especially status conscious, are  useful to create dominance over other factions and to police unity within the ranks. With the war won, the costs of the toxic culture have become increasingly apparent and intolerable.

The previous paragraph is of course a stylized representation of a messy reality. But one nice consequence of this new state of affairs is an increasing interest among folk to draw on resources from outside one's own traditions -- this is, in fact, how analytic philosophy always replenishes itself -- and a willingness to collaborate with folk, including Continental types, who previously would have been outside the margins of respectability. Another potentially healthy feature is that various sub-field-echo-chambers can draw on wider pool of reviewers and referees. 

Problem is, Markus Gabriel, a mediagenic and high-profile (non-analytic) philosopher in Germany, has no desire to play nice. In the quoted review that raised considerable eyebrows for lots of reasons, he basically charges that (primarily analytic) folk use the term 'existentialism' in a shallow way and have no business messing with that 'tradition.'* (For the record Gabriel doesn't frame the review in terms of the contrast between analytic/continental--so what I am doing is kind of uncharitable.) Now, Gabriel's range of charges is wider than this, but one of his claims is that the third kind of existentialism (articulated by Flanagan and Carusso) seems to "more or less the opposite of the two other forms of existentialism" that constitute the existentialist tradition.  One may say then, cheekily perhaps, that Gabriel objects to a form of intellectual appropriation that ends up undermining the very tradition that is being appropriated (so there is no criticism of appropriation as such, although the spirit of the review is so uncharitable that one wonders if the appropriation itself generated the hostility). Because of the stakes involved, Gabriel is unwilling to review most of the contributions to the volume on their own terms. 

I don't have much evidence for the spin I am putting on the review, but notice that it relies on a distinction between "actual existentialism" and (let's say) fake existentialism. The fake existentialism is the one introduced/coined by Caruso and Flanagan. I offer two observations.

First, Gabriel here tacitly assumes that extending a tradition always must involve a form of continuation such that no essential features of the tradition are undermined. But of course what is thought essential in the tradition is, often, a matter of (quietly or more explicitly) retrofitting of the tradition to the newly extended version of it. The previous sentence is, of course, natural to analytic philosophers, who have a hard time articulating any necessary and/or sufficient condition of their own tradition at any given time, and to those that have reflected on the change course of some traditions in the past.

Second, Gabriel claims the authority to distinguish between the actual and fake versions of existentialism. This reveals his commitment to the tradition. And he does so in a way in which he denies others the right to speak on its behalf and extend the tradition. Such boundary policing can be quite entertaining to those who enjoy blood sports, and, even for those of us who may find this less than tasteful, can provide an opportunity for learning about deep-seated, otherwise submerged differences. (It tends to be more instructive about the polemicizing reviewer than the work reviewed.) It exhibits what above (and in the title of the post) I call the state of 'war.'  Despite this being an age of global and instant communication, news of the armistice has evidently not reached Bonn.

 

On Writing in the Wake of Deaththreats (Say When Jordan Peterson Comes to Town)

As the Dutch news is now reporting, this week several of my colleagues in my department and faculty have received anonymous death threats and antisemitic hostility because they politely protested a student group's invitation to Jordan Peterson (here's an English version). (One of the targets, Polly Pallister-Wilkens, shared some of the threats on twitter.) For those of you who care about such matters: there was no suggestion to rescind the invitation or to prevent the student group from hosting him. One public letter did propose adding a critical speaker/respondent to the event. (In his measured response, Peterson called his critics,‘cowards, denouncers and totalitarian wannabes’.) I did not sign any of the letters because I do not wish to contribute to Peterson's branding strategy, which clearly relies on courting and escalating such controversy.

Unlike such events Stateside, the event was organized by a non-partisan student group, which has a strong preference for captains of industry, celebrity academics [sic], and political insiders. The regular series started during the financial crisis with a sense of urgency, but the interviews have generally become utterly anodyne, and the main benefit it provides, I think, is a networking opportunity for the students involved. Because it is so regular, and devoid of irony, the series gives a nice window into the public thinking of the social elites of Holland (and Europe). One day a historical sociologist will find it very useful record.

That criticism of a Peterson-event would lead to threats ought not surprise anybody who has a twitter account. Predictably, the cheerleaders of Peterson in the Dutch press ignore the death threats and attack my colleagues for being critics of free speech (etc.) [and routinely conflate free speech and the various (note the plural) academic missions of the university (something I have blogged a bit about, recall , say, here, here, here. here, here, and here.)] I use 'predictably' because Peterson is not the first to produce death threats in his wake. Other colleagues in my department, most of us are rather old-fashioned Weberian social scientists (with expertise on populism, migration, refugees, political trust, elections, communication, gender, etc.), have  received threatening e-mails when certain right-wing Dutch websites report on them.  

A few years ago I signed a letter protesting Dutch policy change on refugees. Readers of an extreme-right site then nominated all us for a list of traitors. (In  our case, the proposed punishment was not death but a one-way ticket to an insane asylum, after the revolution.) 

My first taste in such matters occurred much longer ago, in 2010, when I tried to publish a (road-to-serfdom inspired) piece about the rise of Geert Wilders, in which I claimed he was a consequence of the corruption of the rule of law among Dutch political elites. No Dutch mainstream outlet was willing to take the piece. I then self-published it at NewAPPS, An entrepreneurial friend then advertised a Dutch version on Google, and the piece went viral in the then still somewhat underground world of alt/extreme right websites.* For a few weeks I got anonymous emails with loads of threats and antisemitic slogans. Most were too vague to really concern me. Because we had a newborn child I decided to keep quiet. We did not need more stress. 

One letter was different. It was articulate and signed by a real person, who introduced himself as a business owner. I responded to his letter, and we had a surprisingly amicable correspondence about my argument and Dutch politics. That exchange  petered out.

Either way, public interventions on certain topics can lead to anonymous harassment or intimidation. This is true even in professional philosophy (recall this post).** It is no surprise that awareness of this mechanism leads to anticipatory forms of self-censorship and second-guessing. Did I not sign because because I do not wish to contribute to Peterson's branding strategy or did I want to stay below the radar of local hotheads? Mill wrote that "unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions," but I think he missed that unmeasured vituperation will create a prevailing opinion because it deters people from professing contrary opinions.

In my environment, grant agencies and university presidents want public impact. But they do nothing to protect their employees against the intimidation or help them navigate law enforcement issues. (I'd love to hear otherwise.) So, there is much room for despair. Left to our own devices, we respond by caring for each other and acknowledging to each other that this side of the job exists. 

My own response to these developments has been to study how to be a public thinker (even wrote a book about it), to ignore most anonymous commentary, and to become more strategic about my public interventions. I have already shared (recall) my general strategy on public philosophy, and I would reiterate how important is to plan one's public interventions with some worst-case advance planning. But the reality of being in an environment, a culture really, of permanent harassment directed at academics who do not conform to the routine vitriol directed against refugees, immigrants, and Muslims (etc.), and who defend rule of law against authoritarianism meant that I speak less to a wider public (fewer editorials, fewer public events, etc.) and aim to communicate more directly with decision-makers, opinion-makers, or educations (like you).+  I tell myself this also fits my academic personality better.

I admire my courageous colleagues who keep serving the public publicly. Perhaps, my prudence is adaptive, or base cowardice. 

 

 

On Public Philosophy and Transgender Rights Campaign

During the past year professional philosophers have struggled with controversies pertaining to transgender issues (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia affaire here and here; and again involving language in journal articles [recall my piece on the open letter to the editors of PPR at Dailynous here;] the debate between Talia Mae Bettcher and Kathleen Stock;[1] the language of the APA philosophy blog [see Leiterreports]), etc. These debates have intersected with wider society and have even led to campaigns to to have faculty removed from their positions in the UK. While I am no friend of calls for civility in debate (recall this post among many), the way this debate is conducted is unedifying and I have already expressed despair that even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities. 

I start this post with two preliminary comments. First, as regular readers know, I support so-called public philosophy (recall; which comes in many varieties [see here]) and philosophical activism (which comes in many flavors and in support of many different kinds of causes) of society and the profession. I have long admired the service philosophy of Kristie Dotson (recall), Hugo Bedau's activism against the death penalty, and John Corvino's work on same-sex marriage. (I am sure readers can add to this list their own favorites.)* Such cause/ideal-promoting political activism is both self-justifying and a useful means of discovery of truth. While philosophy can benefit from a measure of distance, cool reflection, and impartiality, it's also the case that engagement with the messy details of lived experience and the arguments generated by political conflict can also be a useful constraint on and source of creativity for philosophical discovery of the nature and properties of an ideal. 

However, I have  long thought that it seems unwise, or at least imprudent, when philosophers qua being philosophers support active politicians and political parties. (That's compatible with doing so qua being citizens of a particular polity). It seems best if one's pursuit of truth and the good is not sullied by and subject to the many tactical compromises and fatal injustices that accompany political life pursued by imperfect beings like us. I rarely see philosophical excellence in support of a politician or party,+ and much that I find cringe-worthy.

Second, transgender people are subject to bigotry, discrimination, harassment, and violence. This is well documented in the UK and US. The evidence also suggests that many transgender victims are also (intersectionally) members of other historically discriminated minority groups, I assume here that the violence occurs in virtue of their being transgender, and that belonging to it means one belongs to (all other things being equal) a vulnerable category of people. So,

• I wholeheartedly support the campaign for transgender rights and protection under the law.***

Regular readers know (recall this post on MLK Jr.) that I also think that human imperfection, self-interest, and bigotry often undermine enforcement of the law and can even make the most beautifully written laws a tool of oppression. What's needed is, thus, also sufficient popular support or opinion and the right dispositions in favor of such rights. Political campaigns are, therefore, crucial to generate such support.** Of course, there is something of a paradox lurking here, because where such support exists the right would not be necessary.

One important feature of new rights is that the costs and (new) down-side risks of these need not be distributed evenly on the population. That's of special concern if these fall on other vulnerable groups. I understand the present campaign against trans rights, which includes some high profile self-described feminist philosophers -- where not informed by or leaning on bigotry -- as aiming to articulate some such risks to vulnerable women, especially those in prisons and among the homeless. I think such concerns eminently reasonable, but that's because there is a reasonable fear of violence and degradation within prisons and fear of violence against the homeless (see here). But rather than fighting transgender rights, the proper response to such concerns for the very vulnerable is, I would think, to join the coalition for thoroughgoing prison reform and better/more resources and conditions for the homeless.++ 

So my preliminaries have turned into a blog post, which was prompted by my momentary reconsideration of my stance on public philosophy.+++ It's true that there is no reason to believe that philosophical activism will always be beneficial. And I am reminded of the fact that even in the pre-internet age (which, let's stipulate, can make any bad thing worse), there was and never is a golden age of civility (as those of us old enough to recall philosophical debates over abortion, LGBTQ rights, or if one pays attention to debates over Zionism/BDS, etc.)---I have often remarked upon the fact that as a discipline we have an all-too-human fondness for philosophical debates as blood-sports and the delicious take-down.

It's a familiar fact that the pursuit of a worthy cause can turn into fanaticism and unpleasant and vindictive (moral) righteousness. And it is known that friends of worthy causes will find it difficult to condemn the excesses because they do not wish to be seen as undermining the worthy cause. For, it's also all-too-common that critics of the worthy cause will use such excesses as a tactic to undermine a cause, and shift debate away from consideration of the underlying evils. Savvy intellectuals recognize the temptation they may benefit from escalation and from hyping an otherwise unworthy critic, inviting abuse from their anonymous followers, with the cycle being renewed etc. And so it can often happen that wisdom is pushed aside or found crouching unnoticed in the margins of the arresting debates. 

In light of such facts people of good will may prefer to retreat to the ivory tower, and pursue their worthy work in undisturbed quiet. Others will note that these facts are part of the eternal return of life's carnival, and will will them...one tweet at a time eternally.  

 

 

We Need More Philosophy Blogs (yeah!); Or why Philosophy papers feel so long

Most of the problems they discuss would be significantly remedied under a simple proposal: there should be many more short articles/letters/notes, of 2000 words or less, published in philosophy journals, either in existing journals or in new ones dedicated to short pieces, and we should have a disciplinary norm not to besmirch short pieces.

...

The main thing to consider is the (intrinsic) reason for publication in the first place: to advance our understanding of an issue. My contention...is that there are many worthwhile insights that can be expressed rather briefly. We spend a great deal of time perfecting long pieces, or adding background information that most readers will understand anyway. The marginal increase in overall enlightenment that arises from the additional time philosophers use to perfect long articles (and for readers to read them) is in many cases less than what could be achieved by using our time in other ways (such as writing additional short pieces). There will always be a central place for longer pieces, but the publication of more short pieces may increase the overall quality of scholarship as more ideas are shared early on, allowing authors to adjust their views in response to early feedback and to find potential collaborators at early stages, and the discipline can move faster in worthwhile directions.

Some other benefits of this proposal:

(1) It should be much easier for referees and editors to review short pieces, thus significantly shortening turn-around times and making it easier on referees.

(2) Authors could spend less time per paper, thus reducing the risk wasting time on work that turns out not to be published.

(3) More papers could be published in the same amount of journal space, increasing acceptance rates. I have no objection to the existence of a number of top journals having super-low acceptance rates for long papers. But this practice leads to the problem that there are many highly reputable ideas that are not seeing the light of day in highly reputable journals.

(4) With many ideas published in shorter pieces, there may end up being fewer longer pieces submitted to journals, improving the review process at those places. Ideally, the writing of longer pieces would be reserved for ideas that the author has deemed worth the extra time to perfect in long form, perhaps because the idea has already been partly vetted in a short publication. (Journals that publish short pieces should permit authors to use ideas published in them as springboards for longer works.)

(5) This practice would be more inclusive. The publication of short pieces would help those at small institutions and lacking in personal connections more easily have their ideas be more broadly known and the resulting responses could help them improve upon their developing ideas. And philosophers with outside time limitations (e.g., from family or health issues) may find it much easier to compose shorter pieces in the hopes that later they can expand upon the ideas.

(6) We already spend a great deal of time philosophizing in ways that never get published, and there is a lot of value in those efforts that sometimes gets lost. We have informal conversations with philosophy friends, and give commentary at conferences. Many of these ideas have no chance of being published as full, independent papers, but deserve to be shared more broadly than with just those in the conference room. More generally, philosophy is often done dialogically, but dialogues typically happen behind closed doors. By encouraging the publication of short pieces, we can open up otherwise exclusive conversations to more participants.

One might object that this is just a proposal that there be more philosophy blogs. I welcome this comparison! Perhaps what I am proposing can be accomplished by a proliferation of blind peer-reviewed blogs. Not only would this increase quality and prestige of such posts, but blind review would democratize access to authoring posts in blogs.--"A Plea for More Short Journal Publications" by Avram Hiller@DailyNous

Regular readers know, I hope, by now that I believe the profession needs to experiment with a lot more different publication and reviewing formats that do better justice to what professional philosophy is, and could be. This is especially so if you think -- as I emphatically do not -- optimistically that philosophy is intrinsically about arguments and learning which premises to reject (see Stoljaer's very interesting book). We could become a lot more creative about how we organize discussion about, say, disputed premises or different interpretations of what may be the same premise. In the digital age, web-based publication with embedded links should facilitate such discussion. Right now, for example, we have  to read through whole works on dualism while we all know the philosophical action may be (fill in your favorite claim) at the level of the nature of physicalism, or the nature of experience, or the nature of a property, or a zombie, etc. Hiller is, thus, correct that our present journal format does not promote what he calls dialogical publication.* 

So, I welcome Hiller's attempts to promote discussion of an alternative to the status quo. I won't deny that I was, of course, pleased by the casual domestication (and praise) of blogs, which until recently were treated as entertainment and not philosophy, as exemplary philosophy.** (Of course, this was done on a blog and not, say, in the pages of Mind.) But not unlike some of his commentators at Dailynous, I think a blog + "blind [I prefer masked] review" = Analysis. (I am not against Analysis II, More Analysis, Junior Analysis, Epistemological Analysis, Property Analysis, etc.) 

Hiller suggests that many papers are made longer because we add "background information that most readers will understand anyway." I doubt this is the main reason why papers feel so long and so arduous to referee and read. First, I am convinced the main reason why average (so not yours, my dear above average reader) philosophy papers fits this category is that they are not especially well written; they lack personality. (Some other time more about that.)

The lack of personality is connected to the most important reason why this problem exists at all: our papers are written defensively. By this I mean two things: first, as I am confident has been noted by others before, philosophy papers are written defensively against every possible half-baked and willful misreading one can imagine. Perversely, philosophers only extend interpretive charity to disciplinary princes. Second, rather than doing a thorough literature review, we wait for referee 2 to foist objections on us--this then leads to papers that seem strangely out of balance given the stated aims. But, perhaps, maybe there is less of a risk of this in Analysis-length articles.  

I was about to press 'publish' on this (non-peer-refereed blog [although I do get a lot of post publication review!]) when I realized that I had left the core claim unchallenged.  This is (recall) "The marginal increase in overall enlightenment that arises from the additional time philosophers use to perfect long articles (and for readers to read them) is in many cases less than what could be achieved by using our time in other ways (such as writing additional short pieces)." I am pretty sure this rests on a misunderstanding on the nature of a short piece. Perhaps an analogy will help: writing a Haiku is much harder than writing ahh a sonnet. For, the shorter you go the dissonances and  imperfections are much more salient.+ The same is true for a masterfully crafted blog post as opposed to a journal article.

In a journal article you can circle around a point and folk may well get what you intended to say. In a blog post people may completely miss what you wanted to say. For example, I sometimes (recall these two points) explain my dislike of the Clintons by mentioning the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in the middle of a presidential campaign.  What I never said before, I will say now: for me this is not just a blatant case of opportunistically using the death penalty for political gain, it's also a racialized case of signalling willingness of being tough on African-American criminals. For, it is obvious  to anybody who lived through  Dukakis and the famous 'Willie' Horton ad, that this was Bill Clinton's attempt to prevent being tarred with the same brush. The point here today is not that I am right about this, but in previous blog posts I did not spell this out and so was not understood. And note I am still compressing my reasoning here and inviting you to fill in my steps; so blogging is always an invitation at misinterpretation. 

The previous point is, I think, tacitly understood by all who hold an Analysis publication in high regard; to get to the heart of the matter with the right balance of succinctness and clarity is a great demonstration of a certain sort of philosophical skill. 

Let me add another thought (I hope you catch my distinction):  to seem to get to the heart of the matter with the right balance of succinctness and clarity is also often characteristic of philosophical jerks, but that's for another post.

 

 

On Stickers, Nametags, visitors, and (ahh) Identity

I was at an academic conference last week, somewhere in America, where we were invited by our hosts to place a 'preferred pronoun' sticker on our nametags. "If you could pick one of those up during the next break, we'd appreciate it." The options were, 'He', 'She', 'They', 'Ask Me', and one with a blank space for a write-in. Coming from my adoptive France, I had heard of this new practice in my country of origin, but somehow I had convinced myself that it was mostly mythical. Yet there were the stickers, and there were all my fellow participants, wearing them with straight faces. 

I did not pick one up. As is my practice at these events, I do not even wear the nametag that has been provided for me, so there would have been nothing to put the sticker on. But if there had been any direct and explicit pressure on me to wear one, rather than just a general announcement, I would have been constrained to explicitly refuse to do what was being asked of me. I would have been a conscientious objector. 

In the future I will avoid meetings at which I know in advance, or I have a reasonable expectation, that there will be such stickers. I am strongly opposed to this convention, I think it is ridiculous and offensive, and I am only thankful that, for now, it is only a convention and not a compulsion. But the line is not so clear. It is not a compulsion for me to wear a sticker, because I am privileged and basically indifferent as to whether I ever get invited to an academic event again. The quality of my life is enhanced by not going to academic events, and reduced by going to them. If I can't go because social pressure would require me to wear a sticker, well, tant mieux. But this is not the case for younger scholars who are precariously employed. It is in part for their sake that I feel the need to make explicit my opposition to this practice. 

The reasons for this opposition are simple. If to be cisgender is to be such that your gender identity as you experience it matches with the gender identity you are assigned at birth, then I am not cisgender. What it would be like to feel at home with your assigned gender identity is something I cannot even imagine, but I take it that whoever is at home in this way is an utter dullard, an unthinking fool, and definitely someone to avoid. I for my part cringe whenever I am called a 'man'. Even 'person' and 'human' seem rather too confining for my sense of the true nature of my being, but I usually let these slide. 

At the same time, I take it that if we are, as Heidegger said, geworfene Entwürfe, 'thrown projects', then the fact that members of my society find it reasonable to call me a 'man' is part of my Geworfenheit, and not something it is within my conception of my life project to change. I do not feel like a man, but I also do not feel I have it in me to bring about, by my will and by my presentation of self in everyday life, any other social fact as to what sort of being I am. In other words, whatever my preferred pronouns might have been in some imaginary Rawlsian original position, I do not feel I have a reasonable expectation of others that they use them in my non-imaginary present position.

The fact that I do not feel this way is something very deep about my identity: the mismatch between what it is I feel I am, and what it is I feel I can expect others to recognise me as being. This mismatch is philosophically interesting to me, and it is also an unhealing wound at the core of my identity. Again, I suspect that anyone who does not perceive this wound in them, in some way or other, is an uninteresting, unthinking person.  

I expect to be called 'he', because it is into he-ness that I have been thrown, but no, I insist, I do not 'prefer' to be called 'he'. I have a strong preference, in fact, that I not be expected to expect others to use my preferred pronouns, and it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact. 

There will always be unthinking and uninteresting people in the world. But let us not enforce this way of being by bullshit new social conventions or, worse still, by oppressive new bureaucratic demands.--- Justin Erik Halldór Smith "My Preferred Pronouns?" {HT Jessica Collins}

On Friday, I went to Kings College (London) [herafter KCL] to attend a fascinating talk by Emily Thomas (Durham) on the novelist-activist, philosopher, May Sinclair. It was the second time within a week that I had to be at KCL. Due to increased security, it's become quite difficult to enter a KCL building. In some buildings all doors are locked/opened with a employee pass. Earlier in the week, in a in a different building, I got stranded on a floor between the elevators and the doors to the offices (where the seminar room was). After knocking fruitlessly on a glass door, I was saved by a helpful KCL security guard -- who was doing a rounds, checking for fire because the smoke detectors were not operative --, who let me into the floor, and then escorted me to the WC not because he deemed me a security threat, or so he said, but because without a pass I would be locked in the bathroom. I was told that the security exists because of terrorism and to prevent theft of computers and electronics;* while I found the latter plausible, I have a sneaky suspicion the main purpose of the measures is to keep street people from using facilities/premises. Anyway, on Friday i was given a big visitor sticker. This sticker lets me into the main building of KCL and allows KCL security guards to identify me (since I a lack a proper badge) on a particular date. The sticker does not open any doors.

Here I was on a university campus -- which I consider my natural habitus by now -- and told I do not quite belong (a visitor is meant to leave, after all). I knew I was being overly sensitive, but Friday had been one of those days where I awoke more tired than I had felt before I went to bed. All morning I had minor mishaps, and was disgruntled. The cause was not mysterious: I had vivid dreams about my dad, including an incredibly realistic re-experience of his last moments (which I witnessed) with me holding his hand. 

As an aside, my first romance and her mom taught me some principles of dream interpretation. In their approach, all characters in a dream are you (I mean the person dreaming) and represent different features of or wishes for you. Spatial features and narrative of the dream are then used to provide structure to the interpretation. If I followed their approach,  then I could see that in the dream I was identifying myself with my dad's death looking on at how he/I have passed. 

The single strangest thing about mourning is that from one moment to the next loss can feel pungently and suddenly real, and simultaneously surreal. Death slips through my fingers.  

I had a forty-five minutes to kill before the talk, and so I decided to re-read Seneca Letter 33, which, I had decided, I was going to use in Friday's Digression. It's an interesting letter because Seneca here -- as elsewhere (recall) -- is a strikingly modern thinker, who treats progress as something to be discovered by individual thinkers. I was amused that one of the rhetorical tricks of the letter was an attack on historians (like me) who merely retrace steps on familiar paths (via vetere), and who are kept around as a source of stale maxims or insights to be memorized, but who can't guide folks onto the path of wisdom which needs to be carved out at each place and moment in time. While I was heading the seminar room for Emily's lecture I noticed the visitor sticker again, and I thought of my dad's youth and the Jude/Jood badges he had to wear.

That afternoon, I was struggling with my Digression.  I wanted to do justice to Seneca, but reflection on my dream was interfering. The words I was writing were my familiar blog persona, but not quite true to my feelings. I wanted to be distracted by facebook where I noticed a critical discussion about Justin's post (which I have quoted above). I read Justin's piece, and I was impressed how he could make Heidegger's insight into the human condition seem so natural (as opposed to pretentious) and link it with his own vulnerability. In our culture, how many men would admit to themselves, let alone to others, I do not feel like a man. Of course, I recognize sometimes it's easier to say something to unknown strangers -- I am a blogger, after all -- than to oneself (or other intimates).

Justin is such a good and funny ('straight faces') writer that his rage became palpable. I wondered if the rage was directed at the hosts or, more psycho-analytically, was directed at self. (The previous sentence  may be more informative about me than Justin.)+ You may wonder why I call him enraged. It's an interpretation, of course, but when I reread his piece, I noticed he actually never manages to state the reasons for why the practice he is objecting to is "ridiculous and offensive." Since Justin is a terrific philosopher, and one of our best public writers who is ordinarily in complete rhetorical control of his toolkit, the oversight makes me think it is a genuine mistake caused by intense passion.

Let me give an example of Justin's art. Notice how the  first sentence we are immediately put in a familiar place,  "somewhere in America," that is at the same time not anywhere defined. Justin is engaged in a distopian rhetoric here (where the mythical is made to feel very real and scary).++ It turns out that adopting a national identity ("my adoptive France") is much easier than a preferred gender. That's a striking claim because in our time, for many others (refugees, migrants, etc.) obtaining a French identity is literally a dangerous enterprise. I say this not to trivialize Justin's point, but to emphasize it. Personal identity, the true nature of one's being, are existential matters, often beyond choice and (despite some metaphysicians' assertions) no trivial matter at all. 

Okay, let me return. Justin makes many interesting and pertinent observations -- that transcend (ahh) his own struggle with identity, but the closest he comes to stating an objection to the  convention is this: "it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact." But whatever the convention is -- to what degree it is objectionable -- it is really not obvious that it presupposes (for its intelligibility or its normal functioning) that stating such a preferences in this matter would be either "easy and painless" and/or "wholly worked out fact." Given that two of the options are, (i) 'Ask Me', and (ii) a blank space for a write-in, it strikes me that the conference hosts don't need to be thought to make any such assumptions.

I do not mean to deny that Justin is right that a convention of public tagging/stickers will be felt to be compulsory to many. And he is also right that senior luminaries will find ways to escape the ways in which the convention is meant to stick (see what I did there?). But if the convention is worth having or not -- and at many conferences folk are often asked to wear name-tags, including tags that secure entry into the convention center [and we often have the option to adopt names and tags in a professional context] -- requires a more dispassionate analysis of the uses/abuses and benefits/costs of it than Justin offers. 

This is not the moment to contribute to such an analysis. After all, my post has gone on longer than Justin's original post (or Senecas's Letter 33 in Latin),** and I lack authority. Yet, in returning to his post today, after a week-end in the country, and reading the comments on it, I may better understand his reaction. He writes in follow up comments, "the insistence that I am 'cis', by people who do not know me and do not know what my inner life is like, [is experienced] as aggression." Identity attribution is always and, in our world, necessarily caught up in boundaries, and boundary policing. This means they run many dangerous risks; but as Justin signals (adoptive France) and his commentators remind him, identities, chosen and imposed, are also the clay, often the un-curable matter, with which our lives are formed and so also possible affirmations worth holding on to, sometimes, despite our intentions.

 

On Staying in Professional Philosophy while the activists are marching outside the Auditorium.

I will never forget sitting in our auditorium listening to a long talk about meta-ethics when, right outside the doors of the university, Black Lives Matter activists were marching (this was in St. Louis at the time of Ferguson). I could hear them chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable. How could I justify this exuberance of abstraction when there were so many real-world problems that needed the minds of intelligent people? I know, I know: the value of pure research, etc., etc. Rachel Williams."Why I left Philosophy,"  [HT Dailynous, I think, but can't find the link, so apologies if it was somebody else.]

If one wishes to improve professional philosophy, it makes sense to pay attention to those who leave the field. So it is worth paying attention to those who offer public testimonials about their departure. While there are also things Williams admires about professional philosophy and its members, Williams lists a number of reasons why continuing with professional philosophy seemed not worth the sacrifice(s) anymore. I want to talk a bit about the one quoted at the top of the post, but before I get to that I rephrase the others: 

• [A] There is a low probability of having one's written work read. 
• [B] There is s much written work to keep up with, that it is actually a lot of work (relative to pay-off) to satisfy referees's requests to read some relevant work Y.
• [C] Making B worse, much of the work that is published is unpleasant to read. [C*] This is because it is deliberately esoteric to ordinary people. 
• [D] Professional philosophy consists of high status citation/referee networks.
• [E] Philosophy is a hostile work environment toward graduate students, especially women. [E*] There is way too much brutality at conferences.
• [F] Outside top programs, finding a position in professional philosophy is a low probability event and the process is extremely unpleasant. [F*] This reduces the quality of life of PhD students in such programs.
• [G] Dropping out of professional philosophy is considered failure.
• [H[ Even extremely wealthy universities make a professional philosophy PhD unrewarding financially.
• [I] Contemporary professional philosophy is too abstracted from "pragmatic realities of human existence." [I*] There are social, professional biases against philosophers who work on questions with existential import (e.g., "race, gender, and bioethics."]
• [J] Philosophy is a waste of time because there are no decisive answers to our questions. 
• [K] Teaching critical theory to young minds is worthwhile, but this is devalued in the profession.

In what follows, I ignore [J] because I would argue there are good political reasons to favor keeping conversations going rather than trying to resolve them. 

I think [F-H, even E]** are connected, and they point to the essential cynicism of too many universities, which are run (in descending order) for the senior administrators, tenured faculty, the students, the staff, and then the graduate students. (In some state universities the cronies of the trustees should be inserted high on the list.) Sometimes, the local community benefits from nice facilities. It's pretty clear that in the current academic job-market, as long as the PhD is primarily viewed as a kind of union-card and not either a worthy goal in its own right or a sensible means toward other employment, then it is pretty alienating labor.* This is also the message of a book  like Matthew Crawford's “Shop Class as Soulcraft,”  which chronicles the journey from the nihilism of the academic PhD and the corporate office job, to life-enhancing and worthwhile craftsmanship (recall also this post).

In order to address [A] (&[C]), Williams has started a blog. Unsurprisingly, I think this makes sense. If one wants to be read by peers or , especially some wider public, then academic journals are rarely worth any effort. Professional philosophy has insanely low acceptance rates, still relatively slow publication  practices, and many journals are captured by informal networks (who when challenged will use the language of rigor, quality, etc.). Obviously, if you write because you want a professional position you try to find a way to work in the system.

It's undoubtedly true that in some places teaching is perhaps less valued than research success, but [K] did not resonate with me at all.  Nearly all permanent positions in professional philosophy involve non-trivial amounts of teaching (even if the working conditions vary greatly).  There are many different kind of joys (and diverging challenges) related to teaching, but if one is not receptive to any of these, that is, if one does not find teaching a worthy activity, then being in the profession may not be worth the effort (unless on belongs the relatively small group of folk who land research-intensive  positions.) It is undoubtedly true that serious professional conversation is dominated by research (informally and professionally) and not (recall) teaching; and it is undoubtedly the case that grant agencies mistakenly ignore the  impact of teaching on one's students. But I find teaching students basic reasoning and writing skills one of the few intrinsic goods of the profession, and it is a shame that as a profession we fail collectively to convey this to aspiring members of the guild. 

So, that leaves [I/I*] and the quoted passage. Let me start with a nitpicky comment (and so confirm one of Williams' points!): “applied ethics” is something different from being on the street being an activist. This is not to deny they can be connected, and in some people and philosophical traditions they may well be intrinsically connected. (And I agree a good number of professional philosophers have some contempt for applied ethics.) 

But it is by now a familiar fact that writing about oppression need not contribute to the undermining of oppression, and may even contribute to the stability of a system of oppression (by drawing would-be-talented activist/politicians into the life of academy). The previous sentence is compatible with some (let's say) service philosophy (recall Dotson) contributing, even successfully, to activism and other political attempts at fighting oppression. I believe there is a growing professional interest in work that tries to contribute to the philosophical diagnosis of various forms of oppression and injustice, and even provide means to undermine them. 

But having said that, I agree with Williams there is something awkward, sometimes even shameful, in being inside the auditorium while outside people are risking their well-being, even their lives to improve society for the vulnerable. In reading Williams, I was reminded that a few years ago Peter Railton delivered a Dewey lecture that attracted a lot of attention for its frank discussion of depression and mental illness in academic life. At the time, I noted that it also offered a stinging rebuke to those academics who prefer the auditorium over activism. In reflecting on his lecture, I wrote "everybody has the right to exit from activism, even ones that are merely symbolic or small gestures." Somewhat provocatively, I then appealed to Hobbes justify the claim, that "humanity's actions proceed from opinions, and the activity that shapes the content of these opinions is a philosophical task." This provoked important challenges by Mark Lance and Ruth Groff. In re-reading our exchange, I doubt they found my responses satisfying.

I have colleagues and friends (inside philosophy and a few more in political science), who in their research find ways to be scholar-activists (recall this post), and are even capable of flourishing. It is also important to remember that teaching others how to be activists, including intellectual-activists is an important task for universities (Mark Lance sensitized me to this), and that it is disheartening how unwilling university administrators (have  become or ) are to articulate this to critics of our students. But it is undeniable that scholar-activism is not an easy combination and I know many who struggle with (mental and physical) health because of it and lack of recognition by peers. 

This post has gone on too long, and not for the first time I am overcome with that uneasy feeling that those of us that stay and thrive in the profession are incapable of responding to the slamming doors and more subtle hints of those that leave and tell us that our self-image of rationality disguises from ourselves that we're like fiddling Nero with the flames of Rome burning creeping up on the ground we're standing.