Digressions&Impressions

Covid Limbo

Nearly 70,000 cases of covid infection were reported yesterday, 8th January. Of course that’s officially confirmed cases and the real number of infections will be much higher. A small but significant proportion of those people will go on to be hospitalised and a small but significant proportion of them will die in the next few days. As we are often reminded, as if to reassure us, most of these victims will be over 60 and/or have various ‘underlying medical conditions’, but there are at least a couple of important ways in which this narrative of reassurance is both troubling and misleading. First, this narrative, intentionally or not (and I think it often is intentional when seized upon by various covid deniers and ‘lockdown sceptics’) effectively relegates people over 60 and those with ‘underlying conditions’ (and the list of these conditions is much more extensive than people normally realise) to more or less sub-human status: those whose deaths and lives are apparently relatively unimportant. Secondly, the fact is that you just don’t know if you are ‘vulnerable’ or not to this virus – no one can be sure that they are ‘safe’ from it. Indeed it’s currently thought that one in 20 people who develop symptoms on infection might suffer symptoms lasting more than eight weeks and, further, a significant number of those people remain unwell for several months (at least) after infection. This isn’t ‘just’ elderly people or those with ‘pre-existing health conditions’, but includes relatively young, relatively fit and active people like me – I’m 45 and before I became very ill with long covid last summer I used to weight-train in a serious and focused way at least 3 to 4 times a week. There are many, many people in more or less the same position as me currently and, given the rates of infection at the moment, many more will find themselves in a similar place over the next few weeks and months. Those who think – selfishly and incorrectly – that the pandemic is of little concern to them personally really ought to think again.--Ed Rooksby, January 9, 2021 "Nine months in the long limbo of long covid." [HT Chris Brooke]

Last week, I was too depressed to pen a digression. This despite the fact that my very kind and supportive, university's occupational physician suggested that a diary in which I record my progress might be helpful. And there is progress to report: Saturday, nine days ago, was the last truly horrid day of intense headaches. Since, I have barely had any dizziness (the most recurring symptom), much more manageable bouts of insomnia, and much reduced spells of headaches. In addition, on several days I lacked the general sense of fatigue I have tried to describe before (recall here; here; here). In the post quoted at the top of my own, Rooksby, whose symptoms were considerably worse than my own, writes, "it felt like my brain was encased in cotton wool and that I was somehow removed from reality, like I was watching everything – including my own activity – from behind thick glass."  

Even so, even minor walks or an hour responding to emails can still induce a strange fatigue and irritability toward any kind of noise or disturbance (which helps me recognize the fatigue). And the depression was caused not just by my ongoing inability to read books, but also a sense that every sign of progress is quickly followed by a rude reminder that I am nowhere near recovered. Part of me wonders if the sense of despair isn't itself a by-product of covid given how many other weird (and mostly minor) intermittent neurological/cognitive symptoms I experience.

The university's occupational physician convinced me that I need to take my sick leave seriously. And so I have let go of most of my work related activities. As I decline requests to do tenure files, referee, blurb; postpone research activities related to a number of edited volumes and grants; postpone or cancel public lectures and interviews; withdraw from dissertation defenses; I accept intra-departmental political defeats, and I also register how much stuff I pack into my ordinary self days. 

Perhaps the depression was induced by the following uncanny experience. I watched myself lecture on video last week. The recording of the lecture series is used to substitute for my presence this semester. It's a huge lecture course (400-500 students). And while I am no Sandel, I enjoy and take pride in, allowing my lectures to be interrupted by Q&A throughout.  In watching myself -- and my ridiculously chaotic slides -- I realized that I was not so much explaining the material, but sharing what I found interesting or exciting and tried to explain the grounds of interest, while smuggling in concepts and arguments I am supposed to expose them to. I took a childish pleasure into watching myself lecture.

But my responses to student questions were different altogether. I suddenly realized, as I was watching the recording, that I often had no idea what I would answer then, or could answer now, and I would marvel at how my recorded self would quickly and sometimes humorously manage to process and incorporate the questions into the lecture. He could think much faster, much subtler than I can now!* 

When I mentioned this to the university's occupational physician, she laughed a bit. And said that I should not underestimate the skill with which I could handle complex thought when I was not incapacitated. I did not put quote marks around that because I don't recall the exact wording, but that's because she did use 'incapacitated' (in Dutch: arbeidsongeschikt). 

Rooksby (an accomplished blogger and writer), who I knew from a far distance, seems to have died yesterday (here). And that gives his words a special poignance. It's interesting to me that he has tracked the social implicature of 'underlying conditions' as sub-human-status. Back in the day (March 2020), I registered 'herd-immunity' as code for 'culling' or 'dispensable.' And I even satirized that our pseudo-Darwinian age would be followed by a religious revival that would refer to our era as the 'great culling.' When I feel a bit stronger, I want to collect my thoughts on being an incapacitated, philosopher. 

But I am lucky that I don't feel a stigma that I am incapacitated for work; and grateful for hard-earned victories of earlier generations, that I can draw a salary while being pampered at home by my very busy, hardworking spouse. I do find it frustrating and embarrassing that my already overworked and more junior colleagues have additional work because of my disease. The Dutch government has opened the purse-strings, but not for our underfunded universities. I know better, but can't shake the thought am letting down those that count on my help in their career/professional advancement.

Even so, I spent most of my days watching netflix and daydreaming about invited research leaves in lovely climes. With gradual recovery I am willing to hope that I will be able to read and teach again...although last week I could not quiet altogether my simmering panic I may not. When I was a teenager I saw a documentary about Willem de Kooning's late art, which was so much sparser than his exuberant and overflowing earlier work. Later I learned that he suffered from Alzheimer's. I wonder if my post-covid work will have such clean and elegiac quality.

 

 

 

On The Economist as Physician (again): Adam Smith's Purported Vitalism, and a methodological Caution in doing History of philosophy

The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a great number of small markets, has been principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure; the whole state of her body politick less healthful, than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politick. The expectation of a rupture with the colonies, accordingly, has struck the people of Great Britain with more terror than they ever felt for a Spanish armada, or a French invasion. (WN 4.7.C.43, 604)*

In  recent work, Tamas Demeter has suggested (see here) that Smith's appeal to the ‘body politick’ in Wealth of Nations (WN) is evidence of Smith’s vitalistic commitments.** The idea is that the science of the legislator is akin to a physician who offers policies restoring the body politick. There is no doubt that this image is important and an enduring one (recall) in the history of economics and its self-image. For example, at the height of the controversy over the Chicago Boys's entanglement with Pinochet,  Milton Friedman likened the economist as an expert to a physician (I have discussed that here).

Even so, I do not think Smith’s use of ‘body politick’ is a sign or evidence of his embrace of vitalistic conceptual framework. In fact, I'll suggest that Smith does not even embrace the idea of a body politick as his own position in the passage quoted above. (In fact, the passage offers a nice illustration of my claim that Smith relies on proportional reasoning throughout WN.) Before I get to the context of the passage let me note, that there are really three metaphors/tropes at work in the passage. First, we see Smith using hydrostatic/fluid tropes/metaphors for the size and extent of markets; second, he treats Britain’s whole economy (‘industry and commerce’) as a system; and third, he treats Britain’s political economy in terms of a body politick.

As it happens the first two tropes are indeed echt-Smithian. For, he uses the channel metaphor in a crucial passage in Book 2 of Wealth of Nations, where he is describing that the legislator should neither encourage exports nor domestic trade, but should leave capital free to find its own markets. I have described Smith's use of 'system' in my book, although it is notable that in WN he tends to reserve 'system' for intellectual edifices he opposes (the 'system of commerce' is mercantilism and the 'system of agriculture' is physiocracy), although he calls his own approach the liberal system. But what about "body politick''?

It is, indeed, notable that in the paragraphs WN 4.7.C.43-44, 604-6, Smith is very fond of using ‘body politick.’ (He uses the phrase three times.) But these passages are also exceptional; for Smith does not use the phrase elsewhere in his published writings. So, what needs explaining is why Smith uses these tropes here and not elsewhere.

The immediate textual context for these passages is Smith’s analysis of the potential effects of American independence then (1776) an object of intense policy concern. While Smith prefers a political settlement in which Britain and the Americas are turned into an Atlantic, parliamentary empire, the thrust of Smith’s argument is that colonial independence will not be bad for trade, but rather will help unwind some bad economic policies which are a consequence of Britain's mercantile ideology.

That is to say, when Smith looks at some of the bad political and immoral effects of physiocracy and, in the British context, especially, mercantilism he interprets these in terms of medical metaphors. So, for example, we find Petty using the phrase in his Tracts on Ireland;  Mandeville uses the phrase (mostly, but not always) earnestly in the Fable of the Bees; and Smith's great, unnamed rival, the Jacobite James Steuart, adopts the image in An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy. That’s no surprise because these authors are the ones that embrace such metaphors and, thereby, (a) promote partial economic interests and (b) the idea that experts should offer (b*) tailored/detailed policy advice to politicians that is responsive to economic symptoms. But while Smith is no apostle of laissez faire, throughout his writings Smith rejects (a-b-b*). The science of the  legislator is supposed to prevent the meddling of the crafty politician.

I think a more natural reading of the passage that to Demeter suggests a vitalistic reading presents itself: Smith is critical of competing economic systems and he partially deploys their own leading illustrative metaphors against them in order to show that it is not only bad economics, but also generates bad politics. For, he is claiming that when/if one favors one economic interests over all the others then when that interest is threatened or undermined, the public will (perhaps correctly) be alarmed and so become rather unstable (terrified). That is to say, even on their own terms, mercantile policies create political fragility. Mercantilism systematically generates what modern philosophers call inductive risk and so, in Smith's terms, a wrong system.

Let me close with a methodological observation. Historians of ideas and literary scholars are much better than philosophers in paying attention to metaphors, similes, tropes, etc. (I assume this is a matter of interest and training.) In so doing, they are able to reveal important themes and resonances in texts we study. But there is always a risk that thinkers and projects are grouped together based on such metaphors/similes where one really ought to emphasize the differences. A familiar example of this is the use of 'Newtonian' in describing various projects/thinkers of the eighteenth century, or 'Rationalist'/'Empiricist' in the whole early modern period. Something similar has happened with 'vitalism,' which until recently was a niche scholarly topic. There is now a tendency to ascribe various vitalist projects to thinkers based on the presence of particular metaphors. But while it is probably not true that Smith  is merely mentioning the metaphor, he using it in a kind of practical reductio. So, I would urge scholars to pay attention to metaphors, similes, tropes, etc. (and, in light of my conflations above, even learn the difference among them!), but these do not settle the categorization of an author's perspective. That needs to be adjudicated on a case by case basis with due attention to their arguments, distinctions, and substantive positions.

On Being a Constrained Human

Disabled people are constrained and limited by their bodies....The simple act is that, disabled or non-disabled, we are all limited and constrained by our bodies. To have a body that is any particular wa is to have a body that is limited and constrained in some respects an in comparison to other kinds of bodies. That's just part of what it is  to have a body. Some of us are male, some of us are female. Some of us are tall, some of us are short. Some of us are flexible, some of us are stiff. Some of us are stocky, some of us are willowy. There are all sorts of ways that bodies can be. And each way a body can be comes with some limitations and constraints.

We all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, 132 (emphasis in original).

The quoted passage appears in a very interesting and critical discussion of a species of status quo bias to be found in views of adaptive preferences popular among many professional philosophers. I shall turn to this status quo bias some other time. But in reading this passage (and the chapters that followed it), I had what I take to be an ohhh, I should change my idea about what it's like to be human moment. Let me explain.

At the core of Barnes's book is the idea that all human bodies face constraints.+ (One may, in fact, say that to be without constraints is to be godlike; and humans are not god(s), etc.) In particular, it is part of the nature of what it is to be a human body that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans.* It is a fairly common conceptual and maybe even phenomenological mistake to think of disability in terms of constraint, but to ignore simultaneously the existence of constraints in the context of (complex) experiences that arise from having other types of bodies (even though those bodies by necessity include all kinds of constraints).**

Notice that Barnes's core idea does not rely on heavy duty metaphysics and is compatible with all kinds of natural philosophies. But it does cause problems for views that think of disability in terms of defects or special imperfections of the sort embraced by some Thomists, Christians, and (somewhat uncharacteristically, but often quite intensely) Utilitarians. I don't mean to suggest all Thomists, Christians, and Utilitarians must embrace the 'disability = defective human being' view; after all, one way to understand Barnes's core idea is to recognize in it a version of Augustinianism in which we are all defective (due to the Fall, desire, etc.). (Of course, the idea is not exclusively Augustinian; the idea of human limits is intrinsic to much Greek tragedy, the Hebrew Bible, etc.)

At The University of Chicago, I had been exposed to a heavy dose of so-called (Pittsburgh based) Wittgenstein-heavy Aristotelianism and Analytical Thomism (inspired by work of Anscombe, Geach, and Foot). While the interest in that tradition is not, I think, primarily to label some forms of life defective (or disabled) [on the contrary, it is really about articulating the conditions of flourishing and virtue], I did encounter the idea there that some ways of being human are evidently defective. Because we live in a culture that celebrates images of young and fit bodies, it is hard to resist the ableism.

While appeal to Darwinism blocks some of the perfectionist strains (although leaves it difficult to say what 'life' or 'flourishing' is), even within Darwinism it is fairly natural to talk about normal (or proper) species functioning and once you allow function-talk there is plenty of space to slide into thinking that some members of a species are less fit, less able to survive, malfunctioning, etc. (After all, Platonic Eugenics was not banished by Darwinism, but rather with nods to 'fitness' made more 'scientific' within it!) While, of course, within Darwinism it is not allowed to make deviations from the 'normal' normative, it is a recurring temptation (and I lacked tools to block it). As Barnes writes (in the Preface):

It's easy to confuse the view from normal with the view from nowhere. And it's uniquely the minority voices which we single out as biased or lacking objectivity.

Maybe it's because I was reading Barnes's book while sick in bed during my official holiday, but the idea that my life is limited and constrained by my body finally grabbed hold of me. (This is a distinct feeling from recognizing one's mortality [recall].) It's not that I am not in awe of my wife, who climbs mountains and heli-skis, but I don't think of my inability to climb Mont Blanc as a limitation; I just don't think about it. Most of my needs for recognition are oriented toward qualities associated with my mind [and officially I am no substance dualist!], and most of my demands on myself are oriented toward my ability to care for others and how I cope with and accommodate their limitations (some other time I'll discuss how this connects to fatherhood, which involves a lot of facilitating a child's bodily constraints). It's not that my life is without constraints: I notice the absence of  time (and sometimes money) regularly.

But I also became this person. Looking back, I recall that I was a competitive tennis-player as a teenager. At some point I must have recognized without much willingness to confront it that I would not become a college varsity player (let alone a pro). What's key here is that we do not ordinarily understand, I think, our own flourishing and way-of-being as determined by such constraints unless someone else (society, etc.) confronts us with our bodily limitations (e.g., in advertisements and popular culture; or other people's lack of attraction to us). After all, we all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. 

On How Not to defend the Enlightenment

It is naturally to be expected, therefore, that some one or other of those who are employed in each particular branch of labour should soon find out easier and readier methods of performing their own particular work, wherever the nature of it admits of such improvement. A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it. Whoever has been much accustomed to visit such manufactures, must frequently have been shewn very pretty machines, which were the inventions of such workmen, in order to facilitate and quicken their own particular part of the work. In the first fire-engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication, to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour.--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.1.8

A recent review by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is one of my favorite novelists, of Matthew B. Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction makes it seem as if Crawford* is entirely out of step with recent cognitive science and that he makes a number of elementary blunders on early modern philosophy. (As it happens I just read Crawford's book, but what follows does not presuppose intimate knowledge of it.) Newberger Goldstein connects the two points as follows:

Part of Crawford’s argument is based on a philosophy of perception that was put forth in the 1970s by the psychologist James J. Gibson. Gibson and his disciples began with the fact that, as we move around looking at things, the optical input systematically changes. They then went on to make the case that we somehow perceive things “directly,” without mental representations. But Gibson’s theory never explained how we can think about what we see, and it has been marginalized by advances in cognitive neuroscience that have increasingly identified the mental representations Gibson insisted could not exist. Crawford, inheriting the Gibsonians’ lack of interest in language, reasoning, and memory—that is, all those cognitive capacities that use the input of perception—declares that reality is there for the taking. We don’t need to reason our way past the scrim of subjective representations fluttering between us and the world of things. We just need to engage with those things. Anyway, the whole idea of that subjective scrim was foisted on us by—you guessed it—the Enlightenment.

 

Crawford’s argument against the Enlightenment isn’t, to my knowledge, one we’ve heard before, since his rendition of the Enlightenment isn’t, to my knowledge, one we’ve heard before.

Crawford certainly appropriates Gibson's use of affordances, but Newberger Goldstein's review is highly misleading here. For Crawford ignores the mysterious bits of Gibson and primarily relies on work in so-called embodied cognition (he cites and summarizes Alva Noë, Andy Clark, Lawrence Shapiro, Adrian Cussins, and a host of phenomenologists from the past) and he integrates this approach to cognition with some examples of skilled activity (motorcycling, line cooking, organ making, hockey-playing, etc.) and an original focus on political economy. This point is hard to miss if you just read the titles of the first two chapters: "The Jig, The Nudge, and Local Ecology," and "Embodied Perception."  You would never guess from the review that Crawford takes the role of language so seriously that he interrupts his narrative to summarize and comment on the Dreyfus-McDowell debate (to side with McDowell) in a sub-section explicitly titled, "The Role of Language in Acquiring Skill Under Conditions of Risk!" Obviously, in a popularizing book one can't do justice to all the technical details of such a debate, but it is quite remarkable to see it treated so carefully in a book intended for a broad audience.

 

While it is too early to tell, perhaps, if "advances in cognitive neuroscience" will fully vindicate embodied cognition, it is a bit odd to appeal to it to completely dismiss Crawford's approach (which, in turn, is based, in part, on recent advances in robotics--at a key juncture he appeals to Rodney Brooks's classic "Intelligence Without Representation") without even attempting to convey what the actual state of play is on these matters. Perhaps, it was common to dismiss Gibsonian affordances when Newberger Goldstein was in graduate school, but the idea that engaged behavior involves, in part, skill-dependent perception of possibilities (55) is not without evidence.

 

Even if Crawford's position were based on outdated science, the point of Crawford's book is to deploy the idea of embodied cognition in a political and social critique; one notable feature -- that is mentioned only obliquely and dismissively in the review -- is that Crawford offers a critique of the power of corporations and the role of privileged wealth in contemporary America from what is broadly a Conservative perspective that mixes insights from Tocqueville, Iris Murdoch, and (alas) Heidegger. (To offer an analogy: her approach is like dissing Hobbes's political philosophy by noting his outdated philosophy of mind.) Some of his most trenchant comments are reserved for contemporary (political) Libertarians. Goldstein Newberger is, of course, aware of this, but rather than engaging with the details of his position, which is undoubtedly, in part, anti-Enlightenment (to be qualified below), she decides to attack his (purportedly) misreading of the Enlightenment. Since I am something of a scholar on the period I feel I can give an expert evaluation of the debate between Crawford and  Newberger Goldstein.

 

As the passage quoted above from Wealth of Nations suggests, many Enlightenment philosophers played respectful attention to craftsmanship. (In Smith this is not an isolated case see also his critique of stupefying factory labor.) The pinnacle of tendency is undoubtedly Diderot's work in the Encyclopedia. But it is no exaggeration to say that the scientific revolution was, in part, launched by Bacon's and Descartes's respect for the knowledge of artisans and craftsmen and a desire to emulate their achievements and methods in the 'higher' sciences. Not unlike others influenced by Heidegger, Crawford fails to do justice to this non-trivial strain of the Enlightenment and so fails to draw on resources available from them. (About that some other time because this is not the Enlightenment that Newberger Goldstein defends.)

 

Crawford's main idea on the Enlightenment is that "the creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western Thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us, trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions." (73) In his treatment Crawford also focuses on Descartes and Locke with special attention to the relations between Locke's epistemology and political theory.

 

Now, pace Newberger Goldstein the broad outlines of this is a story we have heard before. After all, the very idea that with Descartes there was a separation of mind from world (Kant's Ding-An-Sich goes oddly unmentioned by Newberger Goldstein) by way of abstraction is a trope of Kantian-inspired philosophy; it is, for example, what underwrites the significance of epistemology as first philosophy and some version of this trope gets continued to this day. (Here's evidence from a source that I am hostile to (recall): "The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to  such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.") I am no fan of this story{See also this post}, but Crawford offers a clever spin on a familiar tale.

 

While there is a lot more to be said about the review and the book, I close with an observation.  Crawford clearly has some sympathies with the counter-Enlightenment; even so I want to qualify that claim in the following sense: he reports on and ably communicates esoteric, technical academic debates in multiple fields and brings these to (well) the masses very much in the spirit of Diderot. Along the way he transforms these debates and -- through his arguments, polemic, and anger -- contributes to them in the service of the less than privileged.** For some reason Newberger Goldstein thinks that a "critic" must "do justice  to those ideas, without distorting them for some polemical purpose." Here Newberger Goldstein misses a great historical irony: the Enlightenment is constituted by polemical texts few of which, if any, do justice to their enemies (Aristotelianism, the clergy, revelation, etc.). That is to say, Crawford's book can be fully understood as itself a contribution to and the unfolding of the Enlightenment. 

 

 

 

Trust and Its Absence Among Philosophers

The dissemination and discussion of interesting new ideas will only be discouraged if members of an audience are allowed to pre-publish participants' ideas, since everyone will be inhibited from trying out ideas in public. The free exchange of ideas in our discipline depends on mutual trust. Speakers assume that they are speaking to the present audience in their own voice -- not to the entire world through a reporter. If that assumption no longer holds, all of us will say only what are willing to have permanently recorded for the whole world to read. That's not an environment for the discussion of interesting new ideas.--David Velleman at Leiterreports.

Our profession faces a number of really grave ethical challenges, from the treatment of women, to the treatment of adjuncts and per-course faculty, to the concentration of wealth, power, and access, in a handful of institutions. That someone reported on Martha Nussbaum's speech doesn't strike me as one of them.--Daniel A Kaufman at Leiterreports.

In his initial contribution, which was the occasion of Leiter's original post, Velleman, who is one of our most interesting moral psychologists and who has been of great service to the profession in developing Philosopher's Imprint, suggests that "The live-blogging of Martha Nussbaum's Locke lectures would be a good occasion for a discussion of the professional ethics of this practice." From Velleman's original and subsequent remarks (see this one, especially), it's clear that Velleman believes such live-blogging is unethical. The only ethical argument I encountered in Velleman's subsequent comments on the thread is this one: "what you're not entitled to do with author's ideas is to publish them before the author has a chance to." Now, that's not quite right; what you are not allowed to do is publish another's ideas and pass them off as your own or publish another's ideas without proper attribution or publish another's ideas without making clear in what context they are uttered, etc. If an author has expressly requested that one does not circulate or quote a text or lecture, then we ought to respect the wishes of the author all other things being equal.* But I don't see what's wrong with reporting on another's ideas is, if done generously (and with skill). After all, what's horrifying about most student notes on one's courses is not that they circulate, but that they so often misrepresent (see also Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa).

Forgotten Addison, founder of Philosophy of Science, and the patron of bloggers

It gives me much Despair in the Design of reforming the World by my Speculations, when I find there always arise, from one Generation to another, successive Cheats and Bubbles, as naturally as Beasts of Prey, and those which are to be their Food.--Steele (6/30/1712), #444, The Spectator.

Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.--Hume.

Addison is forgotten.

Hume wrote before the revival of professional philosophy, and so assumed an 'equitable posterity' that was not to be. Professional philosophy has not been kind to the very best essayists--Montaigne, Bacon, and Seneca are familiar names vaguely associated with doctrines or moments (history of skepticism, fideism, crucial experiment, inductions, Stoic suicide, etc.), but they  have not attracted philosophical scholarly industries. Even Hume's great essays tend to be read mostly for supporting evidence--the exception, 'Of Miracles,' the least artful or profound of the lot.

Addison gets passing, sometimes respectable mention in works devoted to eighteenth-century aesthetics (sublime, taste, etc.). Yet, together with Steele, Addison is the patron-saint of today's philosophical bloggers. He wrote (near) daily essays with a lively comments section (including trolls), and found a proper mix of familiarity and surprise in keeping readers engaged over extended period. Steel and Addison were also, despite Hume's deflationary representation of Addison in the full paragraph from which I quote above, subtle thinkers, who -- as Steele notes above -- use reflection to reform their world. They are not mere spectators.

For present purposes, I define 'philosophy of science' as the disinterested study of science with the aim of making generalizations about the nature and methods of the science(s) and scientists. Thus defined scientists can engage in philosophy of science as a kind of second-order practice within the science(s), and they have done so even before the category 'science' took on its present (post 19th century) meaning. If we except scholastic text-books and their authors,  until the eighteenth century nearly all 'philosophy of science' was done by practicing scientists or natural philosophers. This changed in the eighteenth century in response to three non-trivial developments: