Are we making philosophy harder and less popular than we need to? A recent public philosophy lecture in London made me wonder whether analytic philosophy is going the right way.
At the lecture, an early-career philosopher was taken to task by some older colleagues for ‘marching on the spot’, ie spending time attacking a position which didn’t really deserve such a sustained treatment. I have also recently heard of a professional philosopher who lamented that within the modern analytic tradition, ‘postgraduate conferences are about spending as much time as possible saying as little as possible’. And an article here asks similar questions.
I do accept that part of the magic of philosophy is that it does not shy away from asking unanswerable questions. It’s also true that, as a mature (even ancient) discipline, we modern philosophers are left with the toughest questions of all. However I think that if we’re not careful, analytic philosophers can let some killer assumptions trap us into fulfilling the stereotype of philosophy as being ‘a lot of hot air’. Or, as David Hill has described it: “the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers”.
In my view, we make the situation worse by assuming we are worse off than we actually are. By narrowly constraining what constitute acceptable: philosophical questions, philosophical answers, philosophical ambitions, and philosophical people, we reduce the resources available to us. Let me unpack that list a little.
Poverty of questions
What I mean by this is the self-defeating feeling that ‘all the best questions have already been posed’. It is true that the Ancient Greeks opened up many of the most important and fascinating lines of enquiry right in the beginning. But that shouldn’t make us conclude that no new philosophical questions can be asked today. We have also ceded large areas of enquiry to sciences and ‘sciences’. I recently read a popular book on economics whose cover blurb asserted that ‘moral theory tries to say what people should do. Economics says what they actually do’. And yet the book contained a clutch of assumptions about empricical methods which any philosopher could have questioned.
Poverty of answers
By ‘answers’ I mean that we have overtightened the definition of what consitutes a viable argument or explanation of a philosophical problem. In particular, we have become hemmed in by science, both empirical verifiable data (a reasonable limit, perhaps) but also broadly agreed hypotheses. It’s right that philosophical theories should not fly in the face of scientific data, and I wouldn’t go as far to recommend any argument as being philosophically viable. But are we sometimes too cautious?
Poverty of ambition and scale
A few hundred years ago, philosophers were concerned to build complete philosophical systems (Spinoza being a famous example). Any philosopher who states such an aim these days would be laughed off the field. As with answers, we should be cautious about what we claim. But not over-cautious. In my view, one reason why we still read Ancient Greek philosophers is not because they got it all right (they didn’t) but because they engaged ambitiously with a broad sweep of problems. A mountaineering analogy might help here — consider the contrast between ‘I put up an E9 sport route in the SW corner of my local quarry’ and ‘I climbed the highest unknown peak in Siberia’. We should balance the natural desire to aim at completeness with a respect for scale.
Poverty of people
A major self-fulfilling prophecy which afflicts philosophy at the moment is that it is ‘just for philosophers’. This has always seemed odd to me. I like to remind friends who ask why I study the subject that all children are natural philosophers. By encouraging the mistaken view that ‘only philosophers can do philosophy’ we are limiting the number of people who might otherwise take an interest in our project. I am encouraged, though, by projects like Philosophy Bites, The Philosophy Shop, and others. I think every philosophy department should be giving some time to this kind of project. One caveat here: no need to make philosophy risible in order to attract the public (eg avoid: The Philosophy of Avatar).
All this said, I am sure that I will pick up some dry and modest-sounding topic for my postgraduate work. But let’s hope I season it with some tastier philosophy.
What do you think?
things that might have been otherwise 