May you continue to be ever so kind to yourself, Helen. Thank you for checking in with us.
What a strange comment from McGinn, which presupposes that we're not already living in a lesser universe, wherein a great deal of ancient thought was lost or destroyed, and where plenty of other excellent thought simply failed to be selected as essential canon for students in X scholarly tradition. Moreover, there's a highly silo'd view of the Self built into the notion that any person is truly singular in their philosophical discourse, such that it could not have been meaningfully advanced without them--as if their discourse wasn't in strong part shaped by environmental factors that also affected their peers and the overall "mood" of an era, and could thus have found other champions advancing similar positions instead.
(A more pedestrian example of this comes from computer engineering. Quite a few people were tinkering with new tech in the 1950s and 1960s, excitedly swapping ideas and prototypes; the "geniuses" we were taught to covet were simply a few among that number of hard workers and hustlers who got properly financed or lucked out with their investments and local networks.)
This isn't to say that the people we recognize as critical figures in our canon don't matter, but it's an unfortunate misapplication of the history of philosophy to define our essentialness as humans in relation to so fickle a process of collective memory. The work of deep thinking may not sustain us socially through even a single lifetime, let alone through further generations, but it's a mode of being that sustains our sense of being, while we're here as brief witnesses to the cosmos at all.
it strikes me as rather egotistical to assume that one’s ideas are so unique that no one else could ever think of them. I think that throughout history, similar ideas have likely surfaced multiple times—like how many animals independently evolved the ability to fly. I see a tension here: on one hand, valuing one’s own writing and perspective as meaningful; on the other, inflating those ideas to the point where being “cancelled” is framed as a loss for an entire field. to imagine oneself as irreplaceable in the ongoing process of advancing human thought overlooks the collective nature of knowledge and creativity.
At the risk of fulfilling Goodwin’s law, removing Hitler from the pre-war Germany still leaves the power vacuum and instability that fuelled his rise to power for someone else to exploit. The big names from history in any field are as much the lucky ones who were in the right place at the right time, a product of their circumstances, and in any case we often remember the more flamboyant over those that sank in to the shadows. Geniuses though they were, the absence of the Wright brothers would not have held up the development of aviation in the slightest. So perhaps a more fun thought experiment is, who were we robbed of knowing through experiencing Plato and the rest?
Happy to report that after teaching philosophy in two universities over the last 25 years I have no idea who Colin McGinn is. But I know who you are, and I’m grateful for you, Helen!
The level of arrogance that the world is worse off without a particular person's philosophy is laughable. Frankly, the terribleness of his thought experiment proves (to me anyway) that we are more likely better off without him.
Here's another thought experiment: imagine how much better off academic philosophy would be without those who abuse their positions. Imagine all the contributions from women (just to name one group) who would have contributed amazing things to academic philosophy, if they had felt safe to remain in the profession.
i have always made it a practice to read poets nobody reads anymore (or never has); & am completely prepared to predict that, for the time coming after (if there is a time), the names they will bandy about will not be the big names today. the issues that will concern them will be different issues. i might even dare to say that our present pyramidology, our obsession with "icons", is itself one of the issues that will no longer concern anyone in the days to come.
None of his 10 Great Men was cancelled for attempting to force young women into weirdo foot sex with them. 🙄
In any case, the Great Men theory of history is bizarrely archaic, (invented by Carlyle in 1840) and only reflects poorly on McGinn's wretched personal psychology, and his vanity.
A thing I often do in class with undergrads is to insist there are no stupid questions in philosophy, so no need to feel stupid, and encourage them to ask supposedly too-obvious questions. We then think it through all together, ask more questions, come up with unusual answers, connections, etc - it gets a tremendous creative buzz and energy and a loss of inhibition, and they realise there are not two tiers, one of divine sunlit peaks, the other of swarming sheep in the foothills.
(It also keeps them coming to class, apologising for missing, etc., which is no small thing these days).
There's a funny synergy between your advice to write on what you think matters and McGinn's complaint about being cancelled. Because, to write on what you think matters, you have to have your own thoughts. But it's not possible to have your own thoughts if you've spent your whole life in the company of others. Humans are social creatures; whether or not we realize it, we absorb the ideas of the people around us. So, ironically, the only way to have your own thoughts is to be cancelled (or at least to spend a lot of time away from others).
I've never thought of academic philosophy as being two-tiered. When it comes to impact on the profession, it seems that there is a gradual progression, not anything like tier-1 and tier-2.
However, I do think that impact falls off pretty dramatically quickly. People like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam had colossal impact, a few dozen have pretty big impact (e.g., Nussbaum and Sosa), another hundred or two have moderate impact and then the vast majority have almost no impact at all.
For instance, I'm in the latter category. The only thing I've managed to get across to the profession is the epistemology of disagreement idea, especially disagreement with epistemic superiors and groups. That's it for me: just a mere issue, without any views or arguments or thought experiments! And that's a *good* record when it comes to impact. I am proud of it.
This is a comment on *impact within the profession*, not impact outside the profession. For the latter, you have to go with Chomsky, Rawls, and Singer for instance. Further, I'm only talking about influence, and setting aside questions about the pros and cons of that influence.
The McGinn comment is odd though: hasn't he kept publishing pretty well?
I really appreciate your words! A reminder that philosophy is a broad tradition that is all the better when we engage with it and each other authentically. 🖤💛🤍💜
I couldn't find the following in McGinn's article:
"The remaining ones, the cancellers, are of course second-rate philosophers. This piece reiterates several ideas many of us hold: our discipline is polarized into the important philosophers who have interesting things to say and then everyone else--the second-rank--whose thoughts don't really matter"
He never adopts this two-tier framing.
Also, I'm sure the issue of cancelling and censorious academies are counter productive to the following:
"All we can do is cultivate professional spaces where people get reasonable opportunities and chances, and where we encourage writers to feel that they matter, their point of view matters, and they can be their best selves."
I was astounded by the blog post and just submitted this comment to it, which I imagine may not make it through moderation:
"Mate! If you don’t want your influence in our discipline diminished, ensure that it doesn’t victimize those over whom you have institutional power, and are trying to make their way in the discipline you claim to value at a vulnerable point in their career.
I can’t even with this lack of professional self-insight."
Very good point about the 'two-tier system'. I like to think of the current state of our discipline as a 'rock-star system', ruled by a '1%' whose conditions many aspire to and few enjoy, and where today's hot trend is old tomorrow.
May you continue to be ever so kind to yourself, Helen. Thank you for checking in with us.
What a strange comment from McGinn, which presupposes that we're not already living in a lesser universe, wherein a great deal of ancient thought was lost or destroyed, and where plenty of other excellent thought simply failed to be selected as essential canon for students in X scholarly tradition. Moreover, there's a highly silo'd view of the Self built into the notion that any person is truly singular in their philosophical discourse, such that it could not have been meaningfully advanced without them--as if their discourse wasn't in strong part shaped by environmental factors that also affected their peers and the overall "mood" of an era, and could thus have found other champions advancing similar positions instead.
(A more pedestrian example of this comes from computer engineering. Quite a few people were tinkering with new tech in the 1950s and 1960s, excitedly swapping ideas and prototypes; the "geniuses" we were taught to covet were simply a few among that number of hard workers and hustlers who got properly financed or lucked out with their investments and local networks.)
This isn't to say that the people we recognize as critical figures in our canon don't matter, but it's an unfortunate misapplication of the history of philosophy to define our essentialness as humans in relation to so fickle a process of collective memory. The work of deep thinking may not sustain us socially through even a single lifetime, let alone through further generations, but it's a mode of being that sustains our sense of being, while we're here as brief witnesses to the cosmos at all.
That has to be enough.
it strikes me as rather egotistical to assume that one’s ideas are so unique that no one else could ever think of them. I think that throughout history, similar ideas have likely surfaced multiple times—like how many animals independently evolved the ability to fly. I see a tension here: on one hand, valuing one’s own writing and perspective as meaningful; on the other, inflating those ideas to the point where being “cancelled” is framed as a loss for an entire field. to imagine oneself as irreplaceable in the ongoing process of advancing human thought overlooks the collective nature of knowledge and creativity.
At the risk of fulfilling Goodwin’s law, removing Hitler from the pre-war Germany still leaves the power vacuum and instability that fuelled his rise to power for someone else to exploit. The big names from history in any field are as much the lucky ones who were in the right place at the right time, a product of their circumstances, and in any case we often remember the more flamboyant over those that sank in to the shadows. Geniuses though they were, the absence of the Wright brothers would not have held up the development of aviation in the slightest. So perhaps a more fun thought experiment is, who were we robbed of knowing through experiencing Plato and the rest?
Gorgias? ;-)
Happy to report that after teaching philosophy in two universities over the last 25 years I have no idea who Colin McGinn is. But I know who you are, and I’m grateful for you, Helen!
What a wonderful and necessary post, Helen!
The level of arrogance that the world is worse off without a particular person's philosophy is laughable. Frankly, the terribleness of his thought experiment proves (to me anyway) that we are more likely better off without him.
Here's another thought experiment: imagine how much better off academic philosophy would be without those who abuse their positions. Imagine all the contributions from women (just to name one group) who would have contributed amazing things to academic philosophy, if they had felt safe to remain in the profession.
i have always made it a practice to read poets nobody reads anymore (or never has); & am completely prepared to predict that, for the time coming after (if there is a time), the names they will bandy about will not be the big names today. the issues that will concern them will be different issues. i might even dare to say that our present pyramidology, our obsession with "icons", is itself one of the issues that will no longer concern anyone in the days to come.
None of his 10 Great Men was cancelled for attempting to force young women into weirdo foot sex with them. 🙄
In any case, the Great Men theory of history is bizarrely archaic, (invented by Carlyle in 1840) and only reflects poorly on McGinn's wretched personal psychology, and his vanity.
A thing I often do in class with undergrads is to insist there are no stupid questions in philosophy, so no need to feel stupid, and encourage them to ask supposedly too-obvious questions. We then think it through all together, ask more questions, come up with unusual answers, connections, etc - it gets a tremendous creative buzz and energy and a loss of inhibition, and they realise there are not two tiers, one of divine sunlit peaks, the other of swarming sheep in the foothills.
(It also keeps them coming to class, apologising for missing, etc., which is no small thing these days).
Sounds marvellous, Innes.
There's a funny synergy between your advice to write on what you think matters and McGinn's complaint about being cancelled. Because, to write on what you think matters, you have to have your own thoughts. But it's not possible to have your own thoughts if you've spent your whole life in the company of others. Humans are social creatures; whether or not we realize it, we absorb the ideas of the people around us. So, ironically, the only way to have your own thoughts is to be cancelled (or at least to spend a lot of time away from others).
I've never thought of academic philosophy as being two-tiered. When it comes to impact on the profession, it seems that there is a gradual progression, not anything like tier-1 and tier-2.
However, I do think that impact falls off pretty dramatically quickly. People like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam had colossal impact, a few dozen have pretty big impact (e.g., Nussbaum and Sosa), another hundred or two have moderate impact and then the vast majority have almost no impact at all.
For instance, I'm in the latter category. The only thing I've managed to get across to the profession is the epistemology of disagreement idea, especially disagreement with epistemic superiors and groups. That's it for me: just a mere issue, without any views or arguments or thought experiments! And that's a *good* record when it comes to impact. I am proud of it.
This is a comment on *impact within the profession*, not impact outside the profession. For the latter, you have to go with Chomsky, Rawls, and Singer for instance. Further, I'm only talking about influence, and setting aside questions about the pros and cons of that influence.
The McGinn comment is odd though: hasn't he kept publishing pretty well?
https://open.substack.com/pub/clementpaulus/p/dynamic-instability-the-ontological?r=5c1ys6&utm_medium=ios
I really appreciate your words! A reminder that philosophy is a broad tradition that is all the better when we engage with it and each other authentically. 🖤💛🤍💜
I couldn't find the following in McGinn's article:
"The remaining ones, the cancellers, are of course second-rate philosophers. This piece reiterates several ideas many of us hold: our discipline is polarized into the important philosophers who have interesting things to say and then everyone else--the second-rank--whose thoughts don't really matter"
He never adopts this two-tier framing.
Also, I'm sure the issue of cancelling and censorious academies are counter productive to the following:
"All we can do is cultivate professional spaces where people get reasonable opportunities and chances, and where we encourage writers to feel that they matter, their point of view matters, and they can be their best selves."
I was astounded by the blog post and just submitted this comment to it, which I imagine may not make it through moderation:
"Mate! If you don’t want your influence in our discipline diminished, ensure that it doesn’t victimize those over whom you have institutional power, and are trying to make their way in the discipline you claim to value at a vulnerable point in their career.
I can’t even with this lack of professional self-insight."
Very good point about the 'two-tier system'. I like to think of the current state of our discipline as a 'rock-star system', ruled by a '1%' whose conditions many aspire to and few enjoy, and where today's hot trend is old tomorrow.
Really inspiring! Thanks, Helen!