A curtain tune on a ground, by Henry Purcell, realized by La Nimfea I'm working on the early Enlightenment in 17th century Europe. One of the many intriguing aspects of this period is how philosophy at this time did not have academia as its center of gravity. There was of course still plenty of academic philosophy. In the halls where schoolmen used to ponder elaborate logical systems, you now had scholastics and Cartesians battling it out with intensity. As Jonathan Israel writes in
Sobering. I wish I had better news from the outside, but as much as I agree with your assessment that current academic philosophy is in a dead-end, freelance philosophizing also has pitfalls, namely that you end up isolated, and that inevitably cuts into your ability to do serious work (not to be all self-promotey but I wrote about some of my experiences about this a few years ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/diakena/p/life-of-the-lonely-mind?r=19ozuw&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post)
Also the lack of a good library with journal access means doing it well on a freelance basis can be an incredibly expensive hobby. I wrote a book freelance, and while I didn’t do it for money, even modestly researched books are very expensive to put together.
One glimmer of hope might be that even as the academic discipline seems to be on life support, I think a variety of YT channels and podcasts show there is a broad interest in philosophy still. Will the work the emerges and resonates be good? I have my doubts, but the danger that good thinking will be forced to struggle in obscurity against various philosophical populisms goes back to Socrates, so perhaps this isn’t a new problem, just a new variation of it.
Sorry for the long comment, but I’ve also thought a lot about this as someone on the outside who still enjoys academia’s output, so I’ve also wondered where this is all going.
Thanks for this post, Helen. As someone who will be leaving the profession soon, I no longer do unpaid labor for the academy (like refereeing). I think my biggest concern about philosophy being "held afloat" outside the academy is that it takes a lot of privilege to have the luxury to do philosophy "on the side", as it were. (Granted, the Internet makes it somewhat easier, but you also open yourself up to, as you put it, "shittified" discourses and platforms.) I worry that voices from the margins might get lost or be denigrated more than they already are if done mostly by "independent scholars". It's going to take a big institutional shift if independents are going to get the kind of uptake that early modern non-university folk did. That being said, shall we resurrect the philosophical salon? 😉
In any case, I've been listening to the audiobook of "Metaphysical Animals" lately and thinking about how important it was for analytic philosophy to have women working *within* the academy to change it. Might provide another context for reflections of this kind...?
Thanks for a great post. It made my day. I don't mean to be callous, since you say you wrote this feeling pessimistic and hoping people in comments might show how you are wrong. But I think you are completely right, and your post gives me hope. I admire your expressing such clarity while being an academic who is working from within to improve things. That must be hard, and is inspiring. I think what you say is all true, and it is in part what made me leave academia.
Like most institutions, academic philosophy gives greatest platform to those who least express what you say here, and confuses that with optimism for the institution. Akin to your comments about being at Oxford, I studied at Cornell, Harvard and taught at Bryn Mawr, and always felt unnerved when the greatest concerns seemed to be whether a professor will go from Harvard to Princeton or if Rutgers is as good as Pitt, or Bryn Mawr is as good as Swarthmore's department, etc. In that space, those tiny issues seem like where the future of academic philosophy is being determined. When in fact the forces you speak to here are the tectonic shifts which are going to make those issue moot in a few decades, and are already effecting thousands of people caught in the transition times.
Part of the willful ignorance of academic philosophy is not having a clear self-consciousness of the history of academic philosophy. The vision that philosophy professors are continuing the tradition of Socrates and Descartes hides the fact of how much current academic philosophy is a creation of the last 200 years, and how since its inception in the time of Kant and Hegel, it has been a story of loss. Hegel epitomized the grand fantasy that philosophy professors are the center of the university, which takes place of churches in a secular society. Philosophy's understanding of Geist is the secular equivalent of theology's focus on God's vision in the middle ages. But almost from the start of the modern German university (as with University of Berlin in 1810 where Hegel taught), this Hegelian picture was attacked by nonacademics: Schopenhaur/Kierkegaard in a existential way, Marx in a political way, and positivists with regard to science. Already by 1900, the idea that philosophy professors understand the foundations of all other disciplines was seen as outdated idealist metaphysics, and analytic philosophy, like phenomenology and pragmatism, came on the scene as a vision of a disciplinary understanding of philosophy in a rapidly professionalizing academia dominated more by science. The expansion of education post WWII gave new optimism mainly because of the creation of new departments - but it was material optimism covering over the conceptual and existential struggles of the meaning of academic philosophy which were more explicit in the pre WWI and inter war years. The material optimism of academic philosophy started to erode in the 70s and 80s, and by the time of the 2008 downturn, was cemented. Now the material downturn, along with the rise of the diversity issues of the last 30 years, is bringing back to light in a new way the deep challenges to modern academic philosophy voiced by Kierkegaard, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Simone Weil and many others. Academic philosophy can try to reply to these challenges by making these thinkers sub-specialities in the profession and having conferences on their thought (as happened most clearly with the industry of Wittgenstein scholarship in the last 50 years). But for all the hundreds of books academics might write about Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, actually stepping out of academia illuminates these thinkers' ideas in a new light - new, because it becomes practical in a fresh way. When that freshness meets the challenges of a new age of the digital world, new philosophies and frameworks become possible, which lay the groundwork for the conversations needs for our age.
So, yes, I feel bad for academic philosophers caught in the downturn. And I feel nostalgic sometimes for the fantasy of academic philosophy I felt myself as a student, and which I still feel, the way one might for one's first love. But, no, I am not worried overall about the demise of academic philosophy. On the whole, its fantasies are one of the obstacles to the cultivation of new philosophies pressing for our time, and getting beyond those fantasies is a great challenge.
I would like to have more to say about this, but at the moment I just want to note that that I think (a) your pessimism is warranted and (b) this is a more frank and clear eyed expression than the usual deck-chair-rearranging one sees from most academically employed philosophers. I found it ironic to see your article linked from Daily Nous alongside the post claiming that philosophers are “Dishabituation Entrepreneurs” par excellence. That may be true about other social institutions, but it rarely shows through in our own inability to think beyond the default habits and structures of the academy.
I’ve not been a more than a basic student of philosophy, although I love learning, and my master’s degree is in theology. (Something I once loved but seems to have been subsumed in the popular nonsense of this time.)
I completely agree with your assessment that a few compete for articles and attention but don’t actually speak to the underlying angst of this time. I’m happy you put that into words. I believe it’s going to take a willingness of disparate individuals to come together and attempt to offer something, not just for personal gain and influence, but for some sort of seeds of awakening. Not with answers but with probing questions and humility.
This is something I've thought about since 2010 or so, when it became clear that I wasn't going to get a faculty job. I took a lot of inspiration from philosophers like Spinoza, Mill, and Socrates, who didn't make their living from philosophy. I also found an odd sort of consolation in Terry Pinkard's biography of Hegel, where he ends up happily ensconced in the Berlin faculty but spends a lot of his early years instead offering private tutoring (which was something I was doing myself to make ends meet at the time); I thought to myself "Hegel was writing at the beginning of the modern university as we know it, and maybe I'm writing at its end." I knew I wanted to write philosophically whether I was going to make money from it or not, and I've been able to keep that up through fourteen years of writing a philosophy blog. Now a lot of us are having philosophy conversations here on Substack. There's a public sphere where philosophy is happening outside the university, and I think that's huge. No question, the end of academia would be a huge loss and it's worth trying to preserve it, but even in the worst case, we are finding alternative venues.
Thanks for your thoughts. I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about the core empirical claims here, though. You write:
"There is a huge issue of trust and a distinct sense of alienation which is not restricted to philosophy but for academia in general—a lot of people for various reasons simply don't think that academics can help them anymore with e.g., life questions, how to live better lives, how to make sound decisions, or to work toward to the common good."
What is the comparison class here, and what is the evidence? I am skeptical that academia is facing a trust crisis compared to, say, 200 years ago. (Or even fifty years ago.) I also wouldn't know how to measure that effectively. Self reports seem very limited. We presumably want to see how much people let testimony/technology produced by academia guide their reasoning and behavior – how much they act on the say-so of, or with the tools produced by, academics. But then it is not at all clear that trust in academia is very low in 'absolute' terms (whatever that means exactly), given that people go to the doctor, drive on bridges, buy perishable foods, etc., all of which are the product of experts, including especially academics.
Moreover, in the background here are two social factors that seem to me to be serious possible confounders. The first is simply that we are plausibly now hearing from many more people than ever before – the interconnectivity afforded by the internet has turned up the volume on/of public discourse a lot. This means we should expect to *hear more* from people who want to badmouth academics, even if *there are not more* of such people (this applies to any class of people, of course, mutatis mutandis. We also hear more from muffin enthusiasts and Star Wars prequel stans.). For now we have more access to them. The second is that, if there are simply *many more* people publishing philosophical work – not only in prestige venues, but on Substacks, blogs, YouTube channels, twitter feeds – then that can drive down how much attention any particular one of them gets. So it can feel 'from the inside' like people are not listening so much anymore to philosophy, when even the opposite can be true.
Sobering. I wish I had better news from the outside, but as much as I agree with your assessment that current academic philosophy is in a dead-end, freelance philosophizing also has pitfalls, namely that you end up isolated, and that inevitably cuts into your ability to do serious work (not to be all self-promotey but I wrote about some of my experiences about this a few years ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/diakena/p/life-of-the-lonely-mind?r=19ozuw&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post)
Also the lack of a good library with journal access means doing it well on a freelance basis can be an incredibly expensive hobby. I wrote a book freelance, and while I didn’t do it for money, even modestly researched books are very expensive to put together.
One glimmer of hope might be that even as the academic discipline seems to be on life support, I think a variety of YT channels and podcasts show there is a broad interest in philosophy still. Will the work the emerges and resonates be good? I have my doubts, but the danger that good thinking will be forced to struggle in obscurity against various philosophical populisms goes back to Socrates, so perhaps this isn’t a new problem, just a new variation of it.
Sorry for the long comment, but I’ve also thought a lot about this as someone on the outside who still enjoys academia’s output, so I’ve also wondered where this is all going.
Thanks for this post, Helen. As someone who will be leaving the profession soon, I no longer do unpaid labor for the academy (like refereeing). I think my biggest concern about philosophy being "held afloat" outside the academy is that it takes a lot of privilege to have the luxury to do philosophy "on the side", as it were. (Granted, the Internet makes it somewhat easier, but you also open yourself up to, as you put it, "shittified" discourses and platforms.) I worry that voices from the margins might get lost or be denigrated more than they already are if done mostly by "independent scholars". It's going to take a big institutional shift if independents are going to get the kind of uptake that early modern non-university folk did. That being said, shall we resurrect the philosophical salon? 😉
In any case, I've been listening to the audiobook of "Metaphysical Animals" lately and thinking about how important it was for analytic philosophy to have women working *within* the academy to change it. Might provide another context for reflections of this kind...?
Thanks for a great post. It made my day. I don't mean to be callous, since you say you wrote this feeling pessimistic and hoping people in comments might show how you are wrong. But I think you are completely right, and your post gives me hope. I admire your expressing such clarity while being an academic who is working from within to improve things. That must be hard, and is inspiring. I think what you say is all true, and it is in part what made me leave academia.
Like most institutions, academic philosophy gives greatest platform to those who least express what you say here, and confuses that with optimism for the institution. Akin to your comments about being at Oxford, I studied at Cornell, Harvard and taught at Bryn Mawr, and always felt unnerved when the greatest concerns seemed to be whether a professor will go from Harvard to Princeton or if Rutgers is as good as Pitt, or Bryn Mawr is as good as Swarthmore's department, etc. In that space, those tiny issues seem like where the future of academic philosophy is being determined. When in fact the forces you speak to here are the tectonic shifts which are going to make those issue moot in a few decades, and are already effecting thousands of people caught in the transition times.
Part of the willful ignorance of academic philosophy is not having a clear self-consciousness of the history of academic philosophy. The vision that philosophy professors are continuing the tradition of Socrates and Descartes hides the fact of how much current academic philosophy is a creation of the last 200 years, and how since its inception in the time of Kant and Hegel, it has been a story of loss. Hegel epitomized the grand fantasy that philosophy professors are the center of the university, which takes place of churches in a secular society. Philosophy's understanding of Geist is the secular equivalent of theology's focus on God's vision in the middle ages. But almost from the start of the modern German university (as with University of Berlin in 1810 where Hegel taught), this Hegelian picture was attacked by nonacademics: Schopenhaur/Kierkegaard in a existential way, Marx in a political way, and positivists with regard to science. Already by 1900, the idea that philosophy professors understand the foundations of all other disciplines was seen as outdated idealist metaphysics, and analytic philosophy, like phenomenology and pragmatism, came on the scene as a vision of a disciplinary understanding of philosophy in a rapidly professionalizing academia dominated more by science. The expansion of education post WWII gave new optimism mainly because of the creation of new departments - but it was material optimism covering over the conceptual and existential struggles of the meaning of academic philosophy which were more explicit in the pre WWI and inter war years. The material optimism of academic philosophy started to erode in the 70s and 80s, and by the time of the 2008 downturn, was cemented. Now the material downturn, along with the rise of the diversity issues of the last 30 years, is bringing back to light in a new way the deep challenges to modern academic philosophy voiced by Kierkegaard, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Simone Weil and many others. Academic philosophy can try to reply to these challenges by making these thinkers sub-specialities in the profession and having conferences on their thought (as happened most clearly with the industry of Wittgenstein scholarship in the last 50 years). But for all the hundreds of books academics might write about Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, actually stepping out of academia illuminates these thinkers' ideas in a new light - new, because it becomes practical in a fresh way. When that freshness meets the challenges of a new age of the digital world, new philosophies and frameworks become possible, which lay the groundwork for the conversations needs for our age.
So, yes, I feel bad for academic philosophers caught in the downturn. And I feel nostalgic sometimes for the fantasy of academic philosophy I felt myself as a student, and which I still feel, the way one might for one's first love. But, no, I am not worried overall about the demise of academic philosophy. On the whole, its fantasies are one of the obstacles to the cultivation of new philosophies pressing for our time, and getting beyond those fantasies is a great challenge.
I would like to have more to say about this, but at the moment I just want to note that that I think (a) your pessimism is warranted and (b) this is a more frank and clear eyed expression than the usual deck-chair-rearranging one sees from most academically employed philosophers. I found it ironic to see your article linked from Daily Nous alongside the post claiming that philosophers are “Dishabituation Entrepreneurs” par excellence. That may be true about other social institutions, but it rarely shows through in our own inability to think beyond the default habits and structures of the academy.
I’ve not been a more than a basic student of philosophy, although I love learning, and my master’s degree is in theology. (Something I once loved but seems to have been subsumed in the popular nonsense of this time.)
I completely agree with your assessment that a few compete for articles and attention but don’t actually speak to the underlying angst of this time. I’m happy you put that into words. I believe it’s going to take a willingness of disparate individuals to come together and attempt to offer something, not just for personal gain and influence, but for some sort of seeds of awakening. Not with answers but with probing questions and humility.
This is something I've thought about since 2010 or so, when it became clear that I wasn't going to get a faculty job. I took a lot of inspiration from philosophers like Spinoza, Mill, and Socrates, who didn't make their living from philosophy. I also found an odd sort of consolation in Terry Pinkard's biography of Hegel, where he ends up happily ensconced in the Berlin faculty but spends a lot of his early years instead offering private tutoring (which was something I was doing myself to make ends meet at the time); I thought to myself "Hegel was writing at the beginning of the modern university as we know it, and maybe I'm writing at its end." I knew I wanted to write philosophically whether I was going to make money from it or not, and I've been able to keep that up through fourteen years of writing a philosophy blog. Now a lot of us are having philosophy conversations here on Substack. There's a public sphere where philosophy is happening outside the university, and I think that's huge. No question, the end of academia would be a huge loss and it's worth trying to preserve it, but even in the worst case, we are finding alternative venues.
Thanks for your thoughts. I have to say I'm a bit skeptical about the core empirical claims here, though. You write:
"There is a huge issue of trust and a distinct sense of alienation which is not restricted to philosophy but for academia in general—a lot of people for various reasons simply don't think that academics can help them anymore with e.g., life questions, how to live better lives, how to make sound decisions, or to work toward to the common good."
What is the comparison class here, and what is the evidence? I am skeptical that academia is facing a trust crisis compared to, say, 200 years ago. (Or even fifty years ago.) I also wouldn't know how to measure that effectively. Self reports seem very limited. We presumably want to see how much people let testimony/technology produced by academia guide their reasoning and behavior – how much they act on the say-so of, or with the tools produced by, academics. But then it is not at all clear that trust in academia is very low in 'absolute' terms (whatever that means exactly), given that people go to the doctor, drive on bridges, buy perishable foods, etc., all of which are the product of experts, including especially academics.
Moreover, in the background here are two social factors that seem to me to be serious possible confounders. The first is simply that we are plausibly now hearing from many more people than ever before – the interconnectivity afforded by the internet has turned up the volume on/of public discourse a lot. This means we should expect to *hear more* from people who want to badmouth academics, even if *there are not more* of such people (this applies to any class of people, of course, mutatis mutandis. We also hear more from muffin enthusiasts and Star Wars prequel stans.). For now we have more access to them. The second is that, if there are simply *many more* people publishing philosophical work – not only in prestige venues, but on Substacks, blogs, YouTube channels, twitter feeds – then that can drive down how much attention any particular one of them gets. So it can feel 'from the inside' like people are not listening so much anymore to philosophy, when even the opposite can be true.