Kitcher on turning philosophy inside-out

Philip Kitcher, a prominent philosopher at Columbia, recently published his own recommendation for philosophy to re-orient itself. You can get a pdf of his article here. The basic problem is that, like all disciplines, philosophers tend toward ever-increasing specialization, and so their audience shrinks and shrinks. When they try then to argue for the importance of what they’re doing, they face a difficult question: if what they are doing is so important, how come no one other than themselves is interested in it? They can shout, “It IS important!”, but the louder they have to shout, the less convincing their message is.

Instead, Kitcher takes a cue from John Dewey: ‘‘If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education’’. Philosophy, he thinks, and even “academic” philosophy, needs to engage the real questions and problems not just of specialists, but of educated people across a wide bandwidth.

Here’s Kitcher’s own vision:

…[S]ocieties and individuals continue to need an integrated picture of nature that combines the contributions of different areas of inquiry, and different fields of investigation can be assisted by thinkers whose more synthetic perspective can alert them to missed opportunities and provide them with needed clarification. Along the value-axis, philosophy can offer an account of ethics as an evolving practice, one that has probably occupied our species for most of its history, and that has been variously distorted by claims to expertise that are based on alleged religious revelations or on supposed a priori reasoning. They can seek, as Dewey recommended, methods for advancing the ethical project more ‘‘intelligently.’’ In light of this account, using whatever methodological advice can be garnered from it, they can identify the points in current ethical, social, and political practice where tensions and difficulties arise, attempting to facilitate discussions that will lead to progressive shifts.

So I think what this means is that philosophers should attempt to both clarify and question the developments in the sciences, business, politics, and arts, from the vantage-point of a broadly educated person. They should be the ones taking the long view, as it were.

Kitcher’s short article is well worth reading and reflecting on, I think.

Call for submissions: The Philosophers’ Carnival

The Philosophers’ Carnival is an online gathering of philosophical essays from blogs around the world. It happens every three weeks, moving from hosting blog to hosting blog. (Read more here.) Usuphilosophy.com will be the host for the April 25th Carnival. Anyone can submit – one needn’t be a “professional” philosopher, or a professional anything – though of course there’s no guarantee that everything will be included. So, please, submit entries that have intrigued you, whether you wrote them or not! We will be reviewing submissions from now until the 23rd or so.

The Carnival will accept essays on all worthy topics, but let’s set a topic of special interest: whether neuroscience really explains mentality. Of course, there are lots of claims that it does, ranging from the silly to the revealing. But how much of this is mere hype, and how much is paradigm shift?

The iPod: a solipsistic defense against the world’s sucky music

From Slate:

If recording and mechanical reproduction opened up the world of musical pluralism—of listening to other people’s music until you and they became other people yourselves—digital reproduction expanded that pluralism to the point where it reversed itself. You have all the world’s music on your iPod, in your earphones. Now it’s “other people’s music”—which should be very exciting to encounter—as played in cafes and stores that is the problem. In any public setting, it acquires a coercive aspect. The iPod is the thing you have to buy in order not to be defenseless against the increasingly sucky music played to make you buy things.