Who is a Philosopher? (J. Stanley)

Many academics use the term "philosopher" not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline - be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term "philosopher" as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers. This difference in usage has ruined many a dinner party for me. So I was pleased to discover this interview with Hannah Arendt, one of my great intellectual heroes. The interviewer asks Arendt what she thinks about being a woman in the traditionally male circle of philosophers. Arendt is bemused by the question - she protests that she does not belong to the circle of philosophers, and in no way feels herself to be a philosopher. Her "job" is political theory. She points out that just because she studied philosophy, that doesn't mean that she stayed with it. Arendt obviously doesn't think she is a worse thinker for not being a philosopher. She is just baffled that the interviewer confuses the kind of qualitative political and cultural theory Arendt built her career around with philosophy. Arendt knew enough traditional philosophy to understand the contours of the discipline; it might prevent some misunderstanding if our fellow humanists did as well.  

Comments

[eric]

"the set of problems that occupy our time"

what does that mean?

[Jason Stanley]

I can't give informative necessary and sufficient conditions for the property of being a problem that philosophers work on (and maybe its extension is too large to form a set). But that doesn't mean that there is no distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers. We can all agree that people who work on the problems raised by broken toilets are not philosophers (they are plumbers). Similarly, we can all agree that people who work on problems concerning lipids are not philosophers (they are cardiologists). So there are many people who work on problems that are not the problems that philosophers work on. Many of those problems are both hard and important, but they are not philosophical problems. People who have long engagement with the discipline of philosophy develop a sense of what a philosophical problem is, versus a problem for (e.g.) a cardiologist or a problem for a political theorist. Many humanists have so little engagement with philosophy that they cannot make these distinctions. Arendt had spent enough time around philosophers that she could make these distinctions. But I agree that it can be a bit like chicken-sexing.

[ABDer]

Sometimes a general theory about a discipline counts as doing philosophical work. Plenty of biologists have done work we count as philosophy of biology (e.g. Mayr, Gould, Dawkins), but I agree that that doesn't make them philsophers. Likewise, some philosophers sometimes do work that isn't philosophical (e.g. Putnam's work in maths/comp. sci.). I've always thought you're a philosopher if your pay cheque comes from the philosophy dept.

The interesting question is why this honorific use exists, when it doesn't with "physicist" or "biologist". One guess, off the top of my head, is that it's something to do with the fact that most people grasp the questions that motivate people to study philosophy (Are we free? Is there such a thing as a soul?) but not the answers. Because they have no real understanding of how people in philosophy depts go about answering such questions, they tend to think that anyone who asks them must be a philosopher. Whereas people think of scientists in terms of a methodology (even if it's nothing more than writing lots of strange math on a blackboard or wearing a white lab coat and staring through microscopes) and perhaps don't grasp the questions they ask.

Put so bluntly, this could only be part of the truth, and certainly would need to be refined before it could count as that. But it's what springs to mind when I think about others' reactions to my claim to be a philosopher.

[Richard]

"A bit like chicken sexing"?

By that, I assume that you mean that a chicken is either male or female, but sometimes it's hard to tell which. I take your analogy to be that philosophers are alike in the following respect: either you're a philospher or you aren't, although sometimes it's difficult to tell if you don't have the right training.

Is that too black and white? That is, is being a philosopher a digital or an analogue phenomenon? Surely any individual B might be more of a philosopher than some individual C, and still less a philosopher than A? Does this suggest that being a philosopher is, after all, a matter of degree - an analogue phenomenon? Or can we only make sense of the distinction by thinking, for example, that the reason B is more a philosopher than C is because some of the questions in which B is interested are philosophical - but, perhaps in contrast to A, not all of them?

This last possibility would be consistent with its being black or white whether a question is philosophical. But why accept this view?

[Jason Stanley]

I'm fine with the view that being a philosopher comes in degrees. Being red and being orange are also matters of degree. That doesn't mean that some things aren't clearly red and other things clearly orange. Arendt's point is that a political theorist is clearly not a philosopher.

[Piers]

"...a political theorist is clearly not a philosopher." What's the clear line between political theory and political philosophy?

Aren't there just two senses of "philosopher" - one answering to university discipline divisions, and one answering to the idea of philosophy as the grand synoptic discipline? Maybe there are more than two. Why bother to try to privilege one?

[Neil]

Jason, I'm surprised by your impressions of the usage of the term "philosopher" outside philosophy departments. I did my first degree in an interdisciplinary department that included people working in continental philosophy, as well as people in English, cultural theory, sociology and anthropology. I defected to do analytic philosophy. I now describe myself as a philosopher; you would describe me as a philosopher too (I am employed by a philosophy department, publish in journals with 'philosophy' in their titles, etc). I still keep in contact with the people from the interdisciplinary department, and several have remarked to me that I shouldn't describe myself as a philosopher. To them, it is immodest: a philosopher is not someone who works in philosophy (whether on modality or Hegel); instead, it is someone who makes a *very* significant contribution to philosophy. 'Philosopher' picks out Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, but not, say, Stanley (yet!)

[Louis Chan]

Arendt insisting she is a political theorist is akin to Kierkegaard insisting he is a poet and Nietzsche insisting he is a psychologist. Just because one professes not to be a philosopher, doesn't make it so.

[Eric Brown]

I would've thought that an honorific usage of 'philosopher' is alive and well within philosophy departments, as well. When they say that "So-and-So is not (really) a philosopher," some (within philosophy departments) mean that So-and-So fail to engage any of the problems they deem important to philosophy. But I've heard it said often enough where the speaker clearly meant that So-and-So does not engage *well* with any philosophical problems.

This is not silly. Some might hold that those who work on philosophical problems are philosophers, but it is not obviously wrong to think that a philosopher must manifest a love of wisdom in the way in which he or she works on philosophical problems. Granted, this approach might well make Jason's proposed philosopher-identifying look easy, as there will probably be more contention about what counts as ways of doing philosophy that manifest a love of wisdom than there would be about what counts as the philosophical problems.

But if one sees that some philosophers think this way--at least in certain moods (or stages of inebriation), or for certain rhetorical effect--then one might also imagine that some people would call someone a philosopher for manifesting a love of wisdom in the way in which he or she works on, say, literary criticism. After all, it is not as though philosophical problems do not come up in literary criticism, or political theory, or in any field you care to name. This would explain the (to me) natural thought that some political theorists are more philosophical than others *in the way that they do political theory*.

From this it is not a large leap to call Arendt a philosopher. In fact, to refuse this leap, we have three options: (1) philosophers are those who work in philosophy departments; (2) philosophers are those who work on such-and-such problems (which list somehow excludes the problems on which Arendt contributed smartly); or (3) philosophers are those who work on such-and-such problems in a way that manifests the love of wisdom (which Arendt somehow failed to manifest). The first of these is hopeless. The second and third are matters for debate, and it seems to me wrong to think that either of them is purely a descriptive matter, independent of the "honorific" conception motivating the fans of Arendt.

[Jason Stanley]

Louis,

If you listen to the interview, Arendt is clearly not employing any bizarre pretensions of the sort that Kierkegaard or Nietzsche would be employing if they insisted (respectively) that they were poets or psychologists. She is making the utterly banal point that she does something very different than academic philosophy. The Origins of Totalitarianism is a work about the very particular social configurations that led to totalitarianism; a lengthy discussion of the Dreyfus affair is simply not what you would find Wittgenstein or Heidegger engaging in. The Human Condition talks about the different ways society has conceptualized work and labor. Arendt's genius consists partly in the fact that she had a novel way of bringing together cultural critique and historical analysis in the service of leading us to understand phenomena, such as the participation of ordinary people in unimaginable evil, that philosophy is totally incapable of explaining. You could say that all historical explanation is philosophy. But you could also say that plumbing is philosophy.

[Michael Rosen]

"I can't give informative necessary and sufficient conditions for the property of being a problem that philosophers work on (and maybe its extension is too large to form a set). But that doesn't mean that there is no distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers." (Jason Stanley)

1. Do philosophers work on the problem of democracy? Of rights?

2. Do political theorists?

If the answer to both these questions is "yes", there does not seem to be any basis for the distinction between "philosopher" and "political theorist". (If you answer "no" to either, I give up.)

[Jason Stanley]

Michael,

Hmm

1. Do philosophers work on the problem of being? Of substance?

2. Do physicists?

If the answer to both of these questions is "yes", there does not seem to be any basis for the distinction between "philosopher" and "physicist".

[Louis Chan]

"She is making the utterly banal point that she does something very different than academic philosophy."

Kierkegaard made that same point when he criticized Danish Hegelianism in academia. He wouldn't want to be called a philosopher if what it means by "philosopher" equals Hegelians, like Martensen.

Arendt's project is political in focus, very true. But in her writings, she does try to discover what is the good life amid her discussions of history and politics. (I'm explicitly thinking about her work about being a Jew in Germany, but I can't remember the title right now)

[Lebombo Bone]

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy appears to regard Arendt as a philosopher:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/

"Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century...The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action)...At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging)."

Also, while I agree with the spirit of Jason's post, I have to wonder whether political theorists are the best examples of non-philosophers, as the work of political theorists in political science departments and political theorists in philosophy departments sometimes differs in only that respect. A better example would be a linguist, like Chomsky, who is often considered a philosopher, though the vast majority of his work is clearly not philosophy (though much of it is relevant to philosophers.) On the other hand, Chomsky has written about philosophy in the sense that Jason is referring to, so this case too is not so clear cut.

[Jason Stanley]

"But in her writings, she does try to discover what is the good life amid her discussions of history and politics. (I'm explicitly thinking about her work about being a Jew in Germany, but I can't remember the title right now)"

I think you are referring to her classic biography of Rahel Varnhagen. I agree that it's a fascinating work (and very emotionally affecting for me, since I'm a German Jew). But I really think that once we start counting biographies as philosophy, then we are just saying that anyone who is really smart and insightful is a philosopher. Why not include Tolstoy as well? He was very insightful about the human condition.

[Brandon]

On the difference between political philosophy and political theory, Jacob Levy (McGill) has written this (link on the left titled "Political theory and political philosophy"): http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/levy/

[Marina]

So what about Arendt's lectures on Kant's Critique of Judgment? Is that a philosophy book written by someone who is not a philosopher?

[Michael P]

I think that the question of 'who is a philosopher' appeals to nonsense cases or 'honorific' cases appeals to people like (I'm sure you have heard of these people in popular culture, but NOT philosophy) Sam Harris [his blog says that he is an Author, Essayist, Philosopher, Atheist. Another case might be new age spiritualist morons like Ken Wilbur.

On the issue of whether some mathematicians or physicists or very influential people (Newton, Einstein, Turing etc) are philosophers seems to be tempting by virtue of their groundbreaking work and their philospohical content. It is a matter more of philosophers badly wanting to claim them as their own.

[Eric Schliesser]

One key to this exchange is to be found in Stanley's use of 'German Jew'. For Arendt's work, but in differing ways also Benjamin and Leo Strauss (etc), has to be understood, in part, by her understanding of the failures of Weimar and the philosophical stance of Hermann Cohen (or if you, prefer, Husserl, Cassirer, etc), and the sense that Heidegger offers an attractive alternative. (These failures are not co-existensive, of course, but they may be seen as such.) If Enlightenment is not the culmination of history (or if its telos is Nazi-Germani), then, for a certain mind at a certain point in time, political theory becomes the very condition for taking the first step to philosophy.

[Andy Lamey]

I am grateful to Jason Stanley for starting this fascinating discussion, but I am a bit confused by his response to Michael Rosen. Several of Jason's comments above seem to suggest that, for him, someone's status as a philosopher is determined by the topics she writes about. If those topics fall inside a certain "set of problems" then she is a philosopher. But if her writings deal with other topics, whether they be plumbing, the Dreyfus affair or political life more broadly, she is not a philosopher.

If Jason is in fact employing a topic-driven definition of philosophy to exclude Arendt's work, then Michael's response seems on point. For if we accept the idea that there can be a genuinely philosophical discussion of democracy or rights, then that means that someone can take up political topics and still be a philosopher.

In response to this, Jason seems to concede that someone's status as a philosopher is not determined simply or primarily by noting what topics she writes about. Physicists and philosophers, after all, both work on being and substance, but do so in very different ways. I think this is a reasonable response on Jason's part, but it means that he is employing a different definition of philosophy, not primarily topic-based, than his earlier comments appear to suggest (e.g. "People who have long engagement with the discipline of philosophy develop a sense of what a philosophical problem is, versus a problem for (e.g.) a cardiologist or a problem for a political theorist.")

When it comes to Arendt, I’m a bit surprised that she is the thinker being used to demarcate the boundary of philosophy. Despite what she may have said in interviews, she is not a good boundary figure, because she wrote different types of books examining different subjects at different levels of abstraction, with the result that some are plausibly classified as philosophy, others less so.

Speaking for myself, I would classify her Kant lectures and The Human Condition as philosophy (perhaps unlike Jason, I take the latter to be offering a normative vision of political life). The Origins of Totalitarianism, by contrast, is primarily a work of history. I agree with Jason that what it says about the Dreyfus Affair and most other subjects is interesting, but not really philosophy. However, even Origins contains Arendt’s famous attack on the idea of human rights, which continues to be invoked in philosophical debates about the nature of rights. So even when Arendt was in her historical mode, she sometimes blurred the line between being a historian and a philosopher. That’s one of the things that made her an interesting thinker in my view.

[Cissie Fu]

Arendt has an ambivalent relationship with philosophy (philosophers aside). Her wish to look at politics with eyes unclouded by philosophy is a fierce, critical, and contentful position. Her distinction between the contemplative life and the active life is spatial--not so much marking out autonomous spheres of philosophy and politics (a self-defeating project, if I may say so as a political theorist), but stressing the inward, truth-seeking orientation of philosophy versus the necessarily outward, active engagement with politics. There is no space for truth in politics, according to Arendt, precisely because truth defeats human action, which, to her, is the only expression of human freedom in a plural, shared universe. If we understand Arendt on her own terms, her rejection of the title "philosopher" is beyond a light quibble over the boundaries of academic disciplines or the categorisation of her corpus; it rather confirms her integrity as a thinker-actor who values the life of the mind without losing sight of the need to participate in the common world. The messiness of meddling be damned (see Arendt's Men in Dark Times).

[Lisa R]

Well, there's that idea that philosophy is the handmaiden of science. I'm not wholly sure what this claim means.

My (probable misinterpretation) is that science requires the help of philosophy. People in all disciplines (maybe even just people, generally) have to philosophize, to some extent. Sociologists, linguists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists, physicists, biologists, etc. sometimes *have* to do philosophy to do an adequate job dealing with certain questions within their own disciplines. Can they entirely avoid asking foundational questions, dealing with basic conceptual matters and so on?

The better they are at this, the better their own work probably is. People need philosophy.

I think the reason we might say (and they might say) this doesn't exactly make them 'philosophers' is because their goals are not primarily philosophical goals. Maybe, e.g., social scientists who spend a lot of time doing this conceptual work do sometimes get called philosophers? If they do, I wonder whether this matters so much. I would worry more that the failure to recognize how central philosophy is to many domains of knowledge would ghettoize philosophy. I think philosophers can make the claim that philosophy is something that has to be done to do adequate work in many disciplines. Philosophy is something that people who are working out basic questions about the world can't entirely avoid. Maybe we can say that professional philosophers have figured out a way to do it better, that our methods are more successful and our practice more fundamental. But there are some good reasons to avoid the claim (which I don't think you are making, exactly) that only philosophers actually do philosophy or that only philosophers *should* do philosophy. Or that it's only philosophy if a philosopher is doing it.

(I'm not sure if this is a correct view, but one view is that the methodological route political science took was deeply influenced by logical positivism. I'm not sure what this proves but it at least indicates that some philosophical position on what counts as knowledge is required in trying to figure out what kind of approach you should take when acquiring data, constructing theories, etc.)

There's a problem that's the reverse of the problem you might have in mind where theorists in other disciplines are doing philosophy but not always recognizing that this is what they are doing. Understanding philosophy as it is done by philosophers or just knowing more about philosophical methods, questions, the history of philosophy, etc. might be of benefit to those working out philosophical questions that pertain to those fields.

[Michael Rosen]

"1. Do philosophers work on the problem of being? Of substance?

2. Do physicists?

If the answer to both of these questions is "yes", there does not seem to be any basis for the distinction between "philosopher" and "physicist"."

Indeed.

So, either:

1. There is no distinction between philosophers and physicists

Or:

2. Jason's suggested basis for drawing the distinction fails.

You choose.

[Jason Stanley]

Dear Andy and Michael,

Ah, I see the confusion. Sorry - Andy is quite right to point out that I seem to have indicated my preference for a topic-driven way to draw the distinction between philosophy and political theory. That's what Michael was (rightly) criticizing. Sorry, I shouldn't have done that. As Andy points out, if one is seeking some informative characterization of the philosopher/non-philosopher distinction, one must incorporate reference to the methods they employ, and not merely the topics they discuss. Sorry about that - that's of course right. As I said in one of my earlier comments, I see the prospects as very dim indeed for providing an informative characterization of what makes someone a philosopher vs. a political theorist or physicist or a psychologist. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who are clearly philosophers, and people who are clearly political theorists. Arendt's point is that she belongs in the latter camp.

[Jason Stanley]

Cissie,

I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything in your comment. I agree that part of it is that she thought that philosophy was inwardly-directed and truth-tracking, whereas political theory of the sort she practiced was not (she says as much in the interview as well). But she betrays an immediate impatience with the interviewer's suggestion that she is a philosopher - she denies that philosophers regard her as a philosopher, she states "Ich fuhle mich *keineswegs* als Philosophin", and she says that the only basis for regarding her as a philosopher is that she studied philosophy in school. This indicates a recognition on her part of the distinction between political theory of the sort she engages in, which draws upon actual history, cultural critique, and sociology, and the practice of traditional philosophy with which she was well-acquainted. I think she is frustrated with the interviewer in part because she thinks that no one who has engaged with traditional philosophy would mistake what she does with philosophy - she clearly implicates that *philosophers* wouldn't think she was a philosopher, and that they would be right.

[Robert Johnson]

Thanks very much for posting this. Many of us who have tried to work in interdisciplinary settings are often met with just the confusion that Arendt is bemused by. It is laborious, frustrating and quite often not a little insulting to have to explain to colleagues within the academy but outside of philosophy that there is, in fact, a subject matter that we have some measure of expertise on, or at least aspire to, and that it is not at all the same thing that is done in departments such as English, History, Political Science and so on. What is particularly nice is that this comes from Arendt.

[CJ]

From the original post: "As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline - be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics".

If we ignore the "admirable" part, which is what makes this a discussion about honorific usage, then we are left with something that I think we as philosophers should see as in no way weird: the idea that there is something philosophical about "general theory about a discipline", i.e., attempts to gain clear and systematic understanding about the fundamental questions which animate a discipline.

Coming now to Arendt, I think Andy offered the most commonsensical way of treating her claim: noticing that there is work which bears out that she is not *exclusively* a philosopher and, at the same time, disregarding her protestations in light of her work that fits easily (and, acc. to Arendtians, productively) into the venerable tradition of political philosophy.

It seems to me that part of the issue may be whether one can be a philosopher if one is not committed to the discipline in an exclusive manner.

[Jonathan]

I'm no pro, but here are a couple of thoughts. I think Lisa R is onto something, but her comment about everyone in other disciplines doing philosophy at some point in time may not be quite right.

Those other disciplines need to do some theoretical work from time to time, but this theoretical work is grounded in/informed by/in response to/in the context of (what have you) the regular work these disciplines are doing.

Philosophers, on the other hand, are more concerned with pulling concepts out of context and analyzing them from some "objective" perspective, not necessarily concerning themselves with any practical application of the concept.

Maybe that's not fair. After all, aren't those in the experimental camp doing something different? Sure. Well then at some point, given the broad range of methods one employs and the problems one takes as interesting, the lines between philosophy and non-philosophy becomes really really blurry.

So, I guess I'm confused as to why Jason is making such a big deal about this.

[Robert Allen]

"As Andy points out, if one is seeking some informative characterization of the philosopher/non-philosopher distinction, one must incorporate reference to the methods they employ, and not merely the topics they discuss." Jason Stanley

I should have thought that we approach (say) the problem of substance in an a priori manner, formulating it, proposing a solution, and then defending it against objections. In my courses, I basically present the subject as a series of modus ponens/tollens: the problems are the conclusions, the solutions are the rejections of the premises, which, in turn, entail the objections, to be handled by further arguments. Pace the experimental philosophers, there is nothing empirical going on here; it’s all ratiocination. As for the subject matter, speaking very broadly, philosophy is the study of reality, knowledge, and goodness.

[Michael Rosen]

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL THEORY

One way of characterizing the difference might be that political theorists include facts in their reflective equilibrium and history in their conceptual analysis. But then that's what I think that political philosophers *ought* to do. It's an observable fact, though, that political philosophers (political theorists within philosophy departments?) at present seem to be divided between Kantians who think that it is illuminating to explore the normative issues of politics in terms of something they call "ideal theory" and those (Platonists?) who think that even the Kantians are too empirical.

Another observed fact is that political theory faces in different directions. Yes, certainly, there is an important overlapping area with philosophy where, to my mind, the distinction between the two is otiose. But there is also political theory that faces towards law, towards economics, towards history and -- above all -- to the empirical study of politics. Political theory is the place where the caravans meet!

Finally, a third observed fact is that those trained in philosophy departments get jobs in politics departments but not vice versa. There can be many explanations, but one possible one is because philosophers are very keen to protect their identity against intruders -- even if (arguably, just because!) they aren't very sure what it is.

[Alex Leibowitz]

I think of the term 'philosopher' as an honorific -- but I wouldn't use it to describe a thinker who has come up with a "general theory about some discipline". I would like to use it in the ancient sense: someone is a philosopher if he (or she) has decided to live a life devoted to virtue and the contemplation of eternal things. I guess I don't always use it in that sense -- but there are many professional academics whom I would not want to call philosophers. -- It's actually interesting how the sense of the word changes though. Its application was of course much wider in the Renaissance and Enlightenment; it became a term of abuse in the early 20th century (at least on the lips of Wittgenstein); in the ancient world, I imagine to call someone a philosopher would be like calling someone a Christian today -- in that, as I said, such a person is recognized as having devoted himself to a particular way of life.

[matthew n. smith]

I am baffled at Jason Stanley's need to regiment the practice of philosophy so much. In fact, I am baffled by this general recent trend of regimentation of the practice that has been exemplified on this blog - not just by Jason's post but by all the polls Brian Leiter has posted. Who's the best philosopher of such-and-such and era? Who's in, who's out?

This extreme fascination - even obsession - with rankings and this need for articulating sharp distinctions between those who are legitimate philosophers (Lewis!) and those who simply don't count (Derrida!) is, as far as I can tell, simply juvenile. Its sole effect, beyond ego stroking, is no more than *pointless exclusion* of others.

What profit is there is labeling one person as a philosopher - e.g., a Rutgers philosopher of language like Jason Stanley - and another person not a philosopher - e.g., a New School political philosopher like Nancy Fraser? I simply fail to see its value beyond someone feeling like he is part of the in-group while and granting himself the authority to deem others' reflections as not immediately germane to "philosophy".

Perhaps Stanley thinks that this is just plain fun. But, what sort of fun is drawing boundaries so as to include some people and to exclude others? I suppose it's some sort of weekend activity, but I suggest other hobbies, e.g., philately, in which Stanley can make subtle distinctions between what counts as a postage stamp and what doesn't.

All angry snark aside, let me state quite simply my objection to this very endeavor:

Jason Stanley - an eminent Rutgers philosopher - and the Leiter Blog both are important presences in the analytic philosophy world. What Jason and other leading lights of the field say both on this blog and in public and what Brian says on this blog has real-world impact. Hiring decisions, funding decisions and decisions about which grad school to attend and what course of study to pursue, to name just four areas, are affected by what leading figures say and what one finds on this blog in the phil gourmet. These consequences are often neither immediate nor directly causal, but there is a positive correlation between this sort of extreme discipline regimentation. Those whose voices are loud should think carefully about what they say and where they say it.

Consequently, when Jason and others start insisting on sharp standards by which we all are to judge who is and who is not a philosopher and especially when he does it on this blog, there _will_ be effects - people whose AOS's are on the margins of the field will be pressured to subtly alter their approaches or they will feel subtle pressure pushing them further out onto the margins and perhaps even off the map.

Additionally, there is a real risk that this need to specify who's in and who's out will limit exploration of a wide range of materials. For example, it is a crying shame that philosophers rarely talk with political sociologists and vice-versa. I guess a philosopher who wants to be a Stanley-philosopher should steer clear of reading, e.g., most of William James, most of Jurgen Habermas, most of Charles Taylor, most of Axel Honneth, and so on. What a loss! Additionally, I suppose that political sociologists like Hans Joas or Craig Calhoun are *really* not philosophers so, you know, if you want to get tenure in a _philosophy_ department or published in a _philosophy_ journal you had better not engage their work. That is, if you don't want to get accused of being *insufficiently philosophical* you had better just read and comment on the analytic canon.

Well, that's a recipe for irrelevance if I've ever heard one.

And worse, it's a recipe for bad philosophy.

A note on the philosopher rankings: I know that Brian is just having fun with the rankings and I also know that Brian has a wonderfully expansive sense whose work is intellectually rich and worth exploration by philosophers. Despite my admiration of him for these qualities, though, I find the rankings to have the unintended consequence of a brutal form of regimentation - they tacitly provide grounds, at least for the small-minded, for exclusion and intellectual limitation, which is precisely what Brian's work often resists.

[Les Green]

Michael, Jason:

I like Hannah Arendt too; but in my little corner in not the Hannah we need to worry about, but the Hendel. There are *lots* of them, and the law reviews only encourage them. Nicht wahr?

cheers
Les

[mark lance]

re the last three comments: the level of abstraction from empirical facts that it is productive to engage in philosophically is hardly uncontroversial. Certainly some in ethics and political philosophy produce rather "ideal" theories. Certainly many contemporary folks in analytic metaphysics purport to describe reality in abstraction from the empirical. Same for some in epistemology. But there are many trends highly counter to this: experimental philosophy has been mentioned, but most philosophy of science is quite opposed to this approach, as are many approaches going under the label 'phenomenology'. (Even in logic, there is a big distinction between those who pursue it in abstraction from mainstream non-foundational math, computer science, linguistics, etc and those who don't.) Quite a few in the pragmatist tradition as well.

Indeed, I think this is a pretty fundamental split in contemporary philosophy. On one side you have those who believe there is a distinct philosophical method and/or subject matter - one that makes work largely independent of what is going on empirical sciences, of detailed history, or of detailed investigation of the structure of particular practices - on the other are those who think that philosophy involves a distinctive range of interests (perhaps Sellars's "eye on the whole") but no distinctive subject matter or interestingly different method.

(None of that is to deny that there is a difference between philosophy and non-philosophy, or to deny that Arendt is doing political theory in a non-philosophical way.)

[Les Green]

I meant, of course, הֶנדְל.

Les

[Iain Thomson]

It seems to me that when Arendt declaims philosophy, the subtext is a (highly ambivalent and complicated) distinction between herself and Heidegger... (he was, in her mind, a philosophical genius and a political idiot). I don't think you can take this distinction at face value, not only because of her obviously philosophical work in The Human Condition but also because of Heidegger's own ambivalent relation to "philosophy."

[Becko Copenhaver]

It strikes me that the sense in which all other disciplines engage in philosophy (thus the 'Ph' in their 'Ph.D's') is a perfectly legitimate but much, much broader usage of the term than when I refer to myself or Jason as a philosopher. Both uses ought to be retained, but they also ought to be distinguished. As with Jason, I have had strained conversations with other academics (and many students) who appear to have the attitude that they can simply help themselves to a discipline for which they have no practice. Worse, this attitude seems to arise from some notion that doing philosophy is something for which no one needs practice. But that isn't true even for the legitimate, wider use of the term. That students exhibit this attitude (sometimes) indicates that it is not just an interdisciplinary terminological squabble.

[Jason Stanley]

Matthew,

You write:

"Additionally, there is a real risk that this need to specify who's in and who's out will limit exploration of a wide range of materials....I guess a philosopher who wants to be a Stanley-philosopher should steer clear of reading, e.g., most of William James, most of Jurgen Habermas, most of Charles Taylor, most of Axel Honneth, and so on. What a loss!...if you want to get tenure in a _philosophy_ department or published in a _philosophy_ journal you had better not engage their work. That is, if you don't want to get accused of being *insufficiently philosophical* you had better just read and comment on the analytic canon."

Many of us are interdisciplinary. I read and exploit the work of non-philosophers in my written work. Not only that, I even regularly publish articles with non-philosophers. So I don't think my attitude that not everyone philosophers might consult is a philosopher leads to a sense of disciplinary over-specialization. None of the linguists or psychologists or computer scientists with whom I regularly work at Rutgers and elsewhere think of themselves as philosophers. Similarly, I don't think of myself as a linguist or a computer scientist. Despite this, we draw on each other's fields for our work. Similarly, I would expect a political philosopher to draw on relevant work in other disciplines. That doesn't make the people whose work they draw on into philosophers.

Anyway, your beef is with Hannah Arendt, not me. She is the one who went around pish-poshing the idea that she was properly thought of as a philosopher. I'm just delivering the news.

[Jason Stanley]

Matthew,

You write:

"This extreme fascination - even obsession - with rankings and this need for articulating sharp distinctions between those who are legitimate philosophers (Lewis!) and those who simply don't count (Derrida!) is, as far as I can tell, simply juvenile."

I agree that Derrida was a philosopher. In my view, he was a *bad* philosopher. I don't think of e.g. Foucault as a philosopher. But I do think he was brilliant.

[Heidi Tiedke]

I often struggle myself with whether I should call myself a "philosopher." And, when I do, it is because I am taking the term to be an honorific worthy only of those like Kant, Kripke, Quine, etc. On the other hand, there is another sense in which, if someone were to ask, I would say that, of course, I am a philosopher (I am a recent PhD in phil, I write, do, and teach phil, etc.). These seem to be sufficient conditions for descriptively counting as a philosopher anyhow.

The interesting questions, of course, arise when one asks what counts as the doing of philosophy. Here, I also struggle. I do phil of lang, and I often wonder whether everything that doesn't fall under doing logic and linguistics is bullshit (which, by the way, would rule out what I do). In contrast, if I hear a philosopher give a detailed description of the Kreb's cycle during a talk, I often walk out having labeled the talk as not being philosophical enough. Surely merely giving a description of the empirical results in some other discipline doesn't count as being philosophy, I think to myself. And surely we mustn't let all this pluralism run amok, so that there are no longer disciplines between which to share information! I also often feel about certain philosophers who seem to lionize science that perhaps they should just go do that science instead of trying to convince the rest of us that everything else is pointless (as Rorty went and did literary criticism).

In other words, there is in me a positivist, a rationalist, a conservative and a progressive. I don't really know which way is the right way to go because, personally, my ego and my interests are so wrapped up in the answer that I don't trust my own intuitions.

Perhaps one way of getting at intuitions is to ask what I think it is appropriate to teach philosophers, e.g., what do I take it must be taught in an intro class, what courses do I think graduate students must take? Surely even the most liberal and progressive of us have some similar requirements for someone to count as having an undergrad in philosophy or a PhD in phil, or am I just being too naive here to think that philosophers could put aside their political agendas when asking what a well-rounded, well-educated philosopher should know? (perhaps I should qualify that I take this as a debate within the analytic tradition).

[Brian Leiter]

Regarding Matthew Smith's remark that the various polls "tacitly provide grounds, at least for the small-minded, for exclusion and intellectual limitation..." I have two comments: (1) I hope not! (2) I suspect, to the contrary, most people's reaction to the polls is like mine, e.g., "How can other people in the profession possibly think that X is more important than Y?" That Aquinas fared better than Nietzsche did not affect my opinion of their relative merits, and I would be astonished if it affected anyone else's. That being said, I've been astonished before, so let me just reiterate the first comment!

[Robert Allen]

"This extreme fascination - even obsession - with rankings and this need for articulating sharp distinctions between those who are legitimate philosophers (Lewis!) and those who simply don't count (Derrida!) is, as far as I can tell, simply juvenile. Its sole effect, beyond ego stroking, is no more than *pointless exclusion* of others."

No, there is a very good reason for drawing these distinctions. Philosophy is not done in a vacuum and, as Whitehead pointed out, can be seen as a long footnote on Plato. That is to say, philosophers are attending to (conceptual) problems discovered by their predecessors, whose work, thus, is paradigmatic of the subject. There is a set issues bequeathed to us by the Greeks, Medievals, and Descartes: if you are not working on one of them-and in the manner they did- you are simply not doing philosophy.

[AY]

I haven't managed to read through all the comments, so my early apologies in case I am simply reiterating what has already been said.

Specialization of knowledge in the West comes about only the during the Enlightenment; "philosophy", as this post's author and some other commenters have defined it, is a historically specific understanding that is far from "necessarily" the case. I find statements like:

"There is a set issues bequeathed to us by the Greeks, Medievals, and Descartes: if you are not working on one of them-and in the manner they did- you are simply not doing philosophy."

to represent a) an incredibly revisionist and b) a simply false view. (b) Who today conducts *anything* in life (let alone philosophy) in the manner that the Greeks, Medievals, or a 17th century Frenchman did? To ignore all the differences between radically different points in time and say that philosophy is a straight line is a supremely ideological commitment. Besides the internal contradiction (that the Greeks didn't conduct things in the same way Descartes did--think Socratic dialogue vs. Descartes' "Meditations"), there's a fundamentally false kernel at the heart of this idea, the notion of a techno-scientific goal to philosophy. But that may be too much to get into here, and it seems other commenters have described the problems therein.

(a) This view also strikes me as incredibly revisionist. Have we forgotten that Descartes was also one of the greatest Mathematicians of all Western history? Or that Aristotle was a scientist first and metaphysician second (arguably)? I should think that if a Descartes or Aristotle were alive today (unthinkable given the extreme fragmentation of the modern university), there might be a blog post celebrating an interview where they dedicated themselves to something other than "philosophy".

Given that we're on "Leiter Reports", we would be good to keep in mind a passage from Nietzsche (surely a poet and not a philosopher!):

"A scholar can never become a philosopher. Even Kant could not manage it, and despite the innate power of his genius remained to the very end in a chrysalis state. Those who think these words unfair to Kant do not know what a philosopher is-- not only a great thinker but a genuine human being. And when has a scholar ever turned out to be a genuine human being?"

(Nietzsche: "Schopenhauer As Educator")

[Michael Della Rocca]

I agree with the sentiment behind Matthew Smith's, admirable post above. The obsession with rankings and with who's in and who's out can have harmful consequences of which we would do well to be aware, chief among these is the creation or sustaining of a certain kind of rigidity in thinking as to what is philosophically valuable. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. The rankings and the in-group, out-group way of thinking are, I believe, an obstacle to such blooming in philosophy. Some of these issues come up in approaches to the study of the history of philosophy: the pendulum often oscillates between more philosophical approaches to the history of philosophy and more historical approaches to the history of philosophy. But I've always felt: why should we trumpet one approach to the study of the history of philosophy as superior to the other? And even more deeply I've felt: is there really a deep difference between so-called philosophical and so-called historical approaches to the history of philosophy? And even more deeply I've felt: is there really a deep difference between philosophy and the study of its history?

[Brian Leiter]

Nietzsche is obviously a philosopher, as Nietzsche himself believed. Let's not be silly. And no one is obessed with rankings except those, it appears, worrying about the obsession of others. Jeez.

[Jason Stanley]

Michael (and to some extent Matthew as well),

I've published your comments despite utter bafflement about their connection with my original post. My post was a link to an interview in which Hannah Arendt denies that she is a professional philosopher. I did not speak of rankings or of the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy. I'm trying to make the following utterly banal point. When I say to my humanities colleagues and friends who do not teach in the philosophy department that (for example) Michael Della Rocca is a philosopher, and Jonathan Israel is not, I am not making a prescriptive judgment about whose work I find more admirable. I'm making a subtle claim about approaches and bases for arguments. As it happens, I have a tremendous amount of admiration for Jonathan Israel's work. Nevertheless, if they were both employed at my university, and it was up to me to choose whom to teach the advanced Spinoza seminar in the philosophy department, I'd choose Della Rocca rather than Israel. The basis would be that Della Rocca is a philosopher, and Israel is not. I found it interesting to point out that Arendt would agree. That point has nothing whatever to do with interdisciplinary research or attitudes to the history of philosophy. I'm beginning to think that some philosophers are a bit irrationally paranoid about some of their colleagues!

[Jason Stanley]

PS: Michael, if it would help you to interpret my original post, I was certainly thinking that among the "set of problems" that philosophers work on are problems like "what was Spinoza's view of substance?".

[Jason Stanley]

Matthew,

You write:

"I guess a philosopher who wants to be a Stanley-philosopher should steer clear of reading, e.g., most of William James, most of Jurgen Habermas, most of Charles Taylor, most of Axel Honneth, and so on."

That would be puzzling, since (a) I spent a year in Germany studying Hegel, (b) I've certainly read Charles Taylor, and (c) I've argued for views in epistemology close to those associated with William James.

[Louis Chan]

I'm not sure how the post got sidetracked into the rankings but as for Arendt professing that she isn't a philosopher... ok, then. As Stanley says, she wouldn't be employed at a philosophy department (at the very least, she'd be adjunct or by courtesy). I guess who is a philosopher is in the academic sense is one who has a graduate degree in philosophy.

Anyways, to respond to the question "Who is a Philosopher?", let me respond simply by this:

A philosopher is an individual who intentionally produces, through some kind of medium, a non-fictional, non-biographical, substantative work of philosophy.

By intentionally, I mean it can't be by accident, the individual has to be consciously aware that he is doing philosophy.

By "through some kind of medium", I mean that it can include books or speech or actions in any amount, like those of Socrates (0 books, but speech), Wittgenstein (1-2 major books, rest essays and lectures), and Kierkegaard (prolific authorship).

By "non-fictional", this would exclude literary only authors with high philosophical content like Tolsoy, Joyce, Shakespeare, but still include indivdiuals like Camus, with his theoretical works.

By "non-biographical", I mean that, as Stanley pointed earlier, not just anyone is a "philosopher" if they write philosophy in their diaries.

By "substantative work", .... now, this I believe is the true question, and whether some people who read Arendt (or Foucault, etc.), consider her substantative political writings philosophical. Discussing Logic, Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, etc., would be a good start.

I believe the definition is broad enough to include people working both within and outside academia.

Feel free to criticize my definition, I'm pretty sure you all will.

[Robert Allen]

AY,

My meta-philosophy, which I learned in a highly regarded graduate school, guides my work: I can say that I know what I am about. That is the primary benefit of relying on paradigms. (Artists do the same thing.) You are dismissive of my approach, but not only don't you give reasons for that attitude, you don't even bother to propose an alternative. Thus, I wonder whether you know what you are doing. The larger question being, just how far can we stray from the roots of our discipline before we are no longer engaged in it?

As for Nietzsche's credentials, I can honestly say that I learned to philosophize only after I abandoned my study of him- and that other aphorist, Wittgenstein- to concentrate on folks like Chisolm, Plantinga, and Van Inwagen. No arguments, no philosophy.