What Kind of Philosophy Gets in the News? (J. Stanley)

Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously, there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this character. The popular press will not be producing articles on Field, Fine, Raz, or Stalnaker’s recent work, despite the fact that these philosophers produce work that is among the most admired by other philosophers. Similarly, one can’t imagine a New York Times article discussing new advances in e.g. actualist accounts of modality, epistemicist theories of vagueness, Humean accounts of reasons, or dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. It isn’t because this kind of work is narrowly analytical. It’s equally impossible to imagine the New York Times reporting on any of the topics discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (“Hot New Account of Autonomy Founders on Noumenal Mysteries”?). My suspicion is that journalists think that the American reading public can only tolerate philosophy that can be packaged in the format of a popular science bulletin. Much philosophy simply cannot be packaged in this mode. The result is that what is most likely to be conveyed in the popular press about what is ‘hot’ in philosophy is philosophy of a naturalistic bent, which does not always cohere with what many philosophers would regard as most interesting.