A reader points out that the new opinion editor at the NYT has cancelled the various special topics blogs, including the awful "Stone" blog that was ostensibly about philosophy. (For earlier coverage of the "Stone" spectacle, see here, here, here and here.) For every decent blog column it ran over the years, there must have been at least a dozen weak or embarrassing ones. It also gave a highly misleading and selective sense of what philosophers work on, no doubt because of the hack moderating it, whose friends were over-represented as contributors.
The basic problem is that too many of those who want to do "public philosophy" aren't very good at philosophy, and, so unsurprisingly, their public philosophy is no better. The best public philosophy is by those who are really good philosophers who also have a talent for communicating their research with an educated public (think Tim Maudlin [NYU] or Hanna Pickard [Johns Hopkins]. No doubt that work will continue to appear, but fortunately the field will be spared the further embarrassment of mediocrities doing "public philosophy" under the NYT banner--as well as competent philosophers simply peddling their trendy and trite political ideas with a little philosophical garnish under the same imprimatur.
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