When forced to admit in polite company that I am a philosopher, I commonly receive one of two responses. The first is mild confusion or incredulity. This group tends to think of philosophy as the abstract contemplation of the “big questions” of human existence and judges this to be a useless and perhaps self-indulgent activity. This practically minded group often asks me to defend the contemporary relevance of philosophy, usually by reference to the economic, practical, or social benefits it might provide. The second type of response is more enthusiastic. This more open-minded group is keen to discuss questions of human significance and importance, and often asks me to do philosophy, in the sense of dispensing wisdom in a way that I am ill-equipped to do (at least on demand). Interestingly, both groups have different reactions to the same broad concept of “philosophy,” as reflecting on questions of deep human importance, which are somewhat independent of the narrow economic and practical concerns that often govern our everyday lives.Footnote 1
The standard party line from professional philosophers is that both groups are mistaken about what philosophy is and what the run-of-the-mill philosopher gets up to. Philosophy is an academic discipline like any other, engaged in a set of technical research questions that are inaccessible and uninteresting to the uninitiated. Offered this response, the open-minded group is perhaps disappointed to learn that academic philosophers are no better placed to dispense deep wisdom than academic geographers, historians, or scientists. In fact, this response is usually pitched to be more satisfying to the more practically minded group—perhaps because its members often control budgets and funding allocations.Footnote 2 Practical defences of the value of philosophy can offer a list of ways in which the discipline has, in fact, made substantial, concrete contributions to society and other domains of knowledge. Disciplines we now think of as practical and empirical—such as psychology or computational logic—emerged only relatively recently from the discipline of philosophy. The specialist analytic skills of professional philosophers can be turned to more practical topics, and Anglo-American philosophy has recently become more interested in applying philosophical insight to areas of social concern, from economics to environmental sustainability.
The problem with the party line is that it establishes a clear gap between what the public thinks philosophy is and what professional academic philosophers think it is. Once established, this gap makes it much more difficult for academics to articulate the value of philosophy to a wider public and tends to result in public philosophy being judged (by academics at least) as inferior when compared to academic philosophy. Contrary to the standard response, then, I want to suggest that both the open-minded and practically minded groups are in fact right about what philosophy is, even if they are wrong about what professional philosophers occupy themselves with. Philosophy is, or should be, concerned with thinking through those things that are most significant to our lived experience. In fact, I’ll argue that all of us are already engaged in doing philosophy in this sense, and that recognising this fact gives academic philosophers a pressing reason to engage in public philosophy.
I’ll start by presenting some contemporary defences of public philosophy, which I call “philosopher-first” accounts. These accounts assume that there is a gap between academic philosophy and the nonacademic public, and that the role of public philosophers is to overcome this gap by translating academic philosophy into publicly accessible terms. I argue that this account makes it quite difficult to understand the value of public philosophy (Section 1). In response, I’ll present an alternative account of public philosophy, which I call the “public-first” account. Versions of public-first accounts of philosophy can be found in the work of historical public philosophers, such as Mary Midgley and William James. On such an account, philosophy is not primarily of academic concern, but it is a necessary part of each of our lives, insofar as we rely on conceptual apparatus to navigate our physical and social worlds, and manage our sense of what is meaningful within them (Section 2.1). Professional philosophers do not produce philosophy, on this view, though they might be useful in analysing, maintaining, and fixing our conceptual apparatus. As such, the public-first account presents a very different picture of the value of philosophy to the public (Section 2.2). To end, I’ll provide a novel argument for the value of public philosophy. Drawing on a Jamesian thesis about the significance of temperament to philosophical inquiry, I argue that public philosophy should be thought of as valuable—perhaps even central—for the vitality of the discipline of philosophy itself (Section 3).
1. The philosopher-first view of public philosophy: Philosophers as prophets
Throughout its history, philosophy has been a side hustle. Spinoza’s day job was lens grinding; Anslem, Berkely, and Hildegard of Bingen were religious leaders; Locke, Hume, and J. S. Mill held administrative and political positions; Descartes was a solider who made money as a trader; Wollstonecraft was a writer, activist, and mother.Footnote 3 As George Santayana puts it: “that philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly.”Footnote 4 However, over the past century or so, Anglo-American and European philosophers have been busy professionalising their discipline on the model of the natural sciences. Clear boundaries between philosophy and other disciplines were established, and sub-disciplines within philosophy were identified, each with a specific set of research questions. Philosophers canonised vocabularies and methodologies, and discussed philosophy with each other in technical papers published behind the paywall of academic journals. A natural result of such professionalisation was that academic philosophy became increasingly insular, and as the inquiries of philosophers became more technical and specific, they moved farther away from the kinds of questions that interest non-philosophers.Footnote 5
This professionalisation of philosophy has been broadly successful on its own terms. Specialisation has resulted in significant progress across a range of these specific sub-disciplines. However, modern philosophy is now a victim of its own success. Having worked hard to set themselves apart from other humanities disciplines and from issues of broad public interest, philosophers now find it difficult to articulate why their discipline is valuable to anyone else. This is a problem for several reasons. Pragmatically, modern philosophers find themselves working within a funding environment that prioritises “STEM” subjects and research with commercial applications or measurable “impact” outside of academia.Footnote 6 Compared to the natural sciences, on which the professionalisation of philosophy was modelled, it is less obvious what the ultimate practical upshot of philosophical inquiry is. Encouraging public interest in philosophy is one way of justifying the discipline against this background. In addition, academic philosophers have themselves begun to feel constrained by the disciplinary boundaries inherited from previous generations and are keen engage in more social research agendas and connect with other disciplines and nonacademic audiences. Connectedly, the world has numerous challenges and problems that philosophers (as human beings) care about. Once trained as an academic philosopher, it is natural to hope that this specialised knowledge and skill set are well placed to help solve these issues.Footnote 7
Therefore, what is the value of public philosophy? Given the pressures just mentioned, most philosophers interpret this question as meaning: “What is the value to the public of academic philosophy?” In response, academic philosophers might point to specific disciplinary knowledge that could have broader appeal, or to the suite of analytic skills that prepare them to untangle and adjudicate public discourse. On this view, philosophy takes place first within the halls of academia, and the public philosopher then applies it or makes it accessible outside of the academy, for the use or interest of a wider public. Typically, such public philosophy takes place through popular media, such as articles, books, lecture series, podcasts, and social media posts.
This is typically how major proponents of public philosophy describe their activity. William Irwin, series editor for Blackwell’s popular “And Philosophy” book series, jokingly describes the aim of those books as “spreading philosophy to the unenlightened” and, more seriously, as explaining “a broad range of philosophy and philosophers in a way that anyone could understand.”Footnote 8 Tom Morris, who gave up academic philosophy to pursue a lucrative career in public philosophy, describes his well-attended lectures as “bringing philosophy to public audiences.”Footnote 9 Jack Symes, philosopher and host of the popular Panpsychist podcast, suggests that “good public philosophy depends on good academic philosophy.” After all, he asks, “if academic philosophers aren’t making progress on the big questions, then what are public philosophers going to talk about?”Footnote 10 Similarly, Aaron James Wendland, Professor of public philosophy and curator of a series of public philosophy articles in the New Statesman magazine, holds that “public philosophy presupposes the esoteric work done by professional philosophers in universities” and that “academic expertise is the basis of public philosophy.”Footnote 11 This is also the way that sceptics of public philosophy present the relationship between philosophy and the public. Agnes Callard, for instance, suggests that “Philosophy is a bubble … [which] lives inside academia.” The activity of philosophy involves institutional requirements and training, and—unlike public philosophy—is neither useful nor pleasant. As public philosophy is tied to the “business or pleasure” dichotomy, we should hesitate to call it “philosophy” at all.Footnote 12
The common feature of these kinds of views is a certain direction of fit between the public and philosophers. Philosophy is first produced by philosophers in academic positions and then dispensed to the public in an accessible way. Let us call these “philosopher-first” views.Footnote 13 The telling, and slightly self-serving, analogy sometimes appealed to is Plato’s cave. Most of us are familiar with Plato’s allegory: a group of people are chained in a cave, facing the wall. Having never known any better, the prisoners mistakenly believe that the shadows cast upon the wall of the cave are real objects. That is until one of the prisoners frees themselves (we are not told how) and makes it outside of the cave. There, they see the real objects that are the cause of the cave’s shadows. This escapee represents the philosopher. Having obtained true knowledge of reality, the philosopher selflessly elects to re-enter the cave and persuade those still chained there of the veracity of what they have seen. On this analogy, then, the public philosopher is like a prophet, possessed of esoteric knowledge and courageously returning to the cave to educate those less enlightened.Footnote 14 Most public philosophers do not see themselves in anything like such a dramatic fashion, but the analogy is telling because of the direction of fit it assumes: the philosopher is placed in a privileged epistemic position in relation to the public, who lack the knowledge the philosopher can impart.Footnote 15
A lurking threat stalks all philosopher-first accounts of public philosophy. These accounts presuppose a gap between the interests and knowledge of the public and the interests and knowledge of the professional philosopher. The public philosopher’s job is to bridge this gap by translating the insights of academic philosophy into language that is accessible to the public.Footnote 16 As such, public philosophy always entails the possibility of mistranslation; the risk that something essential to real philosophy is lost or corrupted in the attempt to make it accessible. Philosophers display more or less extreme reactions to this threat. Examples of the most extreme kinds of reactions can be found in the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Heidegger was suspicious of the constraints that public discourse and modes of thought placed on individual authenticity, and thought that becoming widely intelligible was “suicide for philosophy.”Footnote 17 Nietzsche similarly thought that “books for the general public always smell foul.”Footnote 18 On the less extreme end, contemporary public philosopher Lee McIntyre presents the distinctive challenge of public philosophy as doing justice to the philosophical issues whilst also making them accessible to nonacademic audiences.Footnote 19 There is the risk, then, that we do not do justice to the philosophy, that we in fact cheapen it or “dumb it down” in the translation.
I’m not interested here in arguing against what I have called philosopher-first accounts of public philosophy. As I’ll go on to discuss in the next section, it seems quite plausible to me that the knowledge and approaches of professional philosophy might sometimes be to the benefit of the wider public. My aim here is to say that even if true, it is only half the story. We should replace or at least supplement the philosopher-first account with what I will call the “public-first” account. Rather than drawing from Plato’s analogy of the cave, public-first accounts might instead take inspiration from Plato’s mentor Socrates. The forefather of Western philosophy, Socrates, claimed no specialised knowledge or epistemic authority, published no works, and did his philosophy solely through engaging non-philosophers in public conversation.Footnote 20 On today’s academic job market, Socrates would not get a second look.Footnote 21 In the next section, I’ll elaborate on what this “public-first” account might look like (Section 2), before suggesting that it might be vital to the discipline of philosophy to be publicly engaged in this way (Section 3).
2. The public-first view of public philosophy: Philosophers as plumbers
The story I’ve just told about the professionalisation and concurrent isolation of academic philosophy is a little unnuanced. Throughout this period, there have also been philosophers who pushed back against this professionalising tendency. Two prominent traditions that did so were the classical American pragmatists and the group of British philosophers now known as the “Wartime Quartet.”Footnote 22 In this section, I will draw from these traditions—and more specifically, from the American pragmatist William James (1842–1910) and British philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018)—to articulate a “public-first” account of public philosophy. I’ll first identify two core metaphilosophical commitments (Section 2.1) before moving on to present the public-first account (Section 2.2).
2.1. What philosophy does: Two pragmatist commitments
To present the “public-first” account of public philosophy with any clarity, I will first have to explain a little about the pragmatist tradition I am drawing from. Worse, I will have to articulate two metaphilosophical points, that is to say, two points about what we are doing when we are doing philosophy. However, I suspect that—at least to those not already corrupted by academic philosophy—these points will be broadly uncontentious.
The first metaphilosophical point concerns the nature of philosophical concepts and theories. According to the pragmatist tradition, for a concept (or theory) to have meaning, it must have some practical effect. That is to say, we must be able to say what practical difference it would make if the object of our thought were to be true or false. All pragmatists hold some version of this thought, which is often referred to as the “pragmatic maxim.”Footnote 23 Understood negatively, the maxim disappoints a certain kind of philosopher by ruling out purely abstract concepts with no practical correlates. If, when we apply the pragmatic maxim, we find that we are discussing concepts that have no conceivable practical or experiential effects, then we can reject those concepts as meaningless. Understood more positively, the maxim encourages philosophers to articulate concepts in ways that foreground their practical effects and clarify those concepts by making them more measurable and applicable.
The second metaphilosophical point concerns the nature of philosophy and those who engage with it. For James, and many other pragmatists, philosophy is not (just) the kind of thing that goes on in academic seminar rooms, but rather something that governs our everyday lives. Think about it like this. The world of our experience is rich and chaotic, and without a set of concepts to help interpret and navigate that experience, we would be practically paralysed. Put bluntly, concepts are tools we use for interpreting and navigating the chaotic reality we find ourselves in. Some of these conceptual tools are inherited from and shared with our wider social community, some of them will be particular to us, having emerged in response to our own temperaments and experiences. As such, each of us has some philosophical outlook that we carry with us (as James puts it) “under [our] hat.”Footnote 24 This outlook will influence our experience of and action within the world by shaping our expectations of future experiences, the possibilities we believe the world allows us, and the meaning our actions can have within that world. We rely on—and sometimes reflect on—these philosophical outlooks when we make decisions about how to relate to others, how to live a good life, or what kind of person we want to be.Footnote 25 As a result, these philosophical outlooks have real practical implications and can cause significant problems when they go wrong.Footnote 26 Philosophy, understood pragmatically, is unavoidable. Our choice is not between having a philosophy or not having one, but between having an examined and consistent philosophy and having an unexamined and inconsistent one.Footnote 27
Taken together, these two metaphilosophical commitments already disincentivise a picture of philosophy as primarily occurring in academic institutions. Philosophy is something which each of us relies on as we interpret and act within the world. To use a blunt analogy, philosophy is no more the concern of philosophers than economics is the sole concern of economists. It may well be beneficial to have a branch of people who specialise in analysing economic forces and who might be called upon if we need to understand or improve the economy. But the economy would still happily carry on without economists. Economists do not produce the economy, or rather, insofar as they act within the social world, they contribute to the economy in more or less the same way as everyone else does. Analogously, it might be useful to have a branch of people who specialise in analysing the concepts and theories that underpin our interpretation of the world—our “philosophies.” But philosophy would still happily carry on without philosophers. New concepts would be created to meet new needs, existing concepts would be applied or extended to new areas of experience, and people would continue interpreting and interacting with reality on the basis of their conceptual schemes. Philosophers do not produce philosophy, or rather, if they do, they do so in more or less the same way as everyone else—as human beings interpreting, reflecting, and acting within the world.Footnote 28
I do not want to over-egg my point here. Professional philosophers have been given the privilege of studying philosophy and thinking philosophically as a job. This (hopefully) means that they are in a better position to provide consistent and logically robust concepts and conceptual systems, and to map out the practical benefits and difficulties of our conceptual apparatus. But being technically proficient at philosophical analysis does not put professional philosophers any closer to the truth of the matter, or mean that the theories and concepts they advocate will be found widely satisfactory. I’ll discuss this point in more detail below (Section 3). For now, I’d like to say something more concrete about the public-first account of public philosophy (Section 2.2).
2.2. What philosophy is: From prophets to plumbers
I argued above (Section 1) that one of the defining features of the philosopher-first account of public philosophy is that it presumes a significant separation between philosophy, as done by academic philosophers, and the concerns of the wider public. What I am calling the public-first account, on the other hand, holds that there is a clear continuity between what goes on in academic seminar rooms and what goes on “under the hats” of regular people as they navigate the world. So, can we provide an account of philosophy that covers these two seemingly disconnected activities? Here is my attempt.
In his last (unfinished) philosophy textbook, Some Problems of Philosophy, James distinguished between “philosophy” in a thick and a thin sense. In the thin sense, philosophy describes the technical inquiries into the questions that occupy academic philosophers. Philosophy in the thick sense of the term, on the other hand, refers to what James calls an “intellectualised attitude towards life.” Philosophy in this thick sense must be lived—must shape our actions, interpretations, and expectations. It is in this sense that we can say that philosophy is unavoidable. We all live according to some philosophy or other.Footnote 29
Both thick and thin types of philosophy are (in principle) responsive to reasons. James calls philosophy an attitude, in the sense that having a philosophy means having a practical disposition to perceive, interpret, and respond to the world in certain ways. But philosophies are intellectualised attitudes, in that they are not grounded solely in emotional dispositions, but in conceptual schemes that are in principle accessible to reflection and criticism, and so subject to change. This marks the key difference between someone’s philosophy and something like an ideology, which is not rationally assessable. We can see this in the ways we naturally respond to each other in discussion. Encountering another’s philosophical outlook gives rise to rational conversation and the practice of giving and asking for reasons. The cynic does not just have a disposition to look on the bleak side of life; they have reasons for why they think it is right for them to view the world in this way. And we respond in kind, with questions and provocations that we hope might counter their reasons and change their mind. If our personal and shared philosophical outlooks were not reason-responsive, this practice would be as unproductive as trying to have a rational conversation about pizza-topping preferences.
There is a clear continuity, then, between academic (“thin”) and lived (“thick”) senses of philosophy. The evaluative standards for each are quite similar. Our lived philosophies are likely to be imperfect, flawed, unsupported, and contradictory in places—precisely because they emerged haphazardly in response to human experience, rather than through careful abstract thought. But ideally, we aim for them to be well reasoned, coherent, and self-consistent. These are the same standards we aim for in academic philosophy. Indeed, these criteria are more vital when it comes to lived philosophies—as our dealings with the world and with others are guided by our conceptual schemes, we have good reason for wanting them to be coherent: we do not want to run into serious error or disappointment in our lives.
If you find the picture of philosophy sketched here at all convincing, then you will hopefully be dissuaded from the Platonic image of the public philosopher as a kind of prophet, in a position of epistemic authority over a public in need of enlightenment. The public-first view argues for an opposite direction of fit; academic philosophy is a technical and abstracted version of something we naturally do, rely upon, and discuss in our daily lives.Footnote 30 Real philosophy is out there, in the world, and it is academic philosophy that is supplementary. But if the public are already doing philosophy, then what use do they have for professional philosophers? And if professional philosophers aren’t prophets, then what are they?
A humbler and more practical role for philosophers is presented by Mary Midgley. According to Midgley, we should think of philosophers under the analogy of plumbers.Footnote 31 Underpinning our shared social world is a complex maze of conceptual “pipes”: a shared set of myths, assumptions, convictions, common-sense ideas, judgements, and norms. Just like our domestic plumbing, and the public sewage system it connects to, we tend to avoid thinkingabout these conceptual foundations when they are working adequately. However—again like the plumbing system—no one consciously planned our conceptual infrastructure, and it emerged piecemeal over many generations in response to certain problems or experiences. As a result, the system is poorly connected, old, and liable to go wrong in difficult-to-detect ways. Problems in our conceptual infrastructure might, at first, reveal themselves subtly, through distorted or restricted thought. As we are used to relying on this thought in our daily interactions, issues can be difficult to detect and diagnose, let alone fix.Footnote 32 Eventually, however, if neglected for too long, such problems might lead to conceptual crises, the equivalent of exploding pipes and flooding.
Anyone who was unaware of the extent of our plumbing infrastructure and the problems that can arise when it goes wrong might think that someone who chooses to dedicate their lives to studying plumbing is slightly odd. But as soon as the pipes burst, we recognise it is vital to have a class of people specialised in diagnosing and fixing plumbing problems. In a similar way, people who dedicate themselves to the study of philosophy seem to be engaging in an esoteric and removed practice, until we identify their subject matter and skill set as practically applicable to solving conceptual problems. The public-first account reverses Plato’s cave analogy. Seen as plumbers, it is philosophers who are “underground,” busily examining the conceptual plumbing that everyone else takes for granted, and only occasionally returning to the light of reality to identify problems that need fixing, or to see whether their conceptual tinkering has improved anything. As such, they must maintain regular contact with those who rely upon this conceptual plumbing, as it is they who are best placed to identify the problems that occur. Professionalisation has encouraged philosophers to see the study of conceptual plumbing itself as of primary importance, and possible relations to the public world as of only secondary relevance. This is an error: philosophy’s centre of interest cannot be so far removed from the real world that philosophers cannot roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty when some conceptual pipes burst.
One of the things we might worry that Midgley’s plumber metaphor misses is the role that philosophers play in generating new ideas. For this reason, we might switch the metaphor to thinking of engineers, carpenters, or coders.Footnote 33 These kinds of craftspeople routinely apply their specialist skills to fixing and maintaining useful parts of the infrastructure we rely on. But they also, when required, produce new objects for public or individual use. The truly talented among them might produce works of great original, practical, or aesthetic value, which subsequent generations come to rely on and admire. In the same way, talented philosophers might produce new conceptual resources or construct elaborate systems of thought that are by themselves original and beautiful. This is to understand “philosopher” as meaning original thinker.
New conceptual resources—or creative redeployment of existing resources—are often needed. Sometimes these emerge organically within social life. At other times, some original thinker might produce some new concept, theory, or intellectual movement that shapes the social world. But there is no reason to think that such original thinkers should be, or are even likely to be, academic philosophers. Academic philosophy can teach philosophy in the sense of craft—it can enable people to recognise good (and bad) conceptual workmanship, and to tweak or repair problematic conceptual resources. But it cannot impart originality of vision or purpose—and in fact often stifles it. Midgley tells us that great philosophy requires the vision of the poet and the logical reasoning of the lawyer, but that professionalisation encourages the latter at the expense of the former.Footnote 34 This is not necessarily a bad thing. Original ideas might come from activities, innovations, and movements outside of academia. The academic philosopher’s task will then be to analyse, finesse, and shore up these new resources, the necessary but boring business of doing the “disciplined, detailed thinking” that must go along with employing new conceptual innovations.Footnote 35
To clarify what we mean by conceptual plumbing, let us consider an example. In several countries across the globe, through a variety of legal means, nature’s rights have been recognised to protect vulnerable ecosystems from human destruction or exploitation.Footnote 36 Whilst environmental campaigners, policymakers, lawyers, and others begin to use these new ecological rights, it is up to philosophers to urgently examine and secure their conceptual underpinnings. Ecological rights need to be “linked up” to the rest of our network of rights: existing theories and defences of rights need to be adapted to support these new ecological rights, or new defences need to be developed; abstract terminology needs to be clarified and interpreted; tensions between new and existing rights need to be mapped out; questions of justification and legitimacy of representation need to be explored. Careful and diligent conceptual tinkering is required to provide this new social institution with the necessary conceptual infrastructure. Without this philosophical plumbing, ecological rights will not have the conceptual support that other rights enjoy, and so will be vulnerable to being misinterpreted, misapplied, or overturned.Footnote 37
So far, the “public-first” account of the value of public philosophy has presented a less aggrandising but hopefully more convincing account of the social role professional philosophers can play. Philosophers—like plumbers or economists—are specialists focused on analysing, fixing, and hopefully improving the necessary infrastructure of our shared social world.Footnote 38 However, this picture also gives us a hint as to why public philosophy is vital for the discipline of philosophy. Maintaining regular contact with those who use the conceptual apparatus that philosophers analyse prevents philosophy from becoming stagnant and irrelevant. In the next section, I will make this argument more explicitly, through appeal to James’s account of temperaments.Footnote 39
3. A temperamental argument for public philosophy
William James did the majority of his philosophy in public. Through public lectures and popular books, James addressed his novel philosophical work to the “seriously inquiring amateur” rather than to professional philosophers.Footnote 40 This bucked the emerging trend within Harvard and other North American institutions. Far from aiming to make philosophy accessible, James’s newly professionalised colleagues were keen to present philosophy as an “esoteric and occult science” and demonstrated a “genuine fear of popularity” as if being understood were synonymous with being shallow.Footnote 41
James offered two reasons for doing philosophy in public. First, philosophy concerns reflection on issues of central interest to every self-reflective human being. It is therefore pernicious for the public for philosophy to become siloed and removed from wider discourse. This, as we have seen, is a common argument for public philosophy. Second, and more uniquely, however, James also thought that public philosophy was required for the health of the discipline of philosophy itself. The “over-technicality and consequent dreariness” of academic philosophy represented a “failure.”Footnote 42 The narrowing of focus that followed professionalism was fatal for philosophy, as it marked a break from its real subject matter: lived human experience.Footnote 43 James’s point here is primarily epistemic. Philosophical inquiry that keeps contact with lived human experience and with “the open air of human nature” is kept “closer to truth’s natural probabilities.”Footnote 44 James does not defend this idea in detail, but I think we can reconstruct an argument for this position from his writings.Footnote 45
One of the benefits of the two pragmatist commitments I highlighted earlier (Section 2.1) is that when concepts are clarified by identifying the practical effects that would follow from their objects being true, then we can test their validity by seeing whether these effects do in fact obtain. For James, one important place to test such philosophical concepts is in lived experience. After all, philosophical concepts and theories are tools—and to be satisfactory, they must work in the sense of allowing us to successfully navigate reality. A belief or theory being “true” in the pragmatist sense means nothing more than being satisfactory in the “long run” of human experience, such that we never have an experience that caused us to doubt or revise it.Footnote 46
For any philosophical theory, concept, or idea to be satisfactory, it must meet two criteria. First, it must be accurate, in the sense of according with observable facts about the world. Second, it must be meaningful, in the sense of being able to guide and make sense of human action. Any philosophical theory that met only one of these criteria would be deficient.Footnote 47 James’s frequently returned-to example is determinism—or the view that all our actions are determined by physical facts in the world. Such a philosophy would accord with observable facts in the world, but would give us little reason to act within it and might lead to depression and a sense of meaninglessness.Footnote 48 As such, determinism is an unsatisfactory theory. Similarly, a philosophical outlook on which benevolent forces of the universe would make all our wishes come true may be meaningful to some, but would likely lead to constant errors, difficulties, and impediments when confronted with reality.
This creates a potential problem for any inquiry that aims to find the truth. After all, human beings are quite heterogeneous and tend to find different things interesting or meaningful. If a satisfactory philosophical theory is meant to be responsive not only to facts about independent reality but also to the concerns and interests of human beings, finding agreement appears impossible. Take determinism again. Someone with a pessimistic temperament might find determinism meaningful, as it reinforces their sense that no human action can really change the world. Someone with a more active, optimistic temperament might find the very same theory claustrophobic and alienating. Throughout history, philosophers have tended to downplay or ignore the role that their temperamental feelings play in informing which theories they find plausible, but for James, this unacknowledged role of temperament explained the persistence of disagreement. The history of philosophy, in his famous phrase, was a “clash of human temperament.”Footnote 49 Like a married couple squabbling over whose turn it is to do the dishes, whilst philosophical disagreement might appear to be about some particular issue or argument, it often hinges on deep and unacknowledged feelings under the surface that inform our sense of what is important, meaningful, or plausible.
How might we resolve such deep-seated clashes between philosophical options? By doing more public philosophy. This is why, I suggest, public philosophy was so central to James’s own philosophical practice. Whilst James argues that temperaments and feelings have a necessary role when assessing the satisfactoriness of philosophical theories, he at no point claims that it is the temperaments of philosophers themselves that denote this satisfactoriness. It is not hard to argue that those drawn to the professional practice of philosophy might not represent the full gamut of human temperament and experience. Philosophers are typically excited by subtle problems and abstract concerns, highly sensitive to fine conceptual distinctions, have an abundance of time and attention to gift to long and meandering arguments, and are driven primarily by intellectual concerns. Philosophers, in short, are quite odd creatures. Engaging with public philosophy is thus a useful corrective for the potential distortions of narrow philosophical temperaments, experiences, and interests. Addressing his audience at a public lecture, James says this:
We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings on your part. In the last resort … it will be by them that all our philosophies shall ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.Footnote 50
This gives academic philosophers a concrete epistemic reason to engage in public philosophy, where our ideas can be tested within a richer range of human experience and temperament. A satisfactory philosophical theory must not only satisfy the concerns and purposes of philosophers but must be applicable and useful across a wide range of human experience. By being responsive only to the limited temperaments and experiences of professional philosophers, we make our philosophy at best the preferred view of some “partial sect.”Footnote 51 Good philosophical inquiry requires verifying our ideas within the experience of as large and diverse a community of inquiry as possible.Footnote 52
But wait. Doesn’t broadening the range of experiences that our philosophical theories are meant to be responsive to mean that we are less likely to find agreement? After all, it was hard enough to find a satisfactory theory when we only had to account for the temperamental inclinations of our fellow philosophers. If our philosophical theories must be responsive to the feelings of every person within the wider community, then surely our inquiry could never even in principle reach a conclusion. I suspect that this is where a focus on temperaments rather than on the feelings and experiences of individuals becomes important. The fact that my philosophical theory is found unsatisfactory by my crazy Uncle Fred, who espouses ludicrous conspiracy theories and experimented a little too much in the 70s, should not concern me. But if my philosophical theory was to be found unsatisfying by everyone who shares a particular temperamental inclination—by everyone who is optimistic, for instance—then my theory is clearly deficient. Temperaments are not the arbitrary feelings of individuals, but the deep dispositional states common across a personality type, or way of living. As such, if our philosophical theory fails to satisfy people of a particular temperament, then it will always remain unsatisfactory to a wide swathe of the community of inquiry.
4. Final Thoughts
Where have we got to? I have suggested that the professionalisation of academic philosophy has resulted in a gap between what philosophers take philosophy to be and what the public takes philosophy to be (see the Introduction). Philosophers have themselves become enamoured by a picture of their discipline as a special science, producing unique knowledge through technical inquiry. This encourages what I have called the “philosopher-first” view of public philosophy, in which philosophers first produce knowledge and subsequently disseminate that knowledge to the public. The analogy that captures this account best is that of the philosopher as a Platonic prophet, returning to the cave to enlighten those still trapped in ignorance. But this view of public philosophy has an inherent problem—the assumed gap must be overcome by convincing the public of the value of academic philosophy, and by translating the insights of technical philosophy into more accessible language. This, in turn, naturally gives rise to concerns about mistranslation and the corruption of philosophy (Section 1).
Rather than attempting to overcome a gap between philosophy and the public, this article has offered an account on which there is no such gap. I have called this the “public-first” view. On this view, philosophy is an indispensable and unavoidable part of everyday life. Everyone has a philosophy in the sense of a—partially shared, partially individualised—conceptual scheme by which they interpret and navigate the world around them. The subject matter and evaluative criteria of academic philosophy are not in principle different from these conceptual underpinnings of the social world (Section 2.1). The public-first view encourages a more practical picture of the philosopher. On Midgley’s analogy, philosophers are like conceptual plumbers who are specialised in maintaining our shared conceptual infrastructure. If this view diminishes the stature of the philosopher somewhat, it offers compensation by presenting a clear picture of the public value of philosophers. When our individual or shared conceptual infrastructure is threatened with breakage, blockage, or strain—or indeed if new extensions to our conceptual system need to be introduced—philosophers are best placed to help (Section 2.2).
The public-first view also helps show why public philosophy is valuable—perhaps central—to the discipline of philosophy itself. If there is no great divide between academic philosophy and the public, then we can seek to understand and assess philosophical theories by opening philosophical inquiry to more public audiences. To argue this, I have drawn from the work of public philosopher and pragmatist William James (Section 3). According to James, there are strong epistemic reasons for philosophers to be more publicly engaged. If philosophers are really interested in testing the truth of their claims, there is no better way of doing so than testing those positions in public and exposing them to a broad range of temperaments and experiences. Any satisfactory philosophical theory must not only meet the intellectual standards of academic philosophers but also be found meaningful and practically applicable in lived human experience. In short, according to the public-first account, philosophy should be done in and with the public as a central part of philosophical practice, not to them as a supplementary afterthought.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: N.W.W.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Amber Donovan, Jeff Wilson, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.
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