I realised after thinking a bit about the long footnote/short article I shared the other day that I had at hand an example of the sort of small-group intellectual presumptuousness about which I wrote. A bit over a year ago, my partner & I started a small working group for woodshedding inchoate pre-papers in philosophy with other graduate students at the departments around us, workshopping the kinds of vague ideas you have that might or might not turn into publications down the line. This sort of thing is useful for airing out arguments when you’re not sure how well they’ll work or not, which is too high-pressure to do at the big conferences, but just doesn’t happen when you keep the ideas to yourself. For some reason there wasn’t already one in our immediate vicinity, and the heterogeneity of the departments around here made it seem as if it would be difficult to make sure we all had something in common to talk about.
It’s very hard to keep these kinds of groups on topic, and their usefulness requires striking a tricky balance between supportiveness & (friendly!) agonism. In order to focus conversations and stipulate our way to some common ground, we drafted a very silly & not at all original account of what we claimed philosophy did (it seems very Oxford in hindsight), and in order to try to get to both inclusiveness & real productiveness in conversations we came up with some equally stringent & whimsical rules. I wouldn’t encourage you to read any of this too closely, as it was never edited, and intended in the spirit of experiment more than anything else, but hopefully it proves at least a little interesting as an early if slipshod example of trying to put this sort of idea into practice. In particular don’t read the memo as anything but a vague demonstration—it did wind up producing a paper, but one I’ll hopefully be able to share once it’s through being revised for reviewers’ comments.
And of course if you’re an ‘early-career’ philosophy/political theory/etc. academic, grad student, researcher who’d potentially like to be in some renewed version of this group, feel free to hit me up at the email in my Twitter bio.
How to do philosophy with other people:
1. What is it that philosophy does?
Philosophy explicates how the things which we find ourselves saying implicate, require or exclude certain other things, some of which may have previously gone unsaid. By `things' we could mean concepts, words, sentences, propositions; what's important, here, is that we might be able to say (and, in some accounts, also think) them. And that ‘or’ is not an exclusive or, nor does the list claim to exhaust the relations in which these things might find themselves.
To make it a little more concrete: when we ask ourselves what's right or what's wrong in the case of a moral dilemma, we are interested in how to parse the particulars so as to fit them with what it is for something to be right in general. Sometimes this elucidates further, practical/empirical, questions about the particulars relevant for coming upon our answer, and sometimes it entails revising our concept of what it is for something to be right, when the conclusion into which it here leads us strikes us as plainly at odds with what we feel to be the case. In either case, philosophy helped get us there.
When we find ourselves asking questions of `what is', for instance in the case of `what is gender', we similarly unravel not only our patterns of use, what it is to use it consistently, but our rationale for use; what this concept does for us, what it requires, how it squares with our other concepts, what might've called us into its use. We see these approaches glossed as conceptual analysis, pragmatic conceptual revision, conceptual amelioration, and conceptual genealogy, but they're all fundamentally of a kind. And when we're up to it, we can extend this inquiry into fashioning new concepts, too, for better serving the same purposes, or reworking our language to meet some stated end.
This is a means of holding ourselves to account for the things we say and do, by the only standards we have.
But that's not to overcomplicate things. All we need is a kind of sense of what it is to do philosophy along these lines. In truth it is just a long-winded description of concrete fashions in which one can think about thought, one that hopefully wraps up Plato with the Germans with our contemporaries. At this level, sociological and historical differences abstracted away, the ostensible continental-analytic division appears to reduce to a now largely out-of-date conception that analytics are disinterested in the Big Questions (though continentals remain disinterested in ‘how many hairs separate my father from baldness’), and differing preferences as to the origin of the component concepts and questions implicated, whether stylised sketches of the intuitions ostensibly guiding our use, or granular readings of the stipulative concept proffered by some dead guy which we presume is supposed to guide use.
2. Why do this with people?
Because it's the kind of thing you practise, and we're not practising it enough. We get a lot of practice reading and writing about others who practised it before our time (and we're better for it), but this is to doing philosophy as literary criticism is to literature. Certainly you're unlikely to be a brilliant writer having never read a work of literature. But it remains that becoming very good at reading literature is something else entirely from becoming a good writer.
Practice is hard when you lack explicit standards for the thing you're supposed to be getting better at. More so when you lack even a third-party's understanding of how you're presently failing. When asked about what was distinctive about Oxford philosophy (most of what we would today as identify, rightly or wrongly, as analytic) was, Hare shrugged and said it was principally about the method of teaching. A method of teaching based on the attempts of quasi-literate Englishmen to ape Plato's Socrates, Plato being the only non-English philosopher any of them had read. And with that another bridge between the continental and the analytic is built.
3. How might we go about this?
We'll present the questions we're trying to figure out and the things we want to say about them to one another. We'll do this in a reasonably self-contained way, so even if the debate is staged in terms of the literature, the assumption is made that none of this literature has been read before. The people not explicitly presenting these inquiries and preliminary arguments are supposed to figure out the ways in which they fail to make sense, or stick together, and challenge them publicly. We should be able to offer a very friendly and immediate, `why does this matter', or `I don't see how that follows'. If someone uses a term that seems obscure to you, you ought to be able to flag it when someone gets to a pause in the run of argument and ask for some clarification as to the kind of thing that might be meant. For this reason, the presentations ought to err on the side of being short and tightly structured, with the expectation that expanding on them will be something that we demand of one another.
From my experience running meetings in a business sort of context, I think it helps people to get something on paper to turn over beforehand. Yet it seems a poor use of time to simply read papers at one another. So for this reason I would suggest that a little memo is prepared on the inquiry, perhaps answering the following high-level questions:
What are you trying to figure out?
What's your hunch about it (if any)?
What concepts does this inquiry hinge on? How do you want to draw these concepts (from the literature--whose?, from intuitions--which ones?, from use--like what?)
What other might this matter for? Which is to say, motivate the inquiry.
And then a brief high-level sketch of steps in the proposed argument, or stages of inquiry. I'll attach a kind of speculative model.
Procedural suggestions:
If at all possible, brief memoranda ought to be sent out before meeting recapitulating the above high-level questions.
Questions should ideally be asked as they arise, at natural stopping points, and either briefly answered or noted (if too lengthy) and deferred.
Always cede the floor when someone interrupts you, even if you get cut off mid-thought.
Always cede the floor back after a minute at the very most when interrupting, even if you trail off mid-thought.
No piece, regardless if it’s previously scheduled, ought to be longer than perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes (not including interspersed discussion).
No question ought to be longer than a minute.
No assuming someone else has read something--anything, even the Apology.
If you talk about something you read, frame your intervention in terms of either a positive case for one of its arguments on terms other than its own, or in terms of an argument with it. This is to say, if it changed your mind, make it change others' minds by recapitulating it in a broadly self-standing fashion, and if it didn't, explain what’s wrong with it.
While attribution of technical terms is welcome, merely naming from whom you're taking them is not adequate without providing the summary you take to be relevant in context off what they're supposed to mean. Sometimes providing a self-standing account might be impossible, but this is usually a deficiency of the person about whom you're talking. If a full explication doesn't fit, specify just the restricted context in which you're using the term.
Be quick to say when you're not sure--have someone else mark your confusion down.
If you can think of a paper that appertains to the topic at hand, recommend it.
If you think someone's inquiry convinced you, say so.
If you think someone's inquiry ought to be expanded into a fuller work, say so.
Share the things you write with others.
If you’re so inclined, write responses to others' arguments, and present them next week.
Memo exemplar:
Inquiry:
The concept of ‘domination’. Namely, how the neo-Republicans are employing it. One particular confusion: it seems as if its users in contemporary philosophy are convinced that it’s necessarily wrong, or bad. But I’m unsure of on what grounds they came to that conclusion, which strikes me as particularly significant because their concept of domination wraps up lots of ordinary phenomena most find innocuous. And if it’s not necessarily wrong, or bad, why is it that they’re using the concept, i.e. what in particular is it supposed to be picking out?
Hunch:
Domination, in the broadest sense possible, is a form of thick description of someone or something possessing the ability to in-principle alter someone else’s choices, just in case we find the grounds on which they might alter these choices wrong, or we think the practical ways in which they might alter said choices might be bad. But these conceptions of domination pick up things we find morally benign, and domination theorists aren’t very willing to bite the bullet on their being cases of domination. So I suspect domination is just a sort of long-winded way of saying ‘the ability to affect someone’s choices in a way that isn’t procedurally justified’, or straight up just ‘in a way that isn’t good’. Which leaves us back at wondering, why am I using this concept at all, instead of talking about procedural justification & why this matters, or talking about when choices are good generically? I’m not so sure we need it—I think it often might be employed in a kind of sleight-of-hand, where I say ‘this is domination and ergo bad’, allowing us to skip the needed premiss in between and eliding the follow-up ‘on what conception of bad’.
Pertinent concepts:,
Domination–I’d like to briefly sketch it as, amalgamating several accounts from Pettit & Lovett, ‘power [to alter someone else’s set of choices] just in case that said power is [deliberatively isolated/not tracking the other person’s interests/arbitrary]’. Further account in the prez.
Motivation:
Domination does a lot of work in political philosophy, and a quickly increasing amount in my corner of it (Marxian). It’s very popular to talk about ‘structural domination’ now, as well as ‘impersonal domination’, and even ‘abstract impersonal structural domination’. But I’m concerned that it has the effect of hiding contentious normative claims in something like conceptually-analytic description of what is supposed to follow from ‘capitalism’.