It’s holiday time which means seeing family and friends which means I might be asked the dreaded question that all philosophers and philosophers-in-training must face at various times in their life: “What do philosophers do?”
This question is put various ways;”There are still philosophers?,” “What are your sayings?,” etc. There are various misconceptions (my favorite comes from a colleague whose family asked him to say grace during the holidays because “he had been training for it”) and various strategies for avoiding the question, e.g. some of my colleagues claim to be mathematical logicians, which, I guess, makes their career immediately too uninteresting to inquire further about.
I’m not sure why we dread the question. I love my proposed career and my training for it, and I know most of my colleagues and professors do too, and when someone asks the “dreaded question” it gives me a chance to share that. Not only do I get to share my passion, I get to do some philosophy! Explaining what philosophy is and what philosophers do is just as philosophically interesting as any of the other questions philosophers typically grapple with, and reflecting on philosophical methodology is both frustrating, interesting, and unlikely to be settled in a single conversation. These are the kinds properties that philosophers drool over.
But, these same qualities might explain why philosophers dread being asked the question by their friends and family that are not philosophers. There is a disconnect between the kind of answer the audience expects and the kind of answer philosophers will want to give.
I can imagine that most of my family would like a short summary of what philosophers do, something they could explain to someone who asked “what is John doing in graduate school?” This is not the kind of answer we are likely to give, or even to aim at.
In response to an in-laws confusion of anthropology and philosophy, I once wrote an answer to the question for my (to be) mother-in-law (I even translated it to Spanish!). Ev took one look at it and said, “she isn’t going to read all that.” Not just because it was four pages (ish) long but also because it started out saying why it was hard to say what exactly philosophy was because that itself was a philosophical question. I had to agree with Ev that it probably wouldn’t be the most enjoyable read for her mom, but it was an honest and heartfelt answer to the question and that was the kind of answer I was compelled to give.
Still, I understand what people want when they ask the question and I think having an answer that meets those expectations is important. Having a short, simple answer would not only satisfy family and friends but also might do a lot for the profession of philosophy. As a recent conversation at Leiter’s blog highlights, philosophers are misunderstood in the population at large. While the debate there is about how much to blame the American Philosophical Association, philosophers are not guilt free. We don’t do enough of our own PR and a good first step would be a good answer to the dreaded question.
A good answer to the dreaded question would also be invaluable in teaching philosophy to students who aren’t already familar with the discpline. I’ve TA’d for professors who have started out class by giving a short account of what philosophy is and what philosophers do and others who have started out a class describing the difficulty in defining exactly what philosophers do. While the latter approach tugs a bit at my heart since it is open and honest about the difficulties of defining even our own discipline, the former approach is the approach that got me hooked on philosophy. Rather than making me feel confused and frustrated at the prospects of answering philosophical questions, it gave me hope and defined a method and discpline that I was excited to get to know.
My first philosophy class (moral philosophy with Ron Sandler) started with something like the following:
Reasons, arguments, justifications, and evidence. Together these are the philosophical method; the tools philosophers use to answer the non-empirical questions in all domains of human inquiry…
This characterization certainly suffers from vagueness, ambiguity, and the lot. But, to a student who didn’t know what any of that was, it was a discpline committed to rigorous answers to interesting questions.
I’ve since used a version of this speech in my own teaching and many students have confirmed to me that it made philosophy exciting and interesting for them. A senior in my class once told me at the end of a class that if he had heard that speech his freshman year, he would certainly have resided in the philosophy department. For me, this was enough to fully convince me to give the short answer despite its shortcomings.
I’m still developing my short answer to the dreaded question, but I’m committed to being able to give one. What’s your answer to the dreaded question?
10 Comments
I tell them “philosophy” is Greek for “love of wisdom,” but since they can’t be expected to love what they do not know, we’ll just call it “study of wisdom.” Obviously, one can pursue wisdom about all kinds of things (if I were less Southern and middle-aged, I might even borrow a subject from the press coverage of this year’s Eastern APA), even about the study of wisdom itself. Then I refer them to my classic paper, “What’s It Like to Be a Philosopher-Mom?” (above) so they can see how practical and useful philosophy is.
I like Sandler’s explanation, though, and am already planning to incorporate it into my Biz Ethics intro on Thursday. Since my enrollment this semester is roughly 50 percent senior engineers, it ought to at least sound translatable.
Kalynne,
Thanks for the comments. I like the study of wisdom idea but always worry that it invites students to think philosophy is like sitting around a bonfire talking nonsense about big ideas (which may in the end be accurate!). I can see how in combination with your essay, this impression would be quickly dispelled (great essay by the way…I didn’t see a link to it in your comment so interested parties can find it at: http://phdwithninekids.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-it-like-to-be-philosopher-mom.html).
Cheers.
Blackburn and Midgley draw useful comparisons (philosophy as “conceptual engineering”, philosophy as plumbing !).
I have used these texts in an introduction to philosophy course :
« The word “philosophy” carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird. I suspect that all philosophers and philosophy students share that moment of silent embarrassment when someone innocently asks us what we do. I would prefer to introduce myself as doing conceptual engineering. For just as the engineer studies the structure of material things, so the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involves seeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes were made. This is what we aim at when we investigate the structures that shape our view of the world. Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are. »
« To sum up: our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. »
Simon Blackburn, Think – A compelling introduction to philosophy, Introduction
« Is philosophy like plumbing ? […]
Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them. But, for both, existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start.
Neither system ever had a single designer who knew exactly what needs it would have to meet. Instead, both have grown imperceptibly over the centuries in the sort of way that organisms grow, and are constantly being altered piecemeal to suit changing demands as the ways of life above them have branched out. Both are therefore now very intricate. When trouble arises, specialized skill is needed if there is to be any hope of locating it and putting it right.
Here, however, we run into the first striking difference between the two cases. About plumbing, everybody accepts this need for trained specialists. About philosophy, many people – especially British people -, not only doubt the need, they are often sceptical about whether the underlying system even exists at all. It is much more deeply hidden. When the concepts we are living by work badly, they don’t usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking. »
Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers : Problems of Philosophical Plumbing, Routledge, 1996, p. 1-2
When I was studying philosophy as an undergraduate, my father couldn’t for some reason admit this socially (he wanted me to study medicine like him–he was a pathologist involved in cancer research). So he would tell people that I studied epistemology. Obscure enough that people would have no idea what it was, but sounded like it had gravitas (and perhaps rhymed with epidemology).
Cédric:
Thanks for posting those quotes. I’m not sure I like the “concepts are our lens” element of the Blackburn (pushy about a particular view of what philosophy is about), but I see that it might be useful. The Midgley bit is quite funny.
Mark:
That is great! I heard once of a similar move being made by claiming one was an ontologist (seems like they might study cancer but perhaps best not to ask).
These are all great — though I personally could no longer say I’m an epistemologist or ontologist, and if I say I’m an ethicist, people tend to think I’m Ann Landers: the Next Generation. I’m going to adopt Cedric’s “conceptual engineer,” because coupled with the established “domestic engineer,” I sound professionally formidable indeed. Or else just delusional.
Good coverage of the question “what do philosophers do?”.
Couldn’t agree with you (and Ron Sandler) more on the “reasons, arguments, justifications, and evidence” spread of philosophical inquiry.
And I think this characterization of philosophy as an inquiry into the most general of phenomena thus, accommodates analytical and experimental sides of philosophy quite well. It is a vague characterization, yet productive and promising.
I think they also start blogs – no?
That they do.