Category Archives: Essays

Grassroots philosophy

Posted by on April 9, 2013 4 comments

Jules Evans, co-organiser of the London philosophy club, charts the amazing rise of philosophy groups. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I first became involved with philosophy groups through my interest in Stoicism, as unlikely as that sounds. Stoic philosophy helped me through an emotional crisis in my early twenties, and I then looked around for other people who had been helped by ancient Greek philosophy. That led me to an online community of Stoics, called NewStoa.com. I helped organise a “gathering of the Stoics” on Marcus Aurelius’ birthday (April 26) in San Diego in 2010. The gathering brought together ordinary people interested in Stoicism from all over the world. However, it turned out that modern Stoics were often quite libertarian and prickly people, and building a “Stoic community” proved difficult. I decided that if philosophy was going to appeal to a broader segment of the population and become a genuine community, it would itself need to be broader and more pluralistic.

In late 2010, I heard about the London Philosophy Club, a group of people who met up to discuss philosophy once a month. I gave a talk at the club in November 2010, and became a co-organiser shortly afterwards. In the last two years, I’ve watched in wonder as our membership broke through the 1,000 mark, then the 2,000 mark – it’s now at 2,400, making us the second-biggest philosophy club in the world (the biggest is in New York, but they mainly organise cocktail nights. We’re not in any way competitive. Honestly.) We’ve hosted speakers including Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Ree and Robert Skidelsky – our Christmas speaker was Angie Hobbs. We also have a popular reading group, philosophy meals and drinks, and group discussions across London, including an idyllic picnic-debate in Hyde Park last spring on the ethics of torture.

Over the last two years, I’ve researched other grassroots philosophy groups for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, called “Philosophical Communities”. The picture I’ve built up is surprising, even for people within the scene. There are 850 groups on meetup.com that describe themselves as “philosophy groups”, in 384 cities and 25 countries, with a combined membership of 125,000. Some of those might stretch your definition of “philosophy”, but it’s still a striking amount. There are 229 ethics meetups, 528 Skeptic meetups, 126 feminist meetups, 60 Socrates Cafes, and 660 meetups dedicated to “intellectual discussion”. And, as I’ve discovered, there are many philosophy groups off the meetup map. There are around 200 Skeptic, atheist and Humanist groups around the United States. There are Cafe Philosophiques across France and Holland. There is the Philosophy in Pubs (PIPs) network, which has 15 groups around Merseyside and a total of 30 around the United Kingdom. There is Philosophy For All, set up by Anja Steinbauer, which has been organising philosophy talks, debates and walks in London since 1998. There are philosophy groups for retired people, run through the University of the Third Age or independently, like the venerable Pinner Philosophy Group in Harrow. There are philosophy cafes and societies on many student campuses. And there are radical ideas groups like Occupy London, who as I speak are recreating the Putney Debates.

And then there are the commercial organisers of ideas events. TED is now almost twenty years old and Intelligence Squared is ten years old, but in the last few years the “ideas event”market has become more crowded. In 2008, Alain de Botton and friends launched the School of Life in London, in imitation of Epicurus’ Garden. It’s since welcomed 50,000 people through its doors, and is launching branches in Australia, Holland, Brazil and beyond. In 2010, Tom Hodgkinson opened the Idler Academy in west London. Both the School of Life and the Idler organise philosophy workshops at festivals like Wilderness and Port Eliot. There are also festivals dedicated to ideas and philosophy, like the Battle of Ideas (launched in 2005), HowTheLightGetsIn (launched in 2008), the Month of Philosophy in Amsterdam, the Modena philosophy festival in Italy, and Recontres de Sophie in France.

Evidently, philosophy is flourishing beyond the walls of academia. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, philosophy has often flourished through informal groups of friends. As the sociologist Randall Collins wrote, “the history of philosophy is, to a considerable extent, the history of groups”. No sooner was philosophy born than it challenged traditional forms of community and gave rise to new forms, like the symposium of Socrates, the Garden of Epicurus or the cult of Pythagoras. When philosophy broke free of the Church in the fourteenth century, it spread through informal networks of friends, like the humanist circles of Erasmus or Salutati or the Platonic Academy of Ficino. The Enlightenment spread through the salons of Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin, the Junto of Benjamin Franklin and the Select Society of Smith and Hume. And socialism likewise spread, through the Doctor’s Club of the Young Hegelians, the Tchaikovsky circle of the Russian intelligentsia, or the Sunday booze-ups at Engels’ house in Primrose Hill.

The question of who was welcome in these networks was always contentious. In the Enlightenment, middle-class thinkers like Voltaire pushed their way into the circle through the sheer brilliance of their intellect, but there was always the risk they would be snubbed or even flogged by an elitist aristocrat. Women were typically excluded from the London debating clubs of the 18th century, so they set up their own clubs, like the Female Congress and Carlisle House Debates for Ladies Only. Working-class men and women weren’t welcome in Enlightenment coffeehouses, so they also set up their own groups in the pub, like the London Corresponding Society, while middle-class philanthropists set up clubs for them like the London Mechanics Institute or, in the US, the Lyceum and Chautauqua networks.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, however, philosophy became more formal and professionalised. Self-run working class mutual improvement clubs evolved into the Worker’s Education Association, which provided courses at Oxford University’s Ruskin College. Mechanics Institutes and extension colleges turned into universities (Birkbeck College grew out of the London Mechanics Institute). Academic philosophy became more specialised, and impenetrable for amateurs. Yet some clusters of non-academic philosophy stubbornly survived, like Asterix’ indomitable village resisting the Roman Empire. There were still, in the 1890s, figures like Tommy Davidson, the exuberant and stubbornly unacademic Scots-American thinker, who travelled across the US and Europe, joining and inspiring philosophy clubs wherever he went, including the Radical Club of Bronson Alcott, the Metaphysical Club of William James, the Aristotelian Society, and his own Fellowship of New Life.

It’s only in the last few years that philosophy groups have become a mass phenomenon. The reasons for their rise are complex. Melvyn Bragg, who I interviewed for my research project, suggests they are a consequence of the rise of the “mass intelligentsia”. Bragg points to the huge expansion of higher education since the 1960s, which he suggests has created a large minority with the capacity and desire to discuss ideas that were once the province of a small intellectual elite. As The Economist’s John Parker pointed out in a great 2008 article called “The age of mass intelligence”, the mass intelligentsia are defined by their willingness to spend their leisure consuming or discussing culture – hence the popularity of book clubs (a survey by Jenny Hartley estimated their membership at 50,000 in the UK in 2001), literary festivals (there are now roughly 300 literary festivals in the UK every year), museums and galleries (attendance rose by 100% from 2000 to 2010, according to the UK Statistics Agency), classical music (Classic FM is now the most popular commercial station in the UK), intelligent mass TV (particularly HBO), intelligent mass cinema (David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Charlie Kaufmann) and intelligent mass media, particularly online ideas podcasts and talks like TED, Philosophy Bites, This American Life and In Our Times.

The concept of the mass intelligentsia was, in fact, first put forward by Richard Flacks, a sociologist and member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to explain the mass campus uprisings that took place in universities in the 1960s. The concept was also used by the sociologist Daniel Bell, who suggested that the rise of the knowledge economy necessitated the expansion of universities and the creation of a “new intellectual class”, to work in the sciences, media and professions in the new knowledge economy. This new class, the mass intelligentsia, acquired on a mass scale many of the attributes of the former elite intelligentsia – a desire for authenticity, self-expression, sexual freedom and spiritual choice.

The rise of the mass intelligentsia has been a cause of deep concern for communitarians like Charles Taylor, who blames them for undermining traditional community values (particularly traditional religion). And yet the mass intelligentsia is not, as a class, quite as individualistic or selfish as Taylor supposes. They showed a desire, very early on, not just to destroy old forms of community, but also to create new forms, new experiments in living together, such as the commune, the happening, or the consciousness-raising circle. Sixties student radicals would sit around for hours, sometimes for days, in earnest ethical discussion about how to live well together. And they tried to extend the ethical conversation into society, through the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement. Tom Hayden, the philosophy graduate and principal author of the SDS’ Port Huron Statement, called for a new “participatory democracy”, in which the public were informed, engaged, and talking to each other. It was a vision close to John Dewey’s dream of a Great Society, where “neighbours on the street corner” could “converse freely with one another”.

If the mass intelligentsia is the demographic driver behind the contemporary emergence of philosophy groups, then the internet is the main technological driver. In the late 1990s, philosophy groups had to post notices on library boards and cafe windows to attract members. Now the London Philosophy Club posts its meetings on meetup, and within a day 100 people have signed up (not that they all necessarily turn up, but that’s another story). Sites like meetup.com and Facebook allow people interested in ideas (still a minority, alas) to find each other, get together, and form groups. The loneliness of the intellectual can be overcome, outside of academia.

The internet has made philosophy far more social and interactive. It has bridged the divide between the intellectual and the masses. In the 1940s, intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin or A J Ayer opined on the Third Programme, and the masses simply listened, their mouths agape. Now, through the internet, they can share, comment and create their own ideas, and host speakers at their own local clubs. Intellectual life has become ruddily democratic and boisterous. As David Brooks wrote: “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

The Skeptic movement is a good example of the anarchism of grassroots philosophy. Modern Skepticism was launched in the late 1970s by Paul Kurtz, an academic philosopher and Humanist inspired by John Dewey’s vision of public philosophy. Kurtz feared America was sinking beneath a flood of irrational New Age beliefs, and wanted to promote critical thinking in mass society. In 1976, he founded an organisation of fellow Skeptics, called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). The members were mainly white, male academics, along with the occasional magician. In the 1980s, CSICOP started to establish some grassroots organisations around the US and other countries. The grassroots Skeptic movement slowly grew, and then exploded in the last few years, thanks to podcasts, blogs and social networking sites. There are now 41 Skeptics in the Pubs groups in the UK – the newest, in Soho, just opened yesterday. As Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, told me: “Skepticism is now a grassroots movement. No one is in control.” Not even Paul Kurtz, who by the end of his life was perplexed by the aggressively atheist direction the Skeptic movement had gone.

The grassroots philosophy movement has sometimes locked horns with academic philosophy. Alain de Botton, who has done a lot to promote the idea of philosophy beyond academia, often criticises academic philosophy for ignoring practical questions of how to live well. Many academics, by contrast, simply have no idea of the grassroots movement, or if they do, they may consider it unserious and amateur. Yet the mutual animosity is gradually dissipating, as both sides recognise they need each other: academic philosophy without street philosophy risks becoming irrelevant, while street philosophy without academic philosophy risks becoming incoherent. Supporting grassroots philosophy groups can be a way for universities to revive their traditions of extension and liberal adult education, and to reaffirm their identity as places where life’s big questions are discussed.

Secondly, grassroots philosophy could be better supported with digital resources. Meetup.com, Facebook and Twitter are incredibly useful, but there’s a surprising lack of material on the internet about grassroots philosophy, such as videos or podcasts. As part of my project, I’ve launched a website called The Philosophy Hub, which will have a global map for people to find or register their local philosophy group, as well as other free resources for groups to use. Universities could also be encouraged to put more of their talks and seminars online, where groups can access them. Grassroots philosophy has already got onto the radio (through Radio 4‘s The Philosophers Arms) but it would be great to see it on TV too.

Thirdly, we could develop better philosophy events. We’ve come a long way, with the launch of philosophy festivals like HowTheLightGetsIn. But we could develop the “live philosophy” format further: events could be more entertaining, taking a leaf from Skeptic events like The Night of 400 Billion Stars, which combines science, music and comedy. They could be more multi-media and immersive. And they could certainly be more interactive and participatory. It would be great to have a national event that brought philosophy groups together, and then to expand that into an international event.

Finally, I would suggest that the mass intelligentsia – and philosophy groups in particular – could re-find the sense of social purpose that they had in the 1960s, and that earlier incarnations of the intelligentsia possessed. Roman Krznaric, one of the founding faculty members of the School of Life, says: “The main task of philosophy clubs is to turn into collective movements of social change, which are capable of tackling the great problems of our age. If we just obsesses about our own lifestyles, I don’t think we’ll get very far.” Philosophy clubs are wonderful places to meet up and talk, but can they also be vehicles for social action? I hope so.

Jules Evans is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations and the founder of www.thephilosophyhub.com. He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org.

Class act

Posted by on April 2, 2013 3 comments

Peter Worley on his philosophical work with children in schools. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I was coming to the end of my first degree in philosophy at University College London and was beginning to have to think about what to do next. I was just starting “to get” this philosophy stuff and had warmed very much to the Greeks, particularly Socrates and Plato and the way that the Greeks had seen philosophy as something applicable to one’s own life. It wasn’t only an academic concern for them. Then I read a series of articles in tpm by Tim LeBon describing philosophical counselling sessions. I wondered if this might be the route for me. I trained with Tim and began practicing as a philosophical counsellor, though I earned my living as a guitar teacher for The Lewisham Music Service in South East London. Because of the counselling I had also embarked on a part-time MA in philosophy at Birkbeck in order to strengthen my subject knowledge, particularly in ethics.

When teaching music I had noticed that there was something I now call “the ensemble effect”: that the overall sound of, say, five children playing together was often much better than each child could manage on their own. And I wondered if doing philosophy with children could be approached in a similar way. I mentioned this idea to a head teacher in one of the schools I was working in and she encouraged – no, prodded – me to put together a proposal for a philosophy pilot project. That was over ten years ago, but, even to this day, when people ask me “how is it possible to do philosophy with young children?” my first response is to say that it is very difficult to do philosophy with one child, because they often don’t have the range of intellectual responses needed to be able to sustain a philosophical discussion. However, doing philosophy with up to thirty children can solve this particular problem; thirty minds bring thirty different perspectives to an issue or problem. When one child makes a point there are up to thirty other minds thinking about it. This is where the basic fuel for doing philosophy for children comes from. It’s worth noting that one of the overall aims of The Philosophy Foundation when doing philosophy with children is to have the class model to each individual within the class how a philosophical conversation progresses. So, the children begin by philosophising externally with each other as a class but in doing so model how philosophy can be done internally, by each individual child, using the “silent dialogue” model. A similar transition is also suggested by Plato when Socrates talks about silent dialogue in the Theaetetus (recall that Plato’s dialogues are usually written in dialogue form where Socrates is engaged in external dialogues with others):

SOCRATES: And do you accept my description of the process of thinking?

THEAETETUS: How do you describe it?

SOCRATES: As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. You must take this explanation as coming from an ignoramus, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no. When it reaches a decision – which may come slowly or in a sudden rush – when doubt is over and the two voices affirm the same thing, then we call this its “judgement”. So I should describe thinking as discourse, and judgement as a statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else, but silently to oneself.

An indication that this kind of transition is beginning to occur is when children start to say things like, “Now I’m going to disagree with myself” or “I know I said x but”. Some children naturally engage in this kind of dialogue with themselves but for others the modeling is essential. I think that this ability is one of the most important skills they can leave the classroom with. Actually, I would resist saying that developing silent dialogue is simply a skill, but more like a disposition. Research has suggested that the skills gained from engaging in philosophy at primary level remain with the children long after they stop doing philosophy (two years later it was found the children still demonstrated the reasoning skills gained from doing philosophy). A good essay or research project will include good “dialoguing” in the form of objections and responses to any claim made – the dialogue being implicit, as it is in Descartes’ Meditations, a dialogue in one voice, rather than explicit as with Plato’s dialogues.

I soon discovered that there were other approaches and methods for doing philosophy with children but, when I looked into them, I was somewhat concerned about the extent to which these endeavours really were philosophical. They seemed to be laudable attempts to make general education more reflective and enquiry-based but fell short of introducing genuine philosophy as I had come to understand it at university. This got me thinking: is the kind of academic philosophy I had learned something that can be done by young children, or is it simply out of their reach, something beyond their cognitive abilities? In many ways the charity I co-founded, The Philosophy Foundation, has been built on trying to answer this question. And I am happy to report that children are capable of the kind of thinking that characterises philosophy.

I have witnessed (and have corroborative footage to support this) primary aged children demonstrate a priori reasoning, spot an infinite regress, make use of reductio ad absurdum argumentation, draw distinctions, construct thought experiments, invent new words, discuss abstract, metaphysical questions and much more besides. In short: most of the thinking tools of philosophy. The Philosophers’ Magazine’s own Julian Baggini, who has on occasion spoken about philosophy in schools, has voiced a legitimate concern that, though he concedes young children may make statements that sound philosophically interesting, he is sceptical that they can sustain genuine lines of philosophical reasoning or develop arguments. This, I take it, is what Baggini thinks is necessary for being able to say that one is doing philosophy. Of course, there is a limit to the extent that children can develop arguments and/or lines of reasoning, but they are perfectly capable of doing so. For instance, here is an argument put forward by a 10-year-old boy:

“I’ve got an argument to prove there’s only one universe and nothing doesn’t exist:

I know the universe is infinite, but, say, half of this room is the universe and the other half of the room another universe.

When they meet together, they must have a point where they meet.

And what is to define that the two universes are different? I mean they [both] have the same description; they cover everything.

And if the universe was here [he points] and nothing was there [points elsewhere] the universe must be touching the nothing, and if it is touching it, it must physically exist, therefore…”

Though the argument shows a level of creative and logical thinking that is highly sophisticated, one may respond by saying that the argument is unsuccessful. If it is this does not, by itself, go on to show that children can’t philosophise. Take the example of Descartes. Many of his arguments are thought to be unsuccessful but this does not mean that he was failing to philosophise. As P F Strawson remarks about Descartes, in his essay “Self, Mind and Body”, “One of the marks … of a really great philosopher is to make a really great mistake.” Further, the boy who formulated this argument went on to defend his argument successfully from objections by other children in the group.

Another example comes from a group of Year 3 (age 7) children discussing whether it is better to be an unhappy person or a happy pig (see “The Prince and The Pig” in my book The If Machine for the lesson plan used with this class). One boy had said that it must be better to be a person because there is not much a pig can do, whereas a person can do so much more. Another boy said that you don’t know what makes the pig happy and that it may well be happy doing the few things that pigs do. But the first speaker was dissatisfied with this and responded by saying that you would know: you could just look at the pig and see if it is happy with what it is doing. Someone else interjected saying that you still wouldn’t know whether it was happy because you can’t know what the pig is feeling. The question was raised, “What if it looked happy? Would you know that it was happy?” Many of the children thought that they would know, except for one single child, a boy who had said nothing up to that point. He said that even though it looks happy, it doesn’t mean that it feels happy: “By magic [the speaker was referring to a magic spell that had featured in the story] someone may always have a smile on their face but underneath they may be very sad,” said one girl.

There are several interesting features about this exchange that help us to understand what the extent and limits of philosophy with children are:

  1. This is clearly a developed and sustained line of reasoning (something like an argument against behaviourism); it is not just a single, isolated statement that superficially resembles something profound such as “Life is a jigsaw with one piece missing”. There is a context, which demonstrates some of what the philosopher John White calls “philosophical intention”.

  2. The argument is put forward as part of a dialogue between speakers as opposed to being the product of just one thinker (as with the first example above).

  3. It would be very unlikely that the children – or at least many of them – would be able to recount the argument or the steps made after they had made it. (This of course changes as they get older and there are exceptional cases.)

  4. They are not necessarily aware of what it is they have actually done. They may have formulated an argument against a behaviourist-like position but would not be aware, more generally, that they had done this, or of the implications of such an argument. (Again, this changes as they get older and again, there are exceptional cases.)

  5. There were strategies and techniques that were employed by the facilitator that were needed to enable the children to construct this line of reasoning. Without them the level of sophistication present in the example simply would not have occurred (see The If Machine for examples of these strategies and techniques.)

From these observations we see not only that the children are capable of philosophical thinking but, where their philosophising is deficient, we can see a space for an argument for why they should do philosophy. Given that they have a basic ability to philosophise surely there is a case for saying that they be given the opportunity to practise philosophising so that they can develop the aspects that they are less good at, such as taking a wider, more holistic view of a discussion as a whole (points 3 and 4 above), what is sometimes called “the synoptic view”. As the philosopher Simon Glendinning said during an interview with Baggini after one of our events (a Philosophers’ Football match celebrating the famous Monty Python sketch), just because children are not very good at playing music or doing maths is no reason to refrain from teaching them music or maths or from encouraging them to do so. It is precisely because they are not good at them that they are taught them or encouraged to do them – so that they can get better.

Interestingly, philosophy has a good deal in common with both maths and music. It shares with maths a logical, conceptual foundation, and it shares with both of them an intrinsic value, i.e. that one is motivated to pursue it for its own sake and that it is good to pursue for its own sake. These are two powerful reasons for doing philosophy – with anyone, for that matter, not just children – but also two reasons that increasingly find themselves distanced from our instrumental, productivity-based society.

If we must, then here are some instrumental arguments (briefly put) for why philosophy should be taught in schools, or for that matter, why it should be taught at all:

The “basic” argument: Thinking and reasoning are even more basic than the three Rs (reading, writing and artithmetic) given that reasoning (the fourth “R”?) and the concepts involved in reasoning underpin all three. Philosophy is the subject that specialises in conceptual thinking and reasoning, therefore we may appeal to a very basic educational need for doing philosophy, i.e. conceptual thinking and reasoning.

The “truth” argument: By honing the concepts that we use in all other truth-seeking subjects (e.g. the sciences), philosophy, which is singularly concerned with concepts and reasoning, is the subject best placed to improve the thinking on which the other truth-seeking subjects are based, thereby improving our efforts to reach truth. (This is to paraphrase an argument owed to Catherine McCall.)

The incoherence argument: When incoherence occurs between disciplines (or simply in the way the world seems to “hang together” or not) one needs the tools to deal with such incoherence, to be able to attempt to make sense of it. Philosophy is the subject that specialises in making sense of incoherence. Therefore philosophy should be taught. (This is a paraphrase of an argument put forward to me by Stephen Boulter.)

It is worth noting that incoherence is just as much a feature of school children’s lives as anyone else’s. Just think of the way the children learn objectivity in the sciences but then are taught something like universal relativism in other aspects of their schooling, perhaps in religious education or the classroom mantra “opinions are never wrong” and such like.

The inescapability argument: Philosophical problems are inescapable. Every time you read something in a newspaper or on the internet you are faced with a philosophical problem: how do you know when something is true? When the teacher teaches you about atoms and shows you the atomic model: how do they know that atoms look like that if they’ve never seen one? If it’s true that philosophical problems are inescapable then surely there is an argument for preparing people/students for how to respond to these problems intelligently and philosophically. (This is a paraphrase of an argument put to me by Michael Hand.)

Perhaps the last word on teaching philosophy to children should go to Montaigne, who wrote, back in the sixteenth century: “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”

Peter Worley is co-founder and CEO of The Philosophy Foundation. He is author of The If Machine and The If Odyssey both published by Bloomsbury, editor and contributor for The Philosophy Shop and co-author of Thoughtings, both published by Crown House. Visit www.philosophy-foundation.org for more information.

Back to big thinking

Posted by on March 21, 2013 3 comments

Ideas still matter, says Hilary Lawson, director of the Institute of Art and Ideas. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

An editorial in one of the nation’s broadsheets is not the natural place to look for comment on the state of philosophy. But there it was. The Guardian, June 4th. Headed “Philosophy: Back to Big Thinking”.

“Stephen Hawking may have insisted that ‘philosophy is dead’ but the numbers queuing up for the HowTheLightGetsIn festival currently on at Hay-on-wye, suggest this isn’t a statement based on observable evidence”, the Guardian piece began. It continued in combative mode. “Throughout the 20th century Anglo Saxon analytic philosophers focused attention down on an increasingly narrow set of conceptual problems that often had all the imaginative range of a car manual.” Given the evidence of the week’s discussions at HowTheLightGetsIn the editorial concluded “the new mood in British philosophy is that the time has come for a more expansive role. Indeed, even the word ‘metaphysics’ is making something of a comeback.”

We were pleased of course. It was good to have an editorial about us and what we were up to. And good to be making an impact. When was the last editorial in a national newspaper about philosophy? It was only four years since the founding of IAI, the Institute of Art and Ideas, and three since we had put on our first philosophy festival: HowTheLightGetsIn. What a strange trip it had been.

When we began people asked how we were going to get anyone to come to a philosophy festival. In the popular mind philosophy was more typically associated with the Monty Python football match than anything one might take seriously. One of the aims of IAI was to change this perception and make philosophy relevant to people’s lives and more broadly to change our cultural space. Although when we started we were not rash enough to think it possible. Philosophy in France had achieved such a status – why could it not do so in Britain? More immediately, how were we to overcome the perception of philosophy as irrelevant technical nit-picking, a subject of comedic derision, and get people to come to an event with real philosophical conversation and debate? My answer was that all of us are concerned with philosophy whether we like it or not, though some only find out on their deathbed. So the thinking went, all we had to do was cast the net broadly and engage with what it is to be alive. It has to be said I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to work.

Over the five days of our first HowTheLightGetsIn and a Herculean effort by the IAI festival team we put on thirty-five events and rather remarkably had three thousand people visit. More telling was that we had some great debates and passionate disputes. The most successful were those that made no concessions to popularisation but simply insisted on clarity of position and viewpoint.

Three years later we had added a nought to our numbers. Four hundred events and 30,000 visitors to the festival, making HowTheLightGetsIn by a substantial margin the world’s largest philosophy event.

It seems to me that it is not implausible to suggest that one can already detect a shifting of broader cultural attitudes. Philosophy is perhaps not quite as laughable. Other festivals incorporate philosophy events. The BBC seems more open to philosophical topics and series. Of course we’ve certainly not been alone in encouraging this shift. For a long time tpm has played an important role, along with others such as The School of Life, and the podcast Philosophy Bites. But shift it is, as the Guardian identified.

Why had philosophy become marginalised and what had made it such a figure of fun? It is tempting to suppose that philosophy is somehow un-British. That as a nation we have a natural inclination to the practical and down to earth, and a suspicion of airy fairy theorising and wild conjecture. No doubt a nation that was home to Newton and the world’s first industrial revolution has in its soul an attachment to science and practical endeavour. It seems implausible though to propose that the ridicule of philosophy is written into our cultural genes.

So how did it come about? The Guardian editorial lays the blame at the door of analytic philosophy. At the outset analytic philosophy was certainly no joke. It was a radical and powerful departure. It provided an attack on the Hegelianism of the preceding decades. It was a breath of fresh air in an intellectual milieu that was stymied in its own impenetrable jargon, talk of “being” and “the absolute”. Russell turned the insights of Frege and G E Moore into a new vision that would take philosophy out of the dark ages and into a science, making piecemeal but assured advance through the application of logical analysis. It was exciting, challenging and of the moment.

Russell was an undoubtedly brilliant mathematician, with a determination for clarity and directness in his philosophical writing. He was a controversial figure, but influential and taken seriously outside of the academy. Wittgenstein added an alternative and in some respects contrary perspective but cemented what we now see as the linguistic turn that placed language at the centre of philosophical concern.

But this was all nearly a hundred years ago. In the intervening time what came to be known as analytic philosophy developed its own arcane character and its own impenetrable terminology. In the process it has gradually walled itself in to its own ivory tower. At the outset the philosophy of logical analysis set out to provide the framework for others to do their thinking. It was to be the under-labourer clearing the ground. No grand theories here, just solid work aimed at making life more effective for other disciplines.

The very project of course in some sense demeaned philosophy – although it may have appealed to a British sense of understatement. Gone were the goals of a grand metaphysical vision. Instead, a limited role lay ahead. This would have been well if it had succeeded. If the clarifications it offered had indeed proved valuable to other disciplines and if other disciplines had taken its insights as a basis for their own investigations.

The reality has been rather more prosaic. A century of analytic philosophy is hard pushed to find a single clarification that has been of any real value to another discipline. Not least perhaps because such advances relied on the emergence of agreement amongst philosophical enquirers. How could other disciplines make use of the new insights if philosophers themselves were still in dispute? Philosophers in the public mind actually outpace economists or politicians in this respect as the philosophical joke currently doing the rounds neatly identifies: How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on how you define “change”.

The application of logic to language never lived up to Russell’s dream. Having demonstrated that logic could describe mathematics, or so he believed, he understandably wished to extend this to language, thereby providing a perfect medium, free of error, for all to use. It was a great idea. It has motivated generations of philosophers and philosophy departments. The problem though is that the dream is impossible – as Wittgenstein thought he had demonstrated in the Tractatus, almost at the outset of the project.

Philosophy has not turned into a science. The twentieth century desire to do so can now be seen as a wide-eyed scientism, the response of a culture that was so enamoured with the success of science that it sought to replicate it in every field. A century on the idea seems far-fetched. Under-labourers are all very well but not so effective if each is challenging the others work. Logic was meant to cut through dispute and provide definitive conclusions. Unsurprisingly it failed to do so. Is there anyone who seriously believes that philosophy is closer to definitive conclusions today than it was a century ago?

There is though a further twist to this tale. Alongside the goal of turning philosophy into a science was the notion that metaphysics could be eradicated. Philosophically speaking I grew up at Oxford, the heartland of analytic philosophy and early on remember reading A J Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic and being excited by its attack on metaphysics, and the potential for a thorough going rationalism to sweep away the prejudices of the past.

Metaphysics however is not so easily eradicated. At its most elementary the denial of metaphysics is itself metaphysical. Ayer encountered a version of this paradox in the self-referential breakdown of his primary thesis. Ayer sought to eradicate metaphysics by arguing that, aside from tautological claims, only empirically verifiable statements had meaning. The paradox was acute because this claim, central to his entire philosophy, is itself not verifiable and therefore meaningless.

A more subtle version of this paradox applies both to Wittgenstein and Derrida. In very different contexts, and for different reasons, both philosophers conclude that an overall account of language and meaning is not possible and seek to avoid putting one forward. As if it might be possible to evade altogether the big question about the nature of language and its relation to the world. The paradox is that in order to understand their philosophies we have to impute to them an overall account, even though such an overall account is explicitly denied.

We might for example understand Wittgenstein’s Investigations as proposing that we are at play in a language game. Or make sense of Derrida’s philosophy as an attack on the possibility of decidable meaning using the methodology of deconstruction. Without an overall account of some sort the reader cannot make sense of the texts. The reader may of course engage in their own self-destruction of the account they have initially used to understand the texts, but if the destruction was fully carried through the text would become meaningless. We provide meaning to these texts at each and every reading by providing an overall metaphysics by which to understand them, and by doing so we therefore misunderstand them.

Metaphysics cannot be escaped. Big thinking is unavoidable. Even at those points when metaphysics is denied. The claim “metaphysics is over” carries within it an overall account of the world that is itself metaphysical, namely the supposition that the world can be described fully by a theory, and there be nothing left unsaid or that remains unsayable.

That’s why on a personal level I have felt that there is no philosophical choice but to address our inability to provide an overall account of language, and the subsequent paradox of relativism and postmodernism head on. Truth cannot be denied without self-referential chaos, nor metaphysics. I agree with Putnam that attempts to solve problems of self-reference with Russell’s theory of types or Tarski’s hierarchy of languages are little more than sophistry. The essential self-referential puzzle remains and has to be addressed.

My own attempt at a response to the problem has been to propose a non-realist metaphysics. This offers an account of the world in which the world is not seen as a thing that we might describe correctly or incorrectly. Instead I have proposed that we regard the world as open, and it is we who close that openness. I have set out to describe in some detail the process of closure by which this is achieved.

In proposing this way of going about things I am not claiming to have uncovered the truth – how could I do such a thing? Instead I offer a story about where we are which I hope enables us to make sense of our predicament and which helps us intervene effectively in the world. There will be other accounts and other ways to understand where we are, but for the moment it seems to me that the story of openness and closure is a powerful one capable of empirical application and improvement.

Which brings me back to the Institute of Art and Ideas and the HowTheLightGetsIn festival. IAI is not a vehicle for continental philosophy, or analytic philosophy, or for that matter my own particular brand of non-realist philosophy. What it sets out to do is to create a space where the very framework of our thought can be discussed and challenged. Where there are no off limit views, no correct positions, no authority that cannot be undermined. IAI events seek to stand at the edge of thought in each discipline and ask those troubling deep questions about our current theories, beliefs and direction that traditionally went by the description “philosophy”. As a consequence big thinking and metaphysics is at our core. We ask the questions that may not be capable of a final answer but which require an answer nevertheless because that answer, however temporary and limited, determines how we think about ourselves and our world.

At the outset people said to us that we would have to make the complex ideas that we were to debate palatable to a “lay” audience. That in effect we would have to dumb down and popularise the subject of philosophy. To our amazement and it has to be said also to our delight the reverse has proved the case. The most theoretical and most challenging debates have proved to be our most widely watched and appreciated. We have increasingly encouraged our speakers and participants to abandon concern that they should modify their mode of speaking for the public. Instead what we encourage is genuine conversation with other leading thinkers in the field. We have, it has to be said no time for obfuscation and pretension. Sadly too many academic discussions hide the emptiness of their thinking behind the appearance of depth provided by obtuse terminology.

Early in my career I was a speaker at a philosophical conference at the ICA and standing at the back with Richard Rorty listening to one of the lecturers. I found the talk unintelligible. As seemingly erudite questions were asked from the floor I turned to Rorty saying, “I didn’t understand any of that.” He responded, “I didn’t understand any of it either.” And then with his deadpan dry East coast humour added in hushed tones, “you know Hilary in the thirty years I’ve been attending philosophy conferences I’ve hardly ever understood any of the papers.”

It is understandable of course that in pursuit of the approbation of colleagues we are tempted to sound intelligent when we have nothing to say. But there should be no truck with this playground game if we are to make progress with the big intellectual issues.

At IAI events like the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, and online at IAI tv, we make no concessions to the audience. Unlike TED we insist on debate and challenge. We do not ask our speakers to moderate their language to encourage engagement. The aim of our speakers should simply be to convey their views cogently to their interlocutors. As Russell and Feynman demonstrated, you don’t have to be obtuse to be intelligent. Rather the reverse. As a result the speakers and audiences at our events leave enriched by the experience, excited by the conversations they have had and the challenges they have faced, and exhilarated by the notion that ideas are alive and matter in a world that so often appears to have abandoned them.

For all of these reasons we were encouraged by that Guardian piece. Big is back. And may it stay that way.

Hilary Lawson is director of the Institute of Art and Ideas, a non-realist philosopher, and author of Closure (Routledge, 2001).

Captive audience

Posted by on March 13, 2013 3 comments

Alan Smith on the highs and lows of teaching philosophy in prison. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I began teaching in the prison in an offhand, unplanned way. There was a phone call from someone my wife knew asking me to step in for a teacher who was going on leave. Could I do a couple of hours with a class who were studying Hamlet? And I strolled into a fourteen year stretch. I’m not sure how it came about, but one day I mentioned that I was not actually an English graduate. “Oh really?” Jean said, Jean was the Education Manager, “what did you do then?” There is still something in me that is a bit reserved about this. I only did philosophy because it was the most obscure and useless thing on offer. When I was a kid in Sheffield in the fifties and sixties I lived in a heartland of common sense: what you needed was a good trade, security, your feet on the ground – you needed to know what was what. It was a dull deadening narrative that I hated and then, when UCAS came around, I applied for philosophy. Philosophy. It was a sort of insult, skyborn, head in the clouds. It was useless and, as everyone pointed out, would get me nowhere. Good.

“You did philosophy did you?” Jean was saying now, eyes gleaming with the romance of it all. “I’ve always thought that we should have a philosophy course here in the prison.” Of course it had only just occurred to her, but Gwen and Helen were in the staff room egging her on. Gwen wanted to make sure that I would have some takers and so she went off and spent the next couple of weeks selecting and recruiting. She found most of these students up on D Wing. It was the obvious place to look. D Wing was a little bit more steady, quieter than the other residential parts of the prison. We called it the Lifer Wing, but it was in fact for men whose sentences were longer than seven years.

Philosophy in the prison was a bit of a leap in the dark. “They’ll love it,” Gwen kept on saying. Gwen, after donkey’s years with these guys really did believe in their goodness. “He just wants his mum really,” was a typical remark for her to make when some shaven headed eighteen stoner had shuffled off, pouting, after one of her bollockings. So I shuffled off, myself, to get philosophy launched on the sea of scepticism that I was sure awaited me.

The first group she produced for me was overwhelming. Ahmed, a man I already knew from my literature class was there, but along with him he had brought Simon, Shayne and Bernard. They strolled in and, in their various ways, took me to pieces. They opened up a part of my life where I gave my class in the morning and then went to bed in the afternoon. Most of the guys were as unsure as me about what was going to happen. Philosophy: it did have a bit of a ring to it, especially doing it in prison; it sounded rather wise, stately, a little bit superior. It didn’t take long for us to leave that kind of nonsense behind. Shayne, direct as ever, got us started, “Come on then Al what’s it all about, philosophy? How would you define it?” I was tempted to ask him, “What do you mean, definition?” but some merciful instinct for self-preservation stopped me. They didn’t want some clever undergraduate posturing, these guys wanted an answer they could get a grip on right here and now, so I told them a bit about the Socratic method, the method of the idiot child. “You know,” I told them, “when some daft kid keeps on asking, why? why?” Yes, they knew about that. “Well, that’s all that philosophy is. Philosophers just ask why.”

There was a certain amount of storm to weather. “Is that it then? Is that all there is to it?”

“Well yes,” I said, suddenly fearful that they would walk out on me and leave me to face Jean and Gwen with the ruin that I had made of their bright idea.

Time went by and I settled down with a regular group of men, mostly from D Wing. People came and went, though, as sentences ended and new guys were shipped in, and this meant that there were quite regular crises as philosophy virgins were seduced into our strange ways. Philosophy attracted men who had long sentences to serve, and they brought into class the hard faced generosity that gets them through the years. They said things that frightened me to death. Shayne on abortion: “If we could turn back the years, Sim, wouldn’t it be better, knowing as we do now that you were going to turn out to be a murdering nut-case who’s been nothing but a drain on society, wouldn’t aborting you have been a good idea?” Dear God, I thought, head in hands, he’s gone too far this time. I ought to have warned him about all the trouble that Socrates was landed in by philosophy. But these guys were neighbours on the wing. They smiled at each other. Sometimes, less often now, I got a bad time for being a weakling. It was usually to do with my problems with authority.

“For God’s sake Al will you use your authority and sort these bastards out.”

“I have no authority, I repudiate it, I spit on authority.”

“Don’t start all that shit,” Simon would tell me, knowing my game.

“Right,” said Shayne, brusquely, “come on let’s get on with this.”

“I’ll read this next bit shall I?” said Simon. I would shrug and away we would go.

Shayne was a real asset; he just kept on asking the obvious questions that no one else would ask for fear of looking stupid. He knows nothing. Or does he? Were his questions just a bit too good naturedly naïve? I promised myself to get someone to have a peak in his pad where I suspect there were walls full of Philosophy books. “Hold on,” he said, playing the devious Yorkshire simpleton, “what’s metaphysics then?” Before I could tumble into his trap Bernard turned to him and treated us all to a lucid, delightful explanation. Bernard was the youngest by far and got terrible stick, but I suspected that he has just done himself a power of good. “Right, okay,” Shayne said nodding gently into Bernard’s beaming face.

We had been talking about aesthetics, and I started to realise that philosophy had the potential to create all kinds of perils. Aesthetics led us on to censorship, and one week we had been reading J M Coetzee on taking offence. Coetzee suggests that taking offence is a transaction where the powerful and the powerless exchange roles and potencies. Far too late it dawned on me that making this explicit could get one or two of the more idealistic guys into trouble back on the wings where shifts in power, suspected or real, could have swift and devastating consequences. “Now don’t try this at home,” I kept on saying, panic mounting as I wished more and more that I had stuck to epistemology or philosophy of mind.

Fortunately I had Ahmed and Simon in the class. These were the steadiest men you could hope to meet, both well into their second decade of imprisonment. Men I admired. Both of them scholars who put me to shame. They tried out the idea, tried its fit into various contexts: apartheid South Africa, family, prison. Shayne, who had really taken a shine to my version of Socratic method harried them into explanations, forced the occasional pursed lipped concession. They watched me struggle to get a word in and smiled as they saw my temper going and language deteriorating. I was so unpleasant in one session that I brought in a bag of sweets by way of apology. They were not impressed. “He only bought these,” Ahmed pointed out, without a hint of a thank you, “because he was such a right bastard last time.”

I hadn’t met Simon before the philosophy classes started. Before we could begin with philosophy there were things he had to get straight. He started me off with some conventional politics, some remarks about New Labour and then we were into the history of the Labour Party, trades unions and their relationship with Marxism. Somehow we’d drifted into Darwin and scientific method before I realised that he was interviewing me. He was a slightly built blond haired guy, and he sat there with his flask of tea in our shabby classroom wondering if he would award me a fellowship at the Oxbridge college he obviously ran.

Simon taught me how and when to go onto the attack. If I hadn’t gone for him, he wouldn’t have stayed in the class. This was quite a complicated interview. I not only had to know more than him but I also had to say upfront when I didn’t. But, not submissively. “Well, I don’t know anything about that, Simon, but what I do know is that your way of presenting that particular case is just not good enough, feeble minded even. Just think will you, just for once in your life?” Mostly the teaching life is a life of restraint and understanding; with Simon there were wonderful moments when I could just let fly.

Mo would say: “That’s a bit harsh Al.”

And I would say: “Well, fuck it,” and away we went.

Simon was absolutely determined to be himself and, to be honest, it could be a bit wearing. There would be heart stopping moments when, in a room where there were half a dozen drugs offenders, he would say:

“Anyone who deals smack is just a fucking scumbag and anyone who does smack is just a fucking moron.” A quick look around at the faces, “Alright?” There was some bleak part of him that didn’t care. I often found myself defending people against him, or perhaps I was defending Simon from the reprisals, which, to me, looked likely. Someone, inevitably someone a lot bigger than Simon, might mention God. “You fucking moron,” Simon would remark, venomously, “only a fucking moron would believe in God.” Or some similar opening gambit.

“That’s a bit harsh Sim,” Ahmed would say which would prompt me into a way of finding a way through the storm of emotion that Simon had generated.

“That you see is the sort of emotional response that first order distinctions can generate. When Simon explodes like that, philosophy wants to pull him back into something rather more cold-blooded.”

“Yeah,” Simon would say, “fuckin right.” And away we would go again.

We were a small group, and mostly we institutionalised Simon’s enthusiasm, although I sometimes felt a bit anxious, even panic stricken, at the way things were going. It was difficult for newcomers, but then quite often Simon himself took them in hand. There were close conversations during the break or while I was doing the register.

“You can’t come in her taking offence” I heard him say. With philosophy you have to leave your feelings at the door. It’s special, alright, so just forget about your ego.” I glanced up and gave him a bit of a look. Cheeky bastard, I thought.

“Simon,” Shayne said, dead pan, “is entirely without ego.”

I realised, too, that who was in the class was not entirely up to me. There was a certain amount of vetting and selecting going on up on the wings. When Steve first came to philosophy he sat there, quietly taking us in. He had come down from the lifer wing with Jason and I suppose that the guys had auditioned, and then recruited him for the class. They were pretty choosy about who came into philosophy and made short work of anyone who wasn’t up to their high standards. It was nice of them, I think, to be as delicate as they were about my feelings, leaving intact, for me and for the management, the illusion that I was in charge. Out in the corridor at tea break I heard Steve telling his pal: “Yeah, its philosophy, man, we were talking about Spider shit.” (No, don’t ask.).

Simon grabbed him. “Just keep your fucking trap shut about this, alright? Best kept secret in the prison, this class. We don’t want the fuckin riff-raff coming in.” It was the most enormous compliment and I still cling to it. Even so he could be a bit trying.

I think that my classes in the prison took me back to being the innocent working class kid stumbling into the unreal glamour of philosophy. Prison is, after all, an overwhelmingly working class environment, and perhaps this is why I felt so at home there. It is also a place where men who cannot read or write can argue the toss about Aristotle or Sartre with men who are halfway through an OU degree. As Beefy once remarked: “There’s no place like jail.”

Alan Smith teaches at the University of Northampton and, until recently, in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. He has recently completed a prison memoir for which he is seeking a publisher.

Deep thinking in graphic novels

Posted by on February 28, 2013 4 comments

Jeff McLaughlin on philosophy and the graphic novel. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Graphic novels have provided their creators with a golden opportunity to express themselves in very adult ways – even if they are doing so by telling stories with talking animals (for example Art Spiegelman’s Maus which deals with the Holocaust). Some of these works can provide philosophy instructors with the opportunity to enhance the learning experience of their students. But what is a graphic novel and how can it provide pedagogical support for philosophy classes?

The term “graphic novel” is not the best term for capturing what they actually are, but like pornography, most people know it when they see it. Graphic novels aren’t typically graphic in the sense of being explicit (one notable exception being Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls) nor are they all novels. You will find many graphic novels that are non-fiction (Joe Sacco’s Palestine), autobiographical (Alison Bechdel’s Funhome), and even governmental reports (Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon’s The 9/11 Report). Indeed, Will Eisner’s The Contract with God, which popularised the term “graphic novel”, is a collection of three short-stories. (There are earlier works that we would now describe as graphic novels, and strictly speaking the term was already in limited use before Eisner’s work appeared.) Graphic novels are really just comic books without the negative connotations.

Comic books themselves look more like magazines than books, and to think of them as being comical is to dismiss the vast majority of them. Some people like to say graphic novels are thought of quite differently, because unlike comics they are complete stories with a beginning, middle and end. This however does not take into account so-called “one-shots” or “mini-series” and even self-contained story arcs within comic book series. Sometimes these self-contained stories or limited series are published as a collection – but these are rightly called trade paperbacks and not graphic novels. Hence, an acclaimed work such as Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore is rightly called a trade paperback and not a graphic novel, because it was originally printed as ten separate comic book issues. Anyway, other popular art forms including movies, plays and dances, all have beginnings, middles and ends.

Although many graphic novels have been turned into movies they should not be perceived as “frozen films”. The action takes place in illustrated panels (i.e., the “movie frames”) as well as in-between the panels. With a film every person in the audience witnesses only what the director (and other members of the film team) wants to show. With a graphic novel the audience actively personalises the experience by, for example, imagining the voice of each character. They can linger over images and revisit any image or text. They can go to the end before they start at the beginning or they can jump from page to page. A movie forces the viewer to sit passively and watch that world unfold, but the graphic novel actively engages the reader/viewer. Such active participation parallels when a student reads a philosophy essay – superficially perhaps – but at least he or she retains control.

It is apparent that the almost universal acceptance of the term “graphic novel” goes hand in hand with the general acceptance of their being worthy of a person’s time and money. Graphic novels are not just illustrated stories or picture books but a series of sequentially organised panels that blend text and image in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts. But if you just want to refer to them as fat comic books that is fine too.

Some individuals just don’t like graphic novels or understand their appeal, while others just have difficulty following them. These are valid perspectives, but if a person is able to spend some time with instructional books such as Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics or Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, he or she won’t be wasting his or her time. Together these two works help explain what makes comic books and graphic novels distinctive and fascinating.

When it comes to appreciating and accepting graphic novels, we are at the early stage that once was occupied by film theory and criticism in the 1960’s. That is, movies were once rejected as being unworthy of study on the grounds that they were merely entertainment and could not provide sufficient content in two hours of viewing time when compared to a book. Now film studies is a standard program area at many universities. And just as with movies, books and plays, not all graphic novels are going to be good, let alone considered enduring classics in the history of popular culture.

The good ones or, more correctly, the useful ones, can help students learn about a variety of topics in an unintimidating way. By bringing the relevant content to the forefront, the instructor can for instance literally and figuratively show how philosophical ideas that were discussed and debated for centuries are still prevalent and relevant today. Most students are familiar with graphic novels (or perhaps a movie or two based upon them) and making students aware of another level of understand in something that they already are comfortable with is a wonderful way to get them to visit (or re-visit) the material with a new appreciation. Doing so creates a bridge between what is new (and sometimes overwhelming) with something that they already know.

One has to admit that philosophical texts are not the easiest things for students to read. Students have to learn how to approach them differently than reading history or science. However, many students read novels, they play video games, and they watch movies and surf the Internet. As such, they often possess a high level of visual literacy. They (perhaps more so than instructors) are acutely aware of how graphic novels work, so the new challenge is to get students to see beyond what they might have perceived as simple entertainment. If the student is able to “see” beyond the words and pictures then they are open to grasping the philosophy.

The graphic novel can act as a thought experiment on paper. For example, in one of the stories in Concrete: Complete Short Stories by Paul Chadwick, a character imagines what it is like to “think like a mountain”. This famous expression taken from the environmental philosophy of Aldo Leopold is a difficult concept to grasp. Ask students to “think like a mountain”, and they will find the task quite daunting, because obviously it is impossible. However, by showing them imagery where a woman’s body blends into nature; her fingers stretching out and transforming into living roots, students can literally see the sense of biotic connectivity and community that Leopold (and Chadwick) is trying to achieve.

Graphic novels are intended to provide enjoyment, and if they manage to do that then it follows that their creators have achieved their goal. However, some creators also intentionally or unintentionally provide something more, and thus readers/viewers can benefit by returning to look at these works again. Any of the works cited in this short essay fit this description. Nevertheless, although you may find various philosophical messages or themes in graphic novels, they are not university lectures. Accordingly, it is unreasonable to expect any graphic novel to map perfectly onto every topic of philosophical enquiry.

Graphic novels as philosophical texts are first and foremost literary/visual works of art, they are not ‘how to’s, they are not manuals on how to live the good life. They are not tomes regarding existence, or argumentative dissertations. Graphic novels are not going to replace the words of the philosopher or the guiding wisdom of an instructor. For some instructors this may make them too vague and open to broad interpretation. Yet, even a weak graphic novel provides the instructor with another teaching and scholarly opportunity: correcting the mistakes and showing the right way.

Socio-political philosophy seems to be the most common subject that can be found in graphic novels. There are a lot works to work with, ranging from an imaginary fascist London England in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta to the very real Iran during the Islamic revolution in Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis. Trade paperbacks such as The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn can be seen as treatises about humans in the state of nature, while Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man deals with gender warfare.

Pick up any superhero graphic novel or trade paperback and you are bound to discover matters of justice, power, and moral responsibility. Religion and matters of faith are dealt with in such works as Blankets or Habibi, both by Craig Thompson, and even The Book of Genesis gets the graphic novel treatment by renowned underground comix artist Robert Crumb. Whether it is about epistemology or metaphysics, reading and seeing (and hearing) situations, or characters in graphic novels provide lessons that are outside the confines of a text only book.

There is no philosophical area that cannot potentially be given a graphic novel treatment. For example, you wouldn’t think that logic and the philosophy of mathematics would easily transfer to graphic novels, but they are exceptionally well-treated in Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna.

Doxiadis was intrigued by the quest for secure foundations of mathematics in logic. The fact that many of those involved had spent time in asylums provided the added drama. Since Bertrand Russell not only played a large role in this pursuit but was also an interesting individual in his own right, he became the focal point upon which to pin the Logicomix story. With a strong background in the field (he studied mathematics at New York’s Columbia University at the age of fifteen and then did graduate work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris) Doxiadis spent hours dissecting the claims and comments that were found in the papers and writings of the very real people that populate the work. His teaching of the subject to other members of the creative team provided the backbone for the self-referential elements that the work is also lauded for. In doing all this, Doxiadis overcomes the potential alienation of the dry university lecture. As he explains the basic concepts to his team, he is therefore also doing the same for the reader/viewer.

Logicomix is neither a history textbook nor a biography, and so some historical alterations were accepted for dramatic purpose. In cinematic terms, Logicomix is “based on” a factual story – the essential truths are maintained. For Doxiadis, who is eager to hear from those who have already used the graphic novel in their courses, the benefit of using Logicomix alongside primary philosophical materials is that students can learn about complex abstract concepts within a dramatic narrative. Indeed, when one uses a graphic novel in a course, students learn that the pursuit for answers does not materialise magically and without any context; rather it is grounded in who we are and what we do. We cannot separate ourselves from our philosophy nor should we.

As I stated earlier, just as with movies and plays and books there are good and bad graphic novels. Logicomix is one of the most successful ones for philosophy classrooms. You can read it and appreciate it as an excellent example of a graphic novel, and you can study it for the philosophy that’s in it. Imagine a class where math and logic students learn about art and art students learn math and logic; and neither group is alienated. That such an initially strange blending of interests can be brought together reveals the breadth, depth, importance and inescapability of philosophy – and this is achieved through the graphic novel.

Most of the artists and writers of graphic novels are not going to possess degrees in philosophy – but they are experts in conveying interesting ideas and concepts through words and images. Any superficial treatment of philosophical materials will be disappointing, but they can be partially forgiven given the nature of the beast. The fact that the Auschwitz Museum and the Anne Frank Foundation publish graphic novels that depict real tragedies during the Holocaust suggests that this form of delivery is becoming accepted as a viable and valuable way to reach people without sacrificing content. Clearly, these institutions would not pursue anything that would be considered inappropriate or wanting in this area. They would also not want not to have the readers/viewers think that The Search or Episodes from Auschwitz: Love in the Shadow of Death is all there is to say. Instead these graphic novels are used in part to reach a broader audience and to elicit in them an interest to learn more. If one of the reasons for teaching philosophy is to get students to become knowledgeable and to seek and to question, then the right graphic novels, when taught and interpreted the right way, can help nudge students in the right direction.

Jeff McLaughlin is professor of philosophy at Thompson Rivers University and editor of Comics as Philosophy (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

The loss of God

Posted by on February 11, 2013 3 comments

Claire Creffield moves in the direction of a constructive conversation between atheists and believers. This article appears in Issue 60 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

I didn’t warm to Alain de Botton’s suggestion, in his book Religion for Atheists, that we should start building “atheist temples”, because not far from my house there is already a splendid one. Among its many beautiful features are several columns made of Frosterley marble, crammed with highly polished fossilised corals. The presence of these fossils invites the viewer to see the building (which itself took forty years to complete) in the context of 325 million years of our planet’s history, during most of which we were absent. But if that timescale makes us feel insignificant, the fossils also call to mind a huge cultural achievement – the theory of evolution that enables us to understand our own origins. Being made to reflect on that scientific achievement while admiring the architecture of a building that is rich in art and craftsmanship and history encourages a seamless appreciation of all of our scientific and creative attainments. The building is also a testimony to the labourers who built it. And it houses a memorial to other local labourers, miners who died in accidents. For all these reasons and more it is a celebration of humanity, even though a significant minority of the people who use it are seeking to celebrate God.

The building is Durham Cathedral, a place of Christian worship. And although de Botton is very sensitive to the resources that religious buildings offer to the non-believer, he thinks that for an atheist such a building is a flawed resource. He thinks that atheism requires brand new buildings, which evoke some of the sentiments that a cathedral might evoke, but which explicitly exclude God from their design. The reason for this is that he wants to separate what he regards as religion’s good bits from the taint of belief in supernatural entities. The good bits of religion are the resources it gives us for learning lessons in living: how to be kind, how to honour community ties, how to see ourselves in a light that gives us understanding of and consolation for our suffering, weakness, and failures. These resources, he says, are not essentially religious. They have been “colonised” by religion and we need to take them back. What is essentially religious, according to de Botton, is a belief in the supernatural. Religion cannot abandon that, he implies, and so atheists cannot benefit from the resources religion offers in support of living a good life unless these are explicitly separated from their religious context, by means of a slightly bizarre process of innovating atheist doppelgangers of religious infrastructure.

I want to suggest that this process of separation and innovation is misconceived. Durham Cathedral, and all of the trappings of religion, are fully available to me as an atheist, and I would lose something rather than gain something if I visited one of de Botton’s new atheist temples instead. This is because religion itself, and not only the trappings of religion, can be a resource for atheists.

To see this, we need to start by noticing that the term “atheist” is not as simple as it might appear. Though it appears to consist in a single negative statement (“There is no God”), it actually involves a range of possible claims – about what religious people mean when they say there is a God, about the relevance and nature of supporting evidence or argument for God’s existence, and about how we can assess the meaningfulness (or lack of meaning) of religious language. This means that there is not, in fact, a single atheism, but a range of atheisms, some of which are more hostile to religion than others.

Think first of all about what religious people are trying to say when they claim that there is a God. There is no monolithic consensus here, and since atheism is a negation of whatever that claim about God’s existence might be, we shouldn’t expect atheism to be monolithic either. Many of the most vocal atheists like to focus on a particular sort of claim of God’s existence – the claim that there is a god who created the universe and whose nature and intentions are part of the explanation of the universe. At its most extreme, this sort of belief in God contradicts established scientific theories, notably the theory of evolution. And it is contradicted in turn by an atheism that says that such an assertion of God’s existence can only be established on the basis of experimental evidence that is in fact lacking: all of the available evidence suggests explanations for the world that do not involve God, so the hypothesis of God’s existence is unwarranted and almost certainly false.

But there are also plenty of religious people who are content to look to science alone to explain the way the world is. They accept evolutionary theory without reserve and rely on physicists, not theologians, to unlock the secrets of the universe. For these people, God’s creative contribution is just an initial self-effacing impulse, simultaneously willing the world and delegating it in its entirety to science. Since their assertion of God’s existence does not contradict any scientific accounts, it cannot be judged false on the basis of the truth of those accounts.

A philosophically minded atheist might respond to this version of the assertion that God exists by calling it, not false, but meaningless. A statement is only meaningful if there is some way to determine whether it is true or false, they might say, and there is no set of circumstances that would count towards the truth or the falsity of the claim that such a scientifically redundant sort of god exists.

This sort of atheist is invoking the “verification principle”, which has an origin in Wittgenstein’s early thought. His theory of meaning in the Tractatus makes religious propositions meaningless: the world is the totality of scientific facts, and no proposition is meaningful that does not correspond with a scientific fact. But Wittgenstein was far from sharing the scathing hostility to religion that today’s atheism exhibits, and we can look to his thought to supply a different sort of atheism altogether, one that can foster an allegiance – perhaps even an identity – with some kinds of religious faith. It is worth making a sketch of his thoughts about religion, not so much with the idea that they are a correct or coherent philosophy of religion, but to show the availability, to an atheist philosopher, of a project of seeking value in religion, and even truth, albeit not truth of a profoundly satisfying kind.

Three features of Wittgenstein’s thought come together to suggest that atheism can be deeply at home in religion: he thought that the religious outlook manifested something very important; he thought (eventually) that religious discourse, including discourse about God, was meaningful; and he thought that religious discourse was founded in universal human characteristics, shared by both people of faith and those without faith.

The importance of religion struck Wittgenstein strongly even when he thought of religious utterances as meaningless: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” When we try to talk of God, we knock up against the limits of language, and our efforts are cognitively fruitless. But that is not to dismiss religion. Philosophy, too, knocks up against the limits of language, and is not thereby destroyed (though it has to be reconceptualised, with a much more modest agenda). In the case of both philosophy and religion our inclination to run up against the limits of language shows us something important.

What does it show us in the case of religion? It shows us something about our status as beings in the world, capable of seeing things only from the midst and not from the outside, much as we cannot see our eye in our visual field. The inarticulable and impossible view from the outside is not available to us, but it is something that we seek: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists …. To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.”

Science alone tells us “how things are in the world”. In this sense, Wittgenstein is an atheist. But there is a certain – mystical – orientation which seeks to reflect with wonder on the world viewed as a whole, sub specie aeterni, which Wittgenstein does not reject (he merely calls it unsayable).

To try and make sense of this, think for a moment about those religious believers mentioned above for whom God’s role is limited to an initial act of creative delegation, which sets the scientific ball rolling. And remember also that the religious doctrine of free will also sees God as delegating to individuals the whole of their inner lives. A god who so copiously sloughs off all of his agency over matter and persons is infinitely small, in the sense of being nowhere present in an account of how the world is. The difference between such an infinitely small god and no god at all is not in the world. It does not tread on the territory of science by concerning itself with “how things are in the world”. Seeing such a god as present or absent is not a disagreement about facts: it is something more like seeing the world under a different aspect: faith and atheism are like different ways of seeing the same picture, and the disagreement between them is something like an aesthetic difference of opinion – concerning matters to which religious people and some atheists are compellingly drawn.

According to Wittgenstein’s earlier thought, religious discourse, despite its importance, is meaningless. Those for whom the mystical/religious orientation to the world is important could make it manifest in their way of life, but they could not speak of it without uttering nonsense. However, as his thought developed, he gave a new account of language. Instead of having the uniform scientific function of naming objects in the world and asserting facts about the world, he argued, language has meaning by being embedded in diverse human practices – including scientific discourse, but also including the practices of those who share a sense of the importance of a religious/mystical orientation. Language is pluralist, and among several very different possible uses of it are those that meaningfully express, in their “deep grammar”, the unsayable. His atheism remained, in that he denied that propositions involving the word “God” can be interpreted as meaningfully asserting the existence of some entity. But he presents such propositions as meaningful nonetheless, entirely capable of being uttered without error, as the linguistic components of a certain way of life, one which he seems to have admired.

So, religion is both important and meaningful for Wittgenstein. But what did it have to do with him, as an atheist? Wittgenstein was both engaged with and cut off from religion. He did not join in religious practice, and the religious practitioners of his day would not by and large have felt it possible to accept his account of their enterprise. He was an outsider to the religious practices of mid-twentieth century Europe. But does that mean he did not partake at all in the religious “form of life”? It cannot mean that, not only because he was so clearly drawn to religion, but also because on his new account of meaning, meaning is generated within our shared practices: it is our participation in a shared form of life that makes it possible for us to share a language. If a religious practitioner and a non-practitioner did not have a relevant form of life in common then they quite simply wouldn’t be able to talk to one another about religion at all.

In tracing the origins of religious language and ritual, Wittgenstein speaks in terms of fundamental, universal human characteristics. Humankind is, for Wittgenstein, by its very nature ceremonious, given to ritual, so a religious form of life has been persistent throughout human history. And human thought and language, by its nature, is mystical: it draws us to its limits, to the kind of attempted utterances of religion and philosophy that Wittgenstein spent his life seeking to clarify and dissipate. There is, then (underlying the historically specific and transient forms of religiousness that individuals may and may not endorse), a universal religious consciousness, shared by believers and non-believers alike (though more highly motivating for some than for others) – in virtue of which there can be meaningful conversations between believers and non-believers. That religious consciousness, or form of life, does not entail a belief in God: it is the framework within which God’s existence can be meaningfully asserted or denied. When God’s existence is finally denied altogether, as it is in vast swathes of modern society, our religious consciousness becomes a “post-religious consciousness” – godless, but still part of a trajectory determined by the conditions which gave rise to religion in the first place. We don’t entirely escape religion just by negating it: atheism is a stance adopted towards religious questions, rather than a disappearance of the religious form of life.

This is our plight, this loss of God coupled with a continuing participation in the form of life which gives religious discourse its meaning. The mystical, as defined by Wittgenstein, persists, but those who are drawn to it find that there is nothing that can be satisfactorily said of it: religious language, though meaningful, is grounded in nothing other than our human mores. Where do we go from there?

Some of us are quite content to turn attention away from the limits of language back to the scientific. But others will continue to be driven towards those limits, and, perhaps surprisingly, they will find that religion itself gives expression to the loss, the absence of God, and is possibly at its most beautiful when it does precisely that.

Perhaps the most poignant religious expression of the loss of God is that moment within the Christian story when the sense of loss is projected onto God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ crying out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The same loss is replayed in numberless Christian artworks. The aria “Erbarme dich” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, for example, speaks of a yearning for God that is so intense that the spirituality is located more squarely in the yearning than in the (nonsensical, non-existent) entity which is superficially its object. One might object that in Christianity as traditionally conceived that loss of God is transient, it is the prelude to a reunification with him. Well, yes. But our religious consciousness evolves with our scientific and philosophical discoveries, and our interpretation of Christian mythology evolves accordingly. A story that was once about our separation from and reunification with God can equally well serve as the expression of a sense of separation that reaches its culmination not only in the death of Christ, but also in the death of the idea of a transcendent God, by means of which death we are acquainted with a painfully less satisfying, but immediately present, divinity, located nowhere other than in our shared religious observances. This would be a form of atheism that is either deeply friendly to religion, or actually religious itself. I’m not sure that it matters much which we call it. This form of atheism would be enriched by a stroll around a cathedral which is empty of God but saturated with the practices by which religious meaning is generated.

Claire Creffield works in academic publishing and is a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

A field guide to the Higgs

Posted by on January 24, 2013 No comments

James Ladyman on the discovery at CERN and the rationality of science. This article appears in Issue 59 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Atoms turned out not to be atomic because, as we know to our peril, there can be nuclear fission. The triumph of the search for the fundamental building blocks of matter and the discovery of the chemical elements of the Periodic Table was a Pyrrhic victory because, as Henri Poincare said, the atom turned out to be a world in itself. The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN announced on July 4th means a new particle is added to the bewildering menagerie that already includes quarks, electrons and the W and Z bosons previously discovered at CERN. The latter two particles are bosons, meaning that they obey Bose-Einstein statistics which allow many of them to be in exactly the same state, unlike quarks and electrons which obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle and are known as fermions (obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics). All these particles are fundamental in the sense that they are not composed of other particles.

However, whereas the other fundamental bosons, the W and Z particles and the photon, are all force-carrying particles, the Higgs is not. Rather, it is there to explain why other particles have mass. Electromagnetism holds atoms together by causing the attraction of the positively charged nucleus and the negatively charged electrons. Richard Feynman complained about the lack of an explanation for the mass of the electron, which is very much lighter than the particles that make up the nucleus (nearly 2,000 times lighter than each, and there may be many). If electrons were even a tiny bit more or less massive there would be no stable atoms at all. However, the mystery goes deeper, because in fact the quantum field theory of the electromagnetic and weak interactions that unified them (in a single theory called “electroweak”) calls for electrons to have no mass at all. Meanwhile, it has been found that quarks and W and Z bosons are very massive, while photons are massless. Some mechanism was needed to explain why particles have the masses that they do. This was the problem that Peter Higgs and others proposed to solve by positing a new field and with it new particles.

It is really the Higgs field whose discovery is being celebrated, because particles are not really particles in the everyday sense but rather excitation states of fields. The Higgs boson has no charge, no colour charge (the charge of the strong force that quarks exhibit) and no spin. It does have a mass because the Higgs field interacts with itself, and it is by the mass of the Higgs and the particles into which it decays that it is known. “The” Higgs boson that has been discovered is in fact the lowest excitation state of the Higgs field, which is posited to have a non-zero ground state everywhere to explain the ubiquity of the masses of other particles. While there is only one type of Higgs particle in the Standard Model, there are non-standard models with more, so what has been found is a particle with the mass and properties consistent with a Higgs particle but not necessarily the only one.

Furthermore, while the mystery of how particles can have mass is solved by the Higgs mechanism, and this is confirmed by the discovery at CERN, the current theory of the former gives no explanation for why particles have the particular masses that they do. The electron is simply supposed to interact with the Higgs field via a “coupling constant” whose value is designed to reproduce the known mass of the electron, and likewise for quarks and other particles. So while the discovery of the Higgs is an important result, it is far from the end of the story.

For philosophers the Higgs affair illustrates many issues in the philosophy of science. The theory-ladenness of observation is exemplified by the discovery of a particle that cannot be seen directly – its existence is inferred from the detection of other particles which themselves are known only indirectly. Furthermore, the Higgs particle was not predicted to have its exact mass, rather previous attempts to find it at lower masses all failed, so the theory of the Higgs particle underdetermines this property which is determined from the data. We know from previous experience that our theories and understanding of the Higgs field may be revised, however we can be confident that the Higgs mechanism for symmetry breaking and the structure of the standard model will be retained in future physics at least as an approximation.

Finally this episode in the history of physics demonstrates a fundamental epistemological issue; neither scientific theory nor mathematical statistics can tell us when to stick our necks out and announce a discovery. The convention in this case is when an apparent event has a probability of less than one in about three million of being due to an error. There is no particular reason why this number is chosen instead of one significantly bigger or smaller. As with climate change, experiment and logic and mathematics can only tell us how likely or unlikely our results are given our theory, not how sure we need to be to believe.

James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Begging to differ

Posted by on December 11, 2012 7 comments

Article by Catherine Z Elgin This article appears in Issue 59 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Disagreement abounds. People disagree about everything from sports and politics to science and child rearing. When disagreements stem from the manifest ignorance, bias, or stupidity of one of the disputants, they are epistemologically benign. That someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about disagrees with you gives you no reason to rethink your position. But some disagreements are more worrisome. Equally intelligent, knowledgeable, thoughtful and open-minded people often disagree. Let us call such parties intellectual equals. Should disagreements among intellectual equals give us pause?

Epistemologists disagree. Conciliatory thinkers such as Hilary Kornblith hold that it should. If Fred recognises George as his intellectual equal, he has no basis for thinking that his opinion is better than George’s (or that George’s is better than his). So when they disagree, conciliationists maintain, both should suspend judgement. Advocates of resoluteness such as Thomas Kelly recommend holding fast. If intellectual equals who disagree are always required to suspend judgement, scepticism looms. Given the range of topics on which we disagree with our intellectual equals, we know very little. Resoluteness is permissible, they maintain, because everyone makes mistakes. It is open to Fred to think that where they disagree, George must be mistaken. He is then within his rights to dismiss George’s opinion. Unfortunately, George can think the same about Fred. Resoluteness fosters dogmatism; we are always entitled to dismiss the opinions of intellectual equals who disagree with us by assuming they have made a mistake. Neither scepticism nor dogmatism is an attractive option. A third alternative is that disagreement among intellectual equals provides some reason to rethink one’s position but does not require revising or repudiating it. In that case, parties could reasonably agree to disagree. The challenge is to make room for this position.

Posing the problem so schematically may be misleading. Different disagreements call for different responses. If George knows that he has scrupulously weighed the evidence and has independent reason to suspect that Fred has not done so, it may be reasonable for him to be resolute in his belief that diets rich in kale cause kidney stones even though Fred disagrees. George’s resoluteness here need not be grounded in a general assumption that people who disagree with him are wrong. Rather, he may think that in this particular case Fred has jumped to a conclusion. Dogmatism emerges if he adopts this stance generally.

As the following cases illustrate, conciliation is sometimes appropriate:

Mathematics: Seven friends go out to dinner and agree to evenly split the check. The total comes to $193.91. Pat and Mike are equally good at mental mathematics. Pat announces that each party should pay $27.53; Mike says each should pay $26.93.

Perception: Pat and Mike have equally good eyesight. Pat says that she sees a rabbit in the field; Mike says that he does not see it.

Isolated, ascertainable fact: Pat says that the Battle of Waterloo took place in 1814; Mike says that it took place in 1815.

Isolated, unascertainable (or not readily ascertainable) fact: Pat says that the blue team won the sack race in 1993; Mike says that the white team won. There are no records, and they have lost contact with the other participants.

These disagreements are readily adjudicable; they rest on a bedrock of agreement about what settles such matters. Pat and Mike agree that the correct answer in the restaurant case is whatever one seventh of $193.91 is; and they agree on how to do the calculation. They agree about how to check whether a particular visual perspective is unreliable. They agree about how to ascertain a matter of historical fact, and about what one should think when the requisite information is not available. Plainly both should suspend judgement until they have done the calculation, moved to a better vantage point, checked the disputed fact by appealing to a reliable source. They should suspend judgement permanently if no such source is available.

Sometimes, however, there is no bedrock of agreement. When paleozoologists disagree about the fate of the woolly mammoth, or baseball fans disagree about the strength of the infield, they are apt also to disagree about exactly how to assess such matters. Typically, these disagreements emerge from systematically interconnected clusters of commitments, not only about the topic but also about how to think about it. Cognitive scientists Ken and Alice disagree about whether flavonoids enhance memory because Ken credits the robust results of longitudinal studies which support the hypothesis, while Alice insists on controlled experiments which have not yet been done. In disagreements among intellectual equals, commitments are likely to overlap. But disputants may assign different weights to factors all consider relevant, diverge over whether particular factors are relevant, consider different methods reliable, or differ over thresholds for acceptability.

Even if contending parties agree about what factors are relevant to settling their dispute, and about the general region within which an acceptable answer must lie, they may condone different trade-offs. Both may agree that science seeks generality and precision, but disagree about how to balance one against the other. Both may agree that empirical results must be statistically significant, but disagree about where the line for statistical significance should be drawn. Both may agree that a political arrangement must counterpoise liberty and equality, but disagree about where the balance lies. Let us call such disagreements (currently) inadjudicable. There is no consensus as to the criterion for an adequate resolution.

Perhaps the remedy is to create common ground. Resolve the underlying disagreements, then move on to the topic at hand. How should this be done? Is there an objective fact as to how good evidence must be before it establishes a conclusion? Is there a fact about how many false positives or false negatives investigators should be willing to tolerate? Suppose a test for anaemia is accurate 93% of the time. Dr Henry considers a positive result to afford sufficient reason to believe that his patient is anaemic. Because Dr Murphy insists on 95% accuracy, she suspends judgement on cases where Dr Henry believes. Both agree about what the test result is and about how accurate the test is. They disagree about whether a 93% success rate is good enough – that is, about where the threshold of acceptability lies. Their disagreement about whether the evidence suffices stems from differences in risk aversiveness. If there is a determinate fact about how risk averse one should be in diagnosing anaemia, at least one of the physicians is wrong. But what might such a fact be? Is there a sharp line between being too cautious and being too cavalier in believing test results? If, within certain limits, any of a range of answers is reasonable, then a factual disagreement can be based on differences over something other than a matter of fact.

Suppose Bill believes that generality is more important than precision, while Ellen believes that precision outweighs generality. Their disagreement about the effects of climate change on a butterfly population might stem from a disagreement about precision and generality. Ellen draws precise conclusions that apply only to Monarch butterflies; Bill draws general conclusions that apply more broadly, but that are accurate to fewer significant figures. So Ellen rejects some of the conclusions Bill draws, considering them unacceptably imprecise. Is there a fact as to the proper balance of precision and scope in scientific theories in general? If not, is there a fact in this particular case? If there is, then either Bill’s enthusiasm for generality is overreaching or Ellen’s fondness for precision is nit-picking. But often things are, as far as we can tell, equally balanced. Different trade-offs between precision and generality yield theories that are on balance equally satisfactory.

Maybe the solution here is the same as the solution to adjudicable disagreements: suspend judgement until the more demanding standard is met or suitably fine-grained criteria are framed. If so, suspension of judgement may be permanent. As we saw in the disagreement about the sack race, sometimes a permanent suspension of judgement is reasonable. But such a strategy can be costly. By suspending judgement parties may deprive themselves of resources that could enable them to eventually resolve their disagreement.

To believe an hypothesis is not only to feel that itis true; it is also to be willing to use the hypothesis as a premise in reasoning and as a basis for action in cognitively serious contexts. To suspend judgement involves being unwilling to reason with it or act on it in such contexts. Each judgement we suspend deprives us of a premise. If the premise is false or its justification is shaky, such deprivation can work to our advantage, preventing us from incorporating unwarranted claims into our corpus of beliefs. But we lose inferential power. In suspending judgement about her share of the restaurant bill, Pat lost information she needed to calculate her contribution to the tip. Because that disagreement was adjudicable, that loss was short-lived. But sometimes the loss is more consequential.

A perforated bone fragment was found in a Neanderthal grave. Palaeontologists disagree about whether it is part of a primitive flute. Given its configuration, if it had been found in the grave of a Palaeolithic Homo Sapiens, it would be considered part of a flute. The disagreement is due to underlying disagreements about the level of Neanderthal neurological development. Some hold that Neanderthals lacked the manual dexterity needed to make and manipulate a flute and the intelligence and imagination to invent one. Others think Neanderthals were more gifted. They challenge their opponents to explain what the bone fragment is, if it is not a flute. Little is known about Neanderthals. The available evidence is sparse and equivocal. Each party to the dispute adduces considerations that are consonant with, but relatively weakly supported by the available, uncontroversial evidence. This is not sloppy reasoning. It is the best that can be done with the resources at hand. If the only issue that divided them was the interpretation of the bone fragment, suspending judgement would be reasonable. But palaeontology is riddled with controversies about the Neanderthals. The extent of their tool-making, the structure of their communities, the level of their cognitive and artistic development are all matters of dispute. If disputants had to restrict themselves to considerations that all knowledgeable parties consider firmly established, they would be left with a few isolated facts, but no way to connect them. The fabric of understanding would be riddled with holes and be too flimsy to hang together. If, on the other hand, each group can provisionally accept a hypothesis that is less than secure, their prospects are brighter. Gradually, by playing off their alternatives against each other, they may weave together a tight body of plausible claims that collectively vindicate or rebut the hypothesis that the bone fragment is a flute. By accepting – even tentatively, and with trepidation – a less than firmly established hypothesis, investigators can pursue their inquiries and, with luck, eventually settle the controversy.

Even if this strategy is reasonable, some might argue that it can be pursued without belief. It is perfectly feasible to treat something as a serious working hypothesis without believing it. So perhaps the best strategy is to be conciliatory about belief, and resolute about working hypotheses. Then both groups of palaeontologists can wholeheartedly and single mindedly pursue their investigations, garnering what evidence they can, systematising it as they think appropriate, and making the strongest case possible for their position. They simply should not believe what they say. If we take this position, however, belief attenuates. It ceases to be tied to cognitively responsible inference and action. Scientists would be entitled to use disputed hypotheses as a basis for reasoning and action in their investigations, to argue from those hypotheses, to act on the basis of them. They would be entitled to treat them in their scientific practice just as they would treat hypotheses they believed. If such entitlements are retained in circumstances where epistemologists say that belief is unwarranted, we should probably say, “So much the worse for belief”. This sort of suspension of judgement would have no effect on cognitively responsible practice.

It differs from the suspension of judgement that occurs in adjudicatable cases. There, when parties suspend judgement, they do not and ought not take themselves to be entitled to use the disputed claims as a basis for cognitively serious reasoning or cognitively responsible action. In the restaurant case, Mike does not think he is entitled to put $26.93 (plus a tip) on the table and walk out. Until they do the calculation and resolve the disagreement, he is in no position to say what he owes, hence in no position to pay what he owes.

In inadjudicable cases, intellectual equals disagree, not only about a question of fact, but also about how their disagreement ought to be resolved. Although they largely agree about what sorts of factors are relevant, opinions may diverge at the periphery – one party holding a factor to have a bearing on the issue, the other thinking not. They may disagree about how relevant factors ought to be weighed and/or what the threshold for acceptability is. Still, within roughly specified limits, a variety of positions seem equally acceptable. In such circumstances, rather than insisting that those who disagree with you must be mistaken or consigning yourself and your colleagues to what may be ineradicable ignorance, the best strategy might be to respectfully agree to disagree. Agreeing to disagree entitles each party to draw cognitively serious inferences and engage in cognitively serious actions on the basis of the hypothesis that she favours. Respectfulness lies in acknowledging that on the available evidence the positions taken by one’s intellectual equals are not unreasonable. This is not a position of mindless tolerance of any opinion whatsoever. On the available evidence, palaeontologists can see the merits of both sides of the debate about whether the bone fragment is part of a primitive flute. But they join forces in resolutely rejecting the suggestion that it is a fully functional slide trombone. To be responsible in such a situation, each party must remain attuned to the state of play in the field, recognising that insights that emerge may tilt the balance toward or against her opinion.

I have focused on scientific disagreements, but my points extend to disagreements in all fields. Knowledgeable sports fans may disagree about whether the Steelers are a better football team than the Patriots, because they disagree about the relative importance of a strong running game and a strong passing game. Both are desirable, and a single team is unlikely to be optimal at both. But, arguably, the verdict as to which team is better hangs on where one stands on the question. Here too, respectfully agreeing to disagree seems reasonable.

Earlier I mentioned that epistemologists disagree about whether we should be resolute or conciliatory. What should we make of this disagreement? (I assume that the parties to this dispute are intellectual equals.) Advocates of resoluteness hold that conciliationists ought to be resolutely conciliationist: that is, conciliationists should insist on suspending judgement about which position is correct. But according to conciliationism, given that the resolute disagree with them, conciliationists should suspend judgement about whether we should suspend judgement on the matter. They are, they believe, in no position to insist. The mere existence of conciliationism creates a predicament: only those who do not hold it can, by their own lights, advocate that anyone hold it. If it is reasonable for epistemologists to agree to disagree, they can evade this dilemma. Those who favour resoluteness are within their rights to stand fast in the face of disagreement, while the conciliatory take disagreement as a reason to suspend judgement. Eventually perhaps a resolution will be reached. Perhaps not. But arguably the best way to understand the nature and epistemological significance of disagreement is to endorse a division of cognitive labour, where the members of the epistemological community take the positions they consider most plausible with the utmost seriousness and pursue them to see whether in the end they prove tenable. Consensus may be overrated.

Catherine Z Elgin is professor of the philosophy of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Considered Judgement (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (Cornell University Press, 1997).

Evil achievements

Posted by on November 26, 2012 No comments

Article by Gwen Bradford. This article appears in Issue 59 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Please support TPM by subscribing.

Achievements play a central role in our lives. Indeed, many people would say that a life of simple comfort wouldn’t be as good as a life with accomplishment – and those accomplishments are worth the effort even at the expense of some comfort, even a large sacrifice. Achievements, it is reasonable to say, are valuable, and enrich the lives of achievers.

But just what is an achievement? Consider the range, from the world-changing to the personal: the discovery of DNA; Banting and Best’s development of insulin; Wagner’s Ring Cycle; running a marathon; buying your first house; baking a soufflé without letting it fall; building a replica of the Titanic out of Lego.

What, we might wonder, do all these achievements have in common, and why are they worth doing?

One thought is that achievements are valuable because of what they achieve: the product. The discovery of insulin was a valuable achievement because it saved many lives; Wagner’s Ring Cycle is a great artistic achievement because it resulted in an incredible work of art that changed the genre.

But not all achievements have valuable products. Running a marathon, for example, doesn’t result in anything apart from its own completion. Indeed, all you get when you run a marathon is 26.2 miles away from where you started. Many people get health benefits from the experience, but it seems that running a marathon is valuable even apart from these effects. In fact, it is typically not the case that running a marathon has lasting health benefits, yet I think we are still inclined to say that it is an achievement, and something that is good, as a result. Similarly, climbing Everest doesn’t result in anything beyond being on top of the mountain. Sure, there might be a nice view, but the view certainly isn’t what makes the climb valuable. After all, several blind climbers have made the ascent and surely their achievements are impressive and worthwhile.

Because these paradigmatic achievements are valuable, yet have no independently valuable products, a reasonable inference is that the process of achievements generates value. Presumably there is some cluster of common features of achievements: exercise of skill, effort, competence, ingenuity, or perseverance. All achievements are difficult, in one way or another, and the features engaged in difficult activity are a plausible source of value. More could be said about exactly what these features are and why they are valuable, but for now let us suppose that there is indeed some cluster of features common to the processes of achievements. Supposing that we are correct that these features are common to all achievements, it stands to reason that achievements are all valuable in virtue of these processes. The value, it turns out, is in the journey rather than the destination, to be clichéd about it. Of course, having a valuable product contributes value to an achievement – surely holding all other features constant, an achievement that results in a highly valuable product is a more valuable achievement than one that does not. But all achievements also have value in virtue of their process.

Overall, then, achievements are characterised by a process-product structure, and while many achievements have valuable products, not all of them do. Insofar as achievements are valuable, and assuming that they are valuable for the same (or similar) elements in all (or most) cases, achievements are all valuable for the process. Presumably, there are some core characteristics of the processes of achievements, and it is because of these features that achievements are all valuable.

But there are some achievements, it seems, that have products that are not just zero value, but worse: they are evil! The creation of the atom bomb; the invention of poison gas; the perfect murder.

Now, one might be inclined to reject the idea that such horrible things could truly be achievements. Perhaps achievements must have products that are at least zero value – an evil product excludes an activity from being an achievement. But I think this judgement would be hasty. Case in point being the ingenious art heists depicted in exciting films such as the Thomas Crowne Affair or Entrapment. An art heist has an evil product – a theft – but to say that pulling off an incredibly imaginative plan with dazzling skill and panache is not an achievement would be overly restrictive and schoolmarmish. So it is certainly possible for an achievement to have an evil product.

But what are we to say of the value of such achievements? If pursuing good, non-evil achievements is indeed worthwhile, is this also true of evil achievements? After all, achievements are valuable because of their process – and these good-making features that are present in benign and good achievements are no doubt also present in evil achievements. So we might ask – can evil achievements have positive value?

I think the question to this is yes: art heists, it seems, aren’t entirely evil. Indeed, it even seems that there might be some positive intrinsic value to them. As evidence for this, look at our reactions to heist films such as The Thomas Crowne Affair. We enjoy these films and root for the “heroes” to pull off their escapades – we are impressed by these achievements, and this seems like the fitting reaction. Insofar as goodness is the sort of thing that it is fitting to be impressed by and respected, then we have some evidence that art heists have at least some value, or some valuable part.

If these lesser evil achievements can have some positive value, what about the extremely evil ones? The perfect crime could be a murder, just as well as it could be a clever art theft. Do these very evil achievements have even a good part or are they entirely evil? Since the very evil achievements share the same good-making features of their process as the lesser evil (and good) achievements, then we will need to account for what happens to that value if we are inclined to say that the very evil achievements have no value at all.

We might appeal to an additive principle so that the value of an achievement is a matter of the sum of the value of the process and the value of the product. Thus achievements with highly positive products – such as the cure for cancer, or a great work of art – are extremely valuable. Assuming the process always has some positive value, achievements that have products of negative value may turn out to have either positive value overall – if the evil product is a very small evil – or negative value overall, in a case where the product is very evil. So according to the additive principle, the positive value of the process of very evil achievements can be outweighed by the negative value of the evil products. In cases where the product isn’t quite so bad – and where the process is especially impressive – then the achievement is good overall. So an exceedingly impressive art heist might be valuable overall, in spite of its evil product.

Although the additive principle is appealing in its simplicity, it doesn’t capture some important intuitions about evil. We need to have a way to distinguish between aiming at something bad and producing something bad by accident. It seems worse to engage in a process with the aim of bringing about something bad, but if we just add the value of the process (in virtue of, for example, difficulty, competence) then it won’t capture this difference in value.

A more sophisticated approach would be to appeal to the philosophical principle that captures this very notion: that loving the good is good, and loving the bad is bad. Here we take “loving” as something very broad, which extends to pro-attitudes in general, including enjoying and desiring, and to pro-activities, such as pursuing or promoting. This principle – that having pro-attitudes toward goods is good, and towards bad is bad – has its roots in Aristotle, and has been discussed by G E Moore, Franz Brentano, and, more recently, Robert Nozick and Thomas Hurka. Let’s give the principle that loving the good is good a fancy Latin name: the amare bonum bonus principle. It accounts for the value of certain pro-attitudes when directed toward objects of certain values.

In achievements, this principle is at play. Achievements involve a process in which the product is being pursued. Pursuit is a pro-activity, and so in cases where the pursuit aims toward a product of either positive or negative value, amare bonum bonus is activated. As a result, then, the value of the pursuit is altered in response to the value of the product. This entails that achievements with positive products have positive processes, and negative products have negative processes.

Yet if what I suggested earlier is true, the processes of all achievements have positive value. If the amare bonum bonus is correct, then what are we to say about evil achievements? What happens to that value that was originally in the process? The amare bonum bonus tells us the positive value of the pursuit of an evil product is negative – it loses its positive value.

We might be inclined to accept this implication for achievements with very evil products – such as heinous murders. The amare bonum bonus would tell us that ingenious, difficult “achievements” that result in a murder, are all the more evil as a result of their elaborate ingenuity.

But what about petty evil achievements? The amare bonum bonus tells us that the same will be true of them: petty evil achievements now become overall evil. Even a practical joke! After all, a practical joke can involve a serious amount of planning, preparation and ingenuity, not to mention skill and panache. But the product of a practical joke is typically some (relatively minor) pain or humiliation, so practical jokes are also examples of such smaller-scale, petty evil achievements. But amare bonum bonus would tell us that practical jokes are evil overall. Because they involve the pursuit of a product of negative value, they are overall evil. We now have another objectionably schoolmarmish implication.

A more promising approach might appeal to aspects of both the views that we have considered so far: on the one hand, we would like the amare bonum bonus to shape the value of the pursuit of good or bad products. On the other hand, we do not want to entirely obliterate the positive value of pursuits that would have independently positive value – as is the case in achievements, particularly achievements with extremely elaborate and impressive processes.

So how about something like the following? Rather than controlling the overall value of the pursuit, we could re-construe the amare bonum bonus so that the value of the pursuit is augmented or diminished, by some amount. Now, the amare bonum bonus doesn’t determine the entire value of the process; rather, it raises or lowers it – so some of its original value remains. Presumably, this amount would be proportionate in some way to the value of the product – so pursuing something very, very bad generates a very significant diminishment of the value of the process; and pursuing something only moderately good results in a relatively slight augmentation of value of the process, and so on. Petty evil achievements, such as art heists and practical jokes, because their products are not seriously bad, the process is diminished by a proportionately small amount. So this approach would allow us to capture the intuition that petty evil achievements are not overall evil. Large-scale evil achievements, with extremely evil products, are such that amare bonum bonus entails that the value of the process is reduced by a significantly large amount – large enough (depending on the details) to obliterate entirely its original positive value. Thus amare bonum bonus tells us that very evil achievements are indeed very evil.

But the details matter quite a lot. It is possible that if a process were of enough positive value that even a significant diminishment could not obliterate it. If there were a process that was superlatively impressive and complex and ingenious and had all the good-making features of achievements to an incredibly high degree, and this staggeringly valuable process were then directed toward the pursuit of some incredibly horrendous product – the murder of hundreds of innocent people, for example – if the process were indeed valuable enough, then it seems possible that even if amare bonum bonus diminished the value of the process by some significant amount, the process might still have some positive value. It might have enough, perhaps, to make it such that this extremely evil achievement would in fact be of positive value in the end, even though it resulted in the killing of hundreds of innocent people.

One option is to accept these implications: perhaps we have learned something interesting – there really can be a sort of peculiar silver lining to heinous acts. Impressive displays of ingenuity and effort are indeed valuable, even when directed toward something evil. But I suspect that many people will be unwilling to accept this implication. We are inclined to think that the very ardent pursuit of some evil achievement is all the more evil just because they involve such an impressive display of skill and ingenuity.

Yet the earlier discussion of amare bonum bonus implies that this can’t be true unless we are willing to say that even petty evil achievements, such as art heists, are also all the more evil because they involve an impressive display of ingenuity toward an evil goal. This seems wrong.

Amare bonum bonus is an intuitively appealing principle, and it would be a pity to reject it. Should we try again to re-construe it yet again? I think a solution may indeed lie in this direction. But let’s now consider another possibility instead.

We may be mistaken about petty evil achievements. Perhaps they are not actually evil achievements in the way that I have defined them: perhaps they do not involve a product that is evil. Let’s reconsider the practical joke and the art heists. What, exactly, is the product that is achieved here?

Initially I described the product of the practical joke as someone’s (minor) pain and embarrassment. Indeed, this is an element of a typical practical joke. But is the pain and embarrassment really the product? Perhaps not – it seems that a more accurate description would be that the product is the amusement, getting a laugh. The pain and embarrassment is a mere means to this end; which is to say, it is part of the process, not the product.

So really what we have here is not an evil achievement – where we mean by this the technical sense in which the product is bad. Rather, it’s a non-evil achievement (even a good product) but it involves some evil means along the way, namely causing someone pain and embarrassment.

What about art heists? I think the case is slightly more complicated – the product is a painting, in a sense, but not simply its existence, rather a state of affairs involving its possession by someone who does not own it. Is this state of affairs of negative value? It’s hard to say. It’s not clear that all states of affairs in which someone has possession of something that does not belong to them are evil. You might be borrowing something with its owner’s permission, for example, or taking care of a stray dog that doesn’t belong to you but would otherwise perish. We might think that this case is bad because it doesn’t “rightfully” belong in the thief’s possession, but even this may be more complex than meets the eye. Again, perhaps a more promising approach is to say that art heists are not, strictly speaking, evil achievements in the technical sense. At least, they have the potential not to be evil achievements. It is the means of the art heist that involve morally questionable elements – a theft. After all, this is morally wrong.

So petty evil achievements are not in the end a threat to the accuracy of amare bonum bonus in its original form. Because they do not have an evil product, they do not involve the pursuit of a bad, so the schoolmarmish implication is no risk here. Moreover, petty evil achievements, it seems, do not involve puzzles of what’s valuable – that is to say, what is good and bad – but puzzles about what sorts of acts are morally right and morally wrong. In other words, there is a different category of normative assessment at play here, namely, actions that are morally wrong. In practical jokes, it’s causing harm (albeit relatively minor) to an innocent person; in art heists, it is stealing. These are actions that are evaluated as wrong – this is simply a different category from being “good” or “bad”. Actions, strictly speaking don’t fall into these categories. People and their characters may, states of affairs or outcomes might, but not actions. And this is what’s at play in evil achievements.

Art heists and practical jokes aren’t really evil achievements after all, and so there is no concern, then, that their evaluation poses a threat to the original version of the amare bonum bonus. Since amare bonum bonus is vindicated, we can use it to evaluate truly evil achievements, which are indeed instances of loving the bad. And we gain the implication we were hoping to capture: that the more ardent the pursuit of the bad, the worse the achievement. Of course, there is far more to be said about achievements – the good, the bad, and the extraordinary – but we will have to leave this for another time.

Gwen Bradford is assistant professor of philosophy at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Women in philosophy

Posted by on October 16, 2012 22 comments

Jennifer Saul on the psychological biases adversely affecting philosophy – and what we can do about it.

In the UK, women are 46% of undergraduate students in philosophy, but only 24% of permanent staff. Women are approximately 21% of professional philosophers in the US, but only 17% of those employed full-time. These figures are very unlike those for most fields of the humanities, in which women tend to be near or above parity with men. Indeed, they more closely resemble mathematics and physical sciences (biological sciences are much closer to parity). One recent study by Kieran Healy showed philosophy to be more male than mathematics, with only computer science, physics and engineering showing lower percentages of women.

What’s the explanation for this? It used to be thought that women were simply unsuited to philosophy. As Hegel puts it: “Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts …. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant.”

This view is, for obvious reasons, less popular now. However, quite a few people, both feminist philosophers and philosophers of psychology, have drawn on the importantly distinct idea that women approach things differently, and that philosophy is the poorer for not fitting well with women’s ways of thinking. One version of this idea can be found in Carol Gilligan and another in very recent work by Wesley Buckwalter and Steve Stich. These claims of women’s difference, however, have never held up well empirically, as Louise Antony argues eloquently in her “Different Voices or Perfect Storm”.

Another commonly floated explanation is that women’s family commitments make it more difficult for them to progress professionally. This may well be true (studies do show that women continue to do the majority of housework and childcare). But it fails to explain why philosophy should show such a different profile than other fields of the arts and humanities, which have achieved (or surpassed) parity. If anything, one would expect it to be easier to thrive as a mother and philosopher than as a mother and scholar of French literature, who is far more likely to need to travel to archives and the like.

I am firmly convinced that there are multiple factors involved in causing the under-representation of women, factors that interact with and compound each other. One important one is the likelihood that women in philosophy experience an unusually high level of sexual harassment. It is very hard to get good data, comparative or otherwise on prevalence of sexual harassment due to very low rates of official reporting. However, many have been shocked by the stories reported at What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy (beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com). As the editor of this blog, I have been even more shocked by the large number of cases I have been contacted about which never appeared on the blog due to fear of identification.

Here, however, my main focus will be on implicit bias and stereotype threat, two well-established psychological phenomena. In the cases of implicit bias most relevant to this topic, people are found to hold unconscious biases against members of those groups that are negatively stigmatised in their culture. The biases take the form of, for example, a tendency to associate men rather than women more strongly with leadership. These biases are extremely widespread, and found both in members of the stigmatised groups and in those who are consciously highly egalitarian. Importantly, these biases are also very likely to be part of the explanation for the under-representation of other groups as well. We lack good data on the racial, class, sexual orientation or disability makeup of philosophy, but surely it is difficult to doubt that philosophy is overwhelmingly white, middle class, straight and non-disabled (and to a far greater degree, in fact, than it is male). These issues will not be my focus here, but it bears remembering that part of the reason there is so much discussion of women in philosophy these days is that there are now enough women in prominent positions to put this topic on the agenda. This is less so for other groups.

The implicit biases of philosophers have not yet been studied (although I’m working on it). However, there are widespread unconscious biases in our culture which bring it about that the same CV is considered less strong with a typically female or black name at the top of it, and that (for example) women having trouble being taken seriously as leaders. Women are also likely to receive weaker letters of reference and, when not marked anonymously, lower marks.

Now on to stereotype threat. This manifests itself when members of a group that is negatively stigmatised at some task are made aware of their group membership in a high stakes situation where they care about doing well. In such situations, we see underperformance from groups as diverse as white men at Princeton doing sports, girls doing mathematics and black students engaging in a test of academic ability. The reminder of group membership can come from many sources – ticking a box indicating gender, engaging in a stereotyped task (colouring in a picture of a girl holding a doll, for example) or simply being one of very few women in the room. When this happens, people who normally perform just as well as those from positively stereotyped groups see their performance decline precipitously.

Although we don’t yet have studies of philosophers, there is good reason to suppose that both implicit biases and stereotype threat play a role in perpetuating the under-representation of women in the field. In addition to biases against women that are widespread in the culture, it seems likely that philosophy as a field is stereotyped as male. Feminist philosophers have argued this point for decades (as in Sally Haslanger’s landmark “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy”). But it’s frankly what one would expect in a field that is nearly 80% male – it would be very surprising, given these demographics, if philosophy wasn’t associated with maleness. Add to this the fact that philosophy makes heavy use of logic (often requiring it for an undergraduate degree) and the well-established fact that mathematics is stereotyped, quite strongly, as male.

If this is right, then it’s very likely that women face a lot of barriers due to implicit bias. Their work is likely to be taken less seriously at every stage if not dealt with anonymously – from early student comments in discussions to work being marked and submitted for publication. (Although most refereeing in philosophy is anonymous, very little editing is and editors reject up to 65% of submissions without sending them to referees.) And these biases will continue to work against them as they apply for jobs, tenure and promotion. It bears emphasising that these biases will cause all sorts of people to fail to appreciate the quality of womens’ work – of all genders and political persuasions, including even those who are actively fighting for equality.

Stereotype threat will also cause women in philosophy to underperform. It will be regularly triggered – by exclusively or nearly exclusively male reading lists, overwhelmingly male lecturers, department seminar speakers and conference programmes. As they progress further in their careers, their colleagues will become increasingly male as well. Combine this with implicit biases, and it is not at all surprising that those who are not white males should have difficulty flourishing in philosophy.

The bright spot in all of this is that we can rather readily do something about it – both as a profession and as individuals. The first step, though, is to move away from a widely-held picture of biases. On this conception, things like sexism and racism are a matter of conscious beliefs, easily introspectable. This is a reassuring picture, as most of us well-meaning people can introspect and see that we don’t have any of those nasty racist and sexist beliefs. Having done due diligence in this way, we can trust ourselves to assess work, students and job candidates fairly. What we know about implicit biases shows this to be wrong. We are all likely to hold biases of which we are unaware, and we are likely to be similarly unaware of the ways that these biases are affecting our judgements in particular cases. Once we acknowledge this, we can begin to do something about it.

Whether or not we’re blameworthy for our implicit biases or their effects is a matter of considerable debate. (My own view is that in many cases we are not.)

But it is very clear that once we know about implicit biases, we acquire an obligation to try to do something about them. And philosophy will be far better off for our doing so: as things stand now, we are very likely assessing work unfairly at all levels unless we’ve anonymised. This means people are not getting the marks they deserve, and we’re not selecting the right papers for publication. We’re also likely to fail to hire the best candidates. Stereotype threat is very likely to be causing some of the most talented women to underperform. The quality of work being published in philosophy, then, is lower than it otherwise would be – both due to actual underperformance and due to unconscious biases affecting assessment at all stages. Both for the sake of fairness and for the sake of philosophy, then, one should want to do something.

And there is a lot we can do, both as a profession and as individuals. The most obvious step is to anonymise whatever we can. Anonymised marking is nearly universal in the UK, but almost unheard of in the US. (For any Americans reading this, anonymity can easily be accomplished by having all students put their name only on cover sheets. Before you start grading, fold all cover sheets back. Don’t look at them again until you’re done grading. Anoymised refereeing is widespread but anonymous editing isn’t – and it’s increasingly straightforward to implement as more journals move to electronic submission.

But anonymity is not always feasible, and anyway it would do nothing for stereotype threat. To address these problems at their source, we need to change the stereotypes. The best way to do this is to expose people to what are known as “counter-stereotypical exemplars”, well-known people who fail to perform to the stereotypes of their stigmatised groups. Even brief exposure can be effective in blocking the operation of implicit biases – gazing at a picture of Martin Luther King for a few minutes before taking a race Implicit Association Test dramatically alters performance. But obviously the more exposure the better. That’s why it’s such a good idea to try to avoid all-male conferences and edited volumes. We should also try to put women on our syllabi, and also to hire them and get them as PhD students. All this, however, is easier said than done.

The most basic thing for accomplishing all of these goals is to begin with a bit of distrust for our initial judgements. For example, the first names that leap to mind for a syllabus or conference are likely to be men, whether or not they are actually the best people to have. Spending a bit of time trying to think of some women who work on the topic will in all likelihood lead to the inclusion of some excellent people one might not otherwise have thought of. (It’s worth recalling also that prominence in the field will be partly a function of biases –there are very likely plenty of women who deserve to be prominent but are not so.)

Our initial judgements of job candidates are likely to be influenced by their gender. There are many ways we can try to counteract this. A key one is to make sure that we never fall back on a simple feeling of fit, but instead examine and discuss our judgements carefully. Another is to make sure we agree upon multiple data points and their relative priority in advance – studies have shown that judgements of the importance of criteria can switch in some worrying ways (credentials most important if they’re what the male candidate has, work experience more important if that’s his stronger suit). Multiple data points will also help correct for individual bits that may have been affected by stereotype threat: a job talk to an overwhelmingly male audience may not be as accurate a measure of a woman’s abilities as a writing sample, for example.

My final suggestion may actually be the most difficult to implement: it’s to stop talking about “who’s smart”, a widespread vice of philosophers in my experience. As Eric Schwitzgebel notes, these sweeping judgements are really very problematic: “I have been collecting anecdotal data on seeming smart. One thing I’ve noticed is what sort of person tends spontaneously to be described, in my presence, as ‘seeming smart’. A very striking pattern emerges: In every case I have noted the smart-seeming person has been a young white male …. Seeming smart is probably to a large extent about activating people’s associations with intelligence. This is probably especially true when one is overhearing a comment about a complex subject that isn’t exactly in one’s expertise, so that the quality of the comment is hard to evaluate. And what do people associate with intelligence? Some things that are good: poise, confidence (but not defensiveness), giving a moderate amount of detail but not too much, providing some frame and jargon, etc. But also, unfortunately, I suspect: whiteness, maleness, a certain physical bearing, a certain dialect (one American type, one British type), certain patterns of prosody –all of which favor, I suspect, upper- to upper-middle class white men.”

Smartness claims are also remarkably immune to counter-evidence (“He’s smart, he just doesn’t work very hard”; “She’s not really smart, she just works very hard”). Moreover, smartness judgements are deeply tied to the notion that there is such a thing as smartness, of which some people are lucky enough to have a big dose while the unlucky get less. And this view of intelligence, Carol Dweck has shown, makes it easier for stereotype threat and implicit bias to do their nasty work. Teaching people instead that intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort helps to insulate against both phenomena. It also helps to motivate people to seek out challenges and to work hard.

In short, there is much that we can all do to fight the implicit biases and stereotype threat that are very likely impeding the process of women (and other groups) in philosophy. My view is that we should all start doing these things whenever we can: they will increase fairness, and improve philosophy.

Further reading

The report authored by Jennifer Saul and Helen Beebee, with more detail on these biases as well as thoughts about what we can do to combat them is called, “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. It’s available at swipuk.org/notices/2011-09-08.

For the view from America, see Kathryn Norlock’s “Women in the Profession”, available at apaonlinecsw.org/workshops-and-summer-institutes.

Kieran Healy’s graph showing the percentage of PhDs awarded in the US to women by discipline, see kieranhealy.org/files/misc/phil-by-discipline.pdf

For readings on implicit bias and stereotype threat, see biasproject.org/recommended-reading and reducingstereotypethreat.org. You can take the Implicit Association Test at Project Implicit implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.

For more on avoiding all-male conferences, see the Gendered Conference Campaign feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign.

Jennifer Saul is professor and head of department at the University of Sheffield, director of the Implicit Bias and Philosophy Research Network (biasproject.org), and director of SWIP-UK. She is co-author with Helen Beebee of the BPA/SWIP Report “Women in Philosophy in the UK” and author of Lying, Misleading and What is Said: An Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).