I’ve hosted “Ask a Philosopher” for two years. Here’s what I’ve learned.

For the past couple of years, Brooklyn Public Philosophers—the public philosophy event series I organize—has set up a booth at New York City farmers’ markets, block parties, book fairs, and even a home goods store. We recruit a couple of local philosophers to sit at a table for two to six hours next to a banner that says “Ask a Philosopher.” We set out three bowls: one with philosophical questions on slips of paper, another with thought experiments, and a third with candy. And we talk with anyone who wants to. All sorts of people stop to chat, and the conversations range as widely as you could imagine.

In anticipation of the Ask a Philosopher booths we will set up at the next Eastern Division Meeting of the APA, the APA Blog has kindly afforded me the opportunity to share what I’ve learned from the booths.  The experience has taught me about what philosophy means to people, how we could do public philosophy better, and how the practice of public philosophy might shape our own understanding of the discipline.

Popular Questions

Around half the time, conversations at the booth start from the question and thought experiment bowls. But the other half of the time, people come with questions of their own. The range of questions people ask is instructive in a few ways.

When I first started doing the booth, I expected people to ask primarily about practical or personal questions—about moral dilemmas they or their friends are facing, the meaning of life, our ongoing political problems, love, death, and so on. People do ask those questions, but just as often they ask more theoretical questions, such as why is there something rather than nothing, how should we interpret quantum mechanics, and how should act utilitarians deal with tragedies of the commons. I used to think that in order to get people to care about philosophy, we needed to show how answering philosophical questions would materially or emotionally affect their lives. While this is true for some people, it’s not true for everyone.

I have also found that people ask a lot of questions about astrology, dream interpretation, and conspiracy theories. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s because they think of philosophy as the academic field where people discuss ideas that aren’t taken seriously in other contexts. Perhaps it’s because the sort of character who sees an “Ask a Philosopher” sign as an invitation is interested in such questions. To some extent, this just confirms what we all already know—that most people don’t share the typical professional philosopher’s sense of what counts as a philosophical question. But like the familiar anecdote about the person at the cocktail party who asks the philosopher for some of his sayings, the impression that philosophers are conspiracy theorists or soothsayers suggests that a pretty specific ingredient is missing from this popular conception of philosophy—namely, that doing philosophy requires you to support and defend your views with reasons, and to change them if you can’t. For the public philosopher who wants to give people a better sense of what philosophers actually do and why it’s valuable, this discrepancy offers hope. At least for some people, all we have to do is show them that philosophy is about reasoning.

Philosophical Spaces

Philosophers spend a lot of time talking about what philosophy is. (Even if this question is merely terminological, it’s philosophically interesting to map out the considerations that lead us to one or another terminological choice, such as those concerning epistemic legitimacy, the family resemblances that tie together very different thinkers and traditions, and the politics of gatekeeping.) When we consider this question, we’re usually concerned about what makes a problem, claim, theory, or text philosophical. But these aren’t the only sorts of things that we can correctly describe as philosophical; thinking about what makes other sorts of things philosophical may help us better understand what philosophy is and how we can do it better. In particular, the Ask a Philosopher booth has gotten me thinking about what makes a space philosophical.

Consider all the spaces, physical and virtual, you might describe as philosophical: coffee shops, bars, classrooms, conferences, message boards, blogs, comment threads. Some of these are philosophical just in the sense that they are places where people happen to think, read, write, or talk about philosophy; some are philosophical in that they are, by design, places people go when they want to do philosophy.

But a space could also be philosophical by causing people who find themselves in it to do philosophy, who weren’t planning on doing philosophy and wouldn’t have been especially likely to otherwise. This could be a space where you ambush a more-or-less captive audience with philosophy—a subway car where pieces of philosophical writing have replaced the ads, say. But what if the audience isn’t captive? The Ask a Philosopher booth is one such philosophical space. What makes it work? What gives it the power to incite people to do philosophy? I think people are drawn in by its guerrilla theater aspect—the Ask a Philosopher booth never quite belongs where it is. I think it works because people can engage with it in different ways. People stop to have conversations; they take pictures to post or send to their friends; they silently read through the question and thought experiment bowls; they get things off their chest. And, having set up the booth in a few different places now, I think it works best when it sits in a comfortable space with plenty of foot traffic from people who don’t have anything in particular to do at that moment.

There are some general lessons for public philosophers here. Philosophy is, for many people, an interstitial activity. We need to do real creative work to draw people to it. If we want to encourage people to do philosophy, we need to be mindful of the fact that different people are prepared to philosophize in different ways, some more interactive or responsive than others.

Philosophy with a Human Face

Interacting with a general audience can have benefits that carry over into our scholarly work. For example, it encourages us to work on subjects of broader interest and forces us to keep before our minds the connections between our work and the big, urgent questions that drew many of us to philosophy in the first place. I think something like the Ask a Philosopher booth also has some possible benefits for our scholarly practice, but they aren’t quite the same as the benefits of public lecturing and writing. George Yancy, in his opening remarks last January at the last Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, said that public philosophy has to be, among other things, philosophy with a human face. This is especially true when public philosophy is essentially interactive, as it is at the booth. To get people to talk to you, you need to be warm, solicitous, patient, and agreement-seeking. If someone wants to be contrarian or give you a hard time (this happens rarely, but it does happen), you need to be thick-skinned and you need to kill them with kindness.

Philosophers often complain, rightly, that we work in a culture of point-scoring, where the metaphors we use to describe and evaluate what we do (e.g. “knockdown,” “incisive,” “devastating,” “opponent,” and so on) connote aggression and dominance. This is only possible because of the insularity of the field. The more we talk and listen to the public, the more the norms that govern successful public engagement will migrate into professional discourse. This would be a good thing. Whether we address each other or the world, philosophy needs a human face.

Ian Olasov

Ian Olasov is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center and the founder of Brooklyn Public Philosophers.