(This post is informed by the collective conceptual labor that led to the analysis in a co-written book chapter with Melissa D. Gruver in A Companion to Public Philosophy.)
I was first educated in philosophy at Wittenberg University under the mentorship of philosophers who are committed to public philosophy. When I arrived at my PhD program, I encountered norms for engagement and lots of content that I didn’t recognize as philosophy. Then, as I continued in my graduate program, I soon discovered that what I had originally encountered as philosophy in my undergraduate program was not always recognized as philosophy (or, at the very least, not as “real” or “serious” philosophy).
For me, public philosophy has been a lens through which to explore the integration of my academic work with my organizing work. As I completed my course work in 2015, I began to build relationships and engage in political organizing in the Greater Lafayette area. Over the course of six years, together we built Indiana Task FORCE (Feminists Organizing and Reimagining Civic Engagement), which is a state-wide, member-led power building organization fighting for liberation for all by focusing on changing the material and ideological conditions of our lives. The Public Philosophy Network has also been a great resource and a source of professional joy. The Network “promotes philosophy that engages issues of public concern and works collaboratively with civic and professional communities”; its mission is to support philosophers in serving communities “outside” of academia, reflect on how philosophy is transformed by public engagement, and encourage institutional changes to support publicly engaged work.
It is the education that I received in organizing communities, alongside my formal education, that has made me into the philosopher I am now. Although I received lots of support for this work, my desire to integrate these sources of education was not always met with open arms. Such experiences are not uncommon for those who push boundaries and keep their feet firmly planted in “two worlds”: that of academic philosophy and the so-called “real” world. This is of special relevance to those of us whose liberation requires engaging socially and politically in response to oppressive systems, in particular those who embody intersecting oppressed identities, including race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and body size, among many others. By extension, the straddling of two worlds has special relevance to all women in philosophy.
Debates around the boundaries of philosophy and what counts as genuine philosophy raise live questions that matter not only for what is taught within philosophy classrooms and who gets hired for philosophy jobs, but also for who conceptualizes themselves as philosophers. I am far from the first philosopher to explore these issues. For example, Kristie Dotson argues that the culture of justification in philosophy makes the working environment difficult for diverse practitioners and that we must work toward a culture of praxis that engages with issues pertinent to our lives and that acknowledges multiple ways of doing philosophy. The exclusionary norms of philosophy may lead women, perhaps especially those who also embody additional targeted identities, to not conceptualize themselves as philosophers.
One of the most curious things for me as I developed as an organizer and philosopher is that I often experienced a deep sense of needing to unlearn what I had learned in my formal education to be a good and effective public philosopher. I will now identify several norms and ideas (which I will call myths for ease of discussion) that are communicated through ways of speaking and practice within academic philosophy that I feel a normative pull to follow. I will then identify the practical concern or motivation to which each myth is potentially legitimately responding. Finally, I will give some reasons why the myth is preventing us from being good (public) philosophers and should be abandoned. Before I begin my analysis, I acknowledge that these myths exist in many forms for very many disciplines and are related to systems of oppression, including classism, racism, ableism, and fatphobia, among others. For this reason, these myths are not philosophy’s unique and special problems; however, given our relation to meaning making, we are well-poised to address them given the right tools and commitments.
Myth 1: Philosophers have something special to offer from “inside” of the academy to the “outside” public world of non-philosophers.
Practical Concern: In an era in which philosophy programs are at risk due to decreases in funding and divestment from education, it is imperative for philosophers to maintain their unique contribution to education at all levels. In addition, philosophical training is particularly useful for detailed analysis of social problems.
Analysis: This myth can be countered on several fronts. The first front is metaphysical. The inside/outside framework presumes that philosophers are not enmeshed in communities already. Philosophers are also material beings with needs that can be better or worse served by the social conditions of the world. Although most people would not reject this premise upon reflection, the inside/outside framework persists. This is particularly salient for women in philosophy given the historical associations between men and rationality and women and embodiment and emotion. Given this history, concern with material conditions, which are indeed the conditions for our survival, can be perceived as non-philosophical and separated from what are thought of as the most essential and ahistorical philosophical questions. A potential counter to this is to conceptualize oneself first as a being in place—within a unique set of historical and cultural circumstances—and to begin one’s philosophical engagement and analysis from that place. My understanding of beginning in a particular location is informed by Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist ethics. The practice of beginning in place counters the inside/outside framework by grounding one’s philosophical work in space.
The second front is epistemic and related to epistemic oppression. The inside/outside myth can also lead philosophers to (perhaps unwittingly) behave as if those they perceive as non-philosophers do not understand their own experiences and to presume that the frameworks that they have developed for making sense of their worlds are either incorrect or insufficient. One of the features of epistemic oppression is that the epistemic resources developed by those who are epistemically oppressed are often blocked from collective uptake, because the integration of these new resources requires deep shifts in strongly held cultural beliefs and ideologies. Although social epistemology has gained mainstream recognition over the past several years, the feminist standpoint epistemology developed primarily by women and those with marginalized genders in many different fields and communities has long been underappreciated in our field, and in my experience, is still not always accepted as “real” epistemology. Finally, when the inside/outside myth is present in community organizing or activist work, authentic relationship building cannot occur, since this dynamic is determined by who is conceptualized as a theoretical expert.
Myth 2: Only people with formal education in philosophy are philosophers and/or people without formal education in philosophy are bad at philosophy.
Practical Concern: Like the practical concern in Myth 1, preserving the unique place of academic philosophy is essential for the livelihoods of those who are employed as academic philosophers, perhaps even more so for those who are under-employed or unemployed. In addition, most of us are learning and honing our skills through philosophical education and engagement in and through academic philosophy. The final concern is conceptional inflation; if everyone counts as a philosopher, then it is unclear how the term will function successfully to pick out a discrete group of people who have expertise or are engaged in particular kinds of thought projects.
Analysis: As a result of unjust social conditions, formal philosophical training is not accessible to everyone. The discipline continues to be disproportionately white men (and as we increase the number of women in philosophy, we must ensure that this growth does not disproportionality benefit white women). As Kristie Dotson and Sally Haslanger each argue, the field as it is today is not equally welcoming or supportive to all people who may wish to engage in the project of philosophy. For this reason, and because the term “philosopher” helps us identify who we think is contributing to philosophy as a collective endeavor, we must be more expansive in our definitions. In addition, the focus on policing the boundaries of philosophy in response to funding issues in higher education shifts our focus away from failures of our systems to support higher education toward a conceptual issue. While conceptual issues are often important, in this case, policy analysis is a more promising avenue for addressing practical concerns.
Myth 3: Adopting philosophical language and frameworks will always help someone to think more clearly about their world.
Practical Concern: Philosophers develop highly technical and precise language because the world is complicated. This conceptual technology allows us to think deeply about the world and our place in it in ways that everyday language does not allow. Imprecision in language can lead to conceptual confusion.
Analysis: While philosophers have a lot to offer their communities, they also have a lot to learn from their communities. With this myth, one thing I have in mind is the urge to “systematize” or “make more precise” frameworks that are coming out of the most affected communities. Myth 3 is reinforced by Myth 1 in which the philosopher comes from “inside” of the academy to the “outside” to share their gifts and knowledge, and then immediately returns to the “inside.” Instead, public philosophy requires that philosophers engage in, through, and with the communities in which they are embedded. When I first started learning to organize with Springfield Promise Neighborhood, I quickly learned that listening to my neighbors and understanding the collective vision for our community was more important than imposing a philosophical framework. After I attended many neighborhood association meetings and built authentic relationships, I found that I could apply my philosophical training as a regular participating member of the association, rather than as an outside “expert.” This orientation to contributing is possible while at the same time acknowledging and honoring the traditional skills of academic philosophers and will result in more accessible and useful epistemic resources to analyze our world and to identify pathways for liberation.
This list of myths is not complete or unified. Instead, my aim is to identify some of the myths and patterns that I have observed as an early career philosopher who is also deeply engaged in community organizing. In addition to thinking about how we engage in public philosophy, this analysis has consequences for how we engage with our students, pointing us to do philosophy with our students and acknowledge the work they have already done to analyze their experiences, develop epistemic resources, and hone their critical engagement with the world. I write this analysis because I love public philosophy, I want the joys of doing philosophy to be shared, and I have deep generative hope for our shared future of philosophical thinking.
My best thinking, and perhaps my only tenable thinking, happens in, through and with community. On the one hand, I mean by this something straightforward: all thinkers exist within a history of inherited frameworks and ideas, as well as in relation to the analyses of contemporary thinkers, some insightful and liberatory, others harmful and ignorance-producing. However, I also mean to highlight that it is flesh and blood (and when needed, Zoom-to-Zoom) interactions that produce our best collective thinking. My thinking here has developed over six years of friendship and political commitment with Indiana Task FORCE. For me, thinking in, through, and with community is both an epistemic and ethical commitment that is essential for doing public philosophy.
Lacey J. Davidson
Lacey J. Davidson (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Indianapolis and an organizer with Indiana Task FORCE. As a teacher-scholar-organizer, her work focuses on the social, epistemic, and cognitive features that generate and sustain interlocking forms of oppression. You can find her work in A Companion to Public Philosophy, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Fat Studies, Social Trust, Making the Case, Introduction to Implicit Bias, and Overcoming Epistemic Injustice.
