You’re having coffee with a colleague, and you mention a kernel of an idea you’ve been playing with. Your colleague responds, and their response goes far beyond the kernel you mentioned. You walk away from the conversation realizing that most of what you now think about the subject comes directly from your colleague’s off-hand comments. As you write that kernel of an idea becomes integral to your project, but it leaves you with a nagging question: is this idea still yours?
A lot of philosophy happens this way. By the time a paper is finished, so many fingers have been in the pie that it can be hard for the author to see their own fingerprints. But we’re still encouraged to present ideas as though we own them. The relationship between “authorship” and “ownership” is complex and layered, and in this piece we focus our attention on how this relationship obscures the deeply social aspects of most philosophical projects. We reflect on our personal experiences to work towards two aims. First, to draw attention to the forms of collaboration which are lost (or hidden) in the professionalization of academic philosophy, and second, to consider strategies to reverse this pervasive tendency.
Margot: I’ve been thinking about the ways that we sneak in time to collaborate. Even though reading and working groups take up quite a bit of our time, it always feels like “extra” work that goes beyond—or takes away from—our primary responsibilities of reading, writing, and teaching.
Kai: “Extra” is a good word here, and I think it helps to show a contradiction at play in the way collaborative work has to happen outside of the academy. That is, it captures the ways in which collaborative work is both informal (or not of the institution’s formal process) and expected (by institutional norms). “Extra” also seems to be marked by its situation in time: it’s after class, it’s on the weekend, or it’s during breaks. Personally, “extra” time is reserved for restoring myself, spending time with my partner and puppies, and simply enjoying the non-work moments of my life. Philosophers who carry heavier loads of care or employment are disproportionately affected by these norms.
M: Exactly! A lot of collaboration, like organizing reading groups, is categorized as service work, and therefore doesn’t carry as much weight. And some collaboration, like informally mentoring, isn’t even recognized at all.
Understood in this way, the “extra” work of collaborative philosophizing is a form of cruel optimism—a term Lauren Berlant uses to understand the contrasting desires that can be bound up in an object. As academic philosophers, especially those who take standpoint epistemology seriously, it’s essential that we take the “extra” time and energy to connect with colleagues, mentors, and anybody else who might provide constructive feedback. But at the same time, the pursuit of the “extra” is undervalued: the “extra” is rarely recognized as valuable to our central projects.
Naming the “extra” as a kind of cruel optimism clarifies a normative assumption often made about the nature of philosophical work: philosophizing on one’s own is somehow better, perhaps more pure. Social forms of philosophizing are valuable only insofar as they serve individual philosophizing.
M: When we think about the norms of academic prestige, single-authored papers count for more than co-authored papers, in both implicit and explicit ways. Implicitly, single-authored papers garner more respect; explicitly, co-authored papers typically aren’t counted in dissertations or (as highly) in tenure files.
K: Agreed. There’s some individualism in the structures of philosophical methodology that favors the work of individuals as being ‘better’ insights than those made by a collective, but there’s no clear justification for doing so.
M: I think the fact that collaborative work isn’t recognized as part of our core responsibilities means that some people—at least grad students and early career philosophers—feel a disconnect between the practice of doing philosophy, which is collaborative, and the public presentation of our philosophical work, which is primarily individual.
K: That seems right. So much of my own understanding of “being a good philosopher” has been learned through my perceptions of mentors. But those mentors, aside from occasional dialogic teaching strategies, are largely committed to individual theorizing in their own work.
This could be a helpful way to understand imposter syndrome within the academy. I genuinely feel a kind of insufficiency in my academic work when I get stuck on a project and need to ask for help. Any reliance on a social approach to philosophy can present itself as professional weakness, or at the very least self-doubt.
M: Yeah, I find myself asking whether ideas are really mine, since I think it’s unlikely I could develop them without collaboration.
One intervention is changing norms to emphasize the collaborative work of philosophy. In its basic form, this might take the shape of establishing awards explicitly for collaborative work, or in encouraging presenters to speak about the collaboration that enabled their project. These are minor interventions. Major shifts include advocating for the compensation of “informal” mentoring and service work in universities (something that already happens at the University of Michigan). Or, more broadly, in further developing citational practices to identify the benefits of collaboration. Given that a subset of academics seem to love citational ranking systems, one might well be composed which quantifies citational engagements of this sort (though, to be clear, this would come with side effects).
These might sound like strange suggestions. One could respond, “Of course philosophy is collaborative, and it’s rare to advertise one’s collaborative work, but why is this a problem? Would bringing collaborative practices into public change anything about philosophy?”
There are at least two responses to these questions. First, we could say that highlighting academic collaboration is important because it’s good for philosophers. It showcases the efforts of all involved and encourages a sense of camaraderie among philosophers. The current “hidden nature” of collaborative work hurts our professional relations and limits our development as productive philosophers. The problem here is that the over-emphasis on individual’s work misrepresents philosophy as a cult of independent, individual geniuses. When people assume that total independence is necessary for their research, they’re bound to feel that they don’t measure up.
A second response is that emphasizing collaborative work is honest and serves the development of the discipline. At its best, philosophy is a deeply social project, and we should acknowledge that fact. Collaboration yields better ideas, and encouraging collaboration will, in the long run, serve our epistemic interests. In short, collaboration is good for both philosophers as individuals and philosophy as a discipline. We should celebrate that fact, not hide it.
Margot Witte
Margot Witte is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where they work on topics in ethics and epistemology. Their current projects concern interpersonal ethics, intimacy, and epistemic justice.
Kai Milanovich
Kai Milanovich is a first year PhD student at the University of Washington in Seattle. Their research interests are in feminism, epistemology, and ethics/social political philosophy.
