What comes to mind when you hear the word “philosopher?”
For many, it’s still the image of the wise, isolated thinker doing philosophy on his own. Such an image has long gripped popular imagination. It permeates ordinary ideas about philosophers, calls to mind the likes of René Descartes (best known for what has come to be called “armchair philosophy,” done in solitude), and also remains ubiquitous within our discipline. For example, the idea that “real” philosophy is individualistic—that it can or should be done on one’s own—continues to be reflected in professional expectations and evaluations, where markers of success are too often restricted to solo-authored work that’s been done on one’s own, preferably, from their armchair! The idea is that “real” philosophy worthy of the name is abstract, objective, and the product of isolated genius. The corollary is that philosophy that doesn’t fit this model—for example, philosophy that’s collaborative, interdisciplinary, applied, or sociopolitically engaged—isn’t real. That is to say, it isn’t as rigorous, and as a consequence, isn’t and shouldn’t be valued in the same way or to the same degree.
But why should this be the case?
One need only turn to the ancients to see clear models of philosophy developing in community, through direct dialogue with others. In fact, the word dialectic, from the ancient Greek dialegesthai, means “to converse with,” and is central—both practically and etymologically—to the philosophical enterprise. And if we fast-forward to the present, philosophical progress is still made through discussion, disagreement, and revision, all of which are most successful in and through dialogue with others, be it at conferences, workshops, in the pages of journals, in our classrooms, and even in parks, bars, coffee shops, and sometimes around our dinner tables. To do philosophy well and responsibly requires that we listen to and take seriously challenges, incorporate critiques, ask questions of others, and revise and update our views in response.
Philosophy is, at its core, a team sport. It’s something we do and advance, together, in communities, regardless of whether this is something we are quick to acknowledge or fully appreciate.
And yet, professional standards—what’s expected, celebrated, and rewarded—still tend to center the work of individuals (read: solo-authored manuscripts, articles, and talks). Often, our institutional means of evaluating professional “success” cannot properly accommodate research that’s been undertaken collaboratively, particularly because we are evaluated, first and foremost, as individuals. (Descartes’s legacy of the atomistic, individualistic, rational deliberator still looms large.) Reasonably, then, many philosophers continue to shy away from more overt forms of collaboration and co-authorship, and many junior scholars are advised against it.
This, we believe, is a mistake. Or, at the very least, it results in lost opportunities for what could be fruitful collaborative experiences that yield unique and interesting philosophy.
Despite widespread renunciation of collaborative and co-authored work in philosophy, and the snail pace at which institutional and professional norms are shifting to accommodate these practices when and where they happen, we believe that there’s deep value in doing philosophy together. In what follows, we highlight some of the epistemic, social, and personal benefits of philosophical collaboration. We argue that the profession—and we individual philosophers who comprise it—would be better for more fully embracing philosophical collaboration and co-authorship and for creating more spaces, opportunities, resources, and metrics for meaningfully supporting it.
To highlight the epistemic, social, personal, and professional benefits of collaboration and co-authorship in philosophy, we’d like to reflect on our own experience collaborating and co-writing over the past eight years. We strongly believe that our collaborative projects have benefitted from doing philosophy together, and we hope that reflecting on our collaboration introduces and amplifies one model for how other philosophers can experience the benefits and joys of collaborative projects. We also hope to push the needle toward thinking about how we can collectively challenge what we take to be the overly individualistic normative and professional paradigms, expectations, metrics, and standards of our discipline.
Our collaborative relationship began in 2013 when we were in professor (Lauren) and student (Heather) roles. We flag this to acknowledge that often our students can be valuable interlocutors and equal participants in philosophical conversations, not just passive vessels onto whom professors impart knowledge. Shortly after Lauren joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Louisville, she met Heather, who was finishing up their undergraduate degree in biology and philosophy and was entertaining the thought of pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy. The following year, Heather had the privilege of beginning graduate work in Health Care Ethics in the same department. During that year, Heather took a graduate seminar, Foundations of Bioethics, with Lauren, and it was there that the seeds of our collaboration were planted. Over the course of the semester in class, office hours, and an extended set of animated marginalia commentary on Heather’s assignments, we engaged in heated discussions and critiques of Beauchamp and Childress’s seminal text, Foundations of Biomedical Ethics. Specifically, we were both struck by their vastly underdeveloped account of harm in medical contexts. Together, we developed our thoughts on the various ways in which a variety of medical injustices and harms are not captured by their narrow conception of harm.
These vibrant discussions led us to co-author a paper, which we were invited to present together at the annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP) (2016) and again at the 2016 meeting of the Kentucky Philosophical Association. Working together, it became clear that we had a great dynamic for thinking, writing, and presenting as a team. Our discussions about harm and injustice in medical contexts began to move in many directions, and, as these things often go, grew into a series of paper projects. Over the next few years, we wrote several articles and chapters together (see here, here, and here), only to have another philosopher point out that “it seems like you have a book project happening!” (Thank you, Veronica Ivy, for the confidence and inspiration, and for seeing something that we ourselves did not!) Though it took a friend to point it out to us, the years of thinking, speaking, and writing together had blossomed into something more robust and comprehensive than either of us (individually) would have arrived at.
Indeed, we did have the makings of a book—one that will be published later this month with Oxford University Press, called Microaggressions in Medicine. This is a book that we are both immensely proud of, and which, importantly, would never have come to be if not for our collaboration. Thinking and writing together—texting compulsively about new ideas and ways of resolving problems in our ever-developing arguments, to the point that we were thinking of calling this blog post “How to write a book together by texting”—even against the backdrop of professional and institutional norms that don’t always support or value such collaborative endeavors have not only been key to our success, but have also brought us immense joy and laughter in the process. In our experience, philosophical collaboration can bring about epistemic, social, personal, and professional benefits. Let us briefly consider each in hopes of reinforcing the value of doing philosophy together.
Epistemic benefits
An important insight from feminist philosophers of science and feminist epistemologists is that all knowers are socially, politically, and epistemically situated. As such, and as feminists have long been arguing, the kinds of questions we are inclined to raise, what we are in a position to know, and what we ultimately come to know about the world are a function of who we are, what identities we occupy, and what lived experiences we’ve had. Because all of us as individuals are partial and limited epistemic agents, constrained by features of our own identities, experiences, and worldviews, we all have epistemic gaps and limitations. Without moving beyond ourselves and engaging with others who have different identities and experiences, we may never come to notice, develop, or fully appreciate those gaps, let alone ever hope to fill them.
In a collaborative process of inquiry, those with whom we are engaged in philosophical reflection can help us come to see, understand, and appreciate things we might not be in a position to see, understand, or appreciate on our own. When there are more perspectives and experiences working on a single problem or issue, there will likely be fewer unfilled gaps (and of course, we must also always draw on perspectives and experiences outside of specific collaborative dynamic through our research, citation, and dissemination practices in order to address other possible gaps that may remain).
The upshot is that each of us begins our inquiry as a philosopher, thinker, and researcher from a vastly different starting point, with different intuitions, assumptions, insights, and experiences. These varying starting points shape how we come to a problem, issue, or question in philosophy and what tools we have at our disposal to try to work through it. This is particularly salient when it comes to socially and politically engaged philosophy. When we work together as a team, we expand the collection of epistemic tools on which we can draw to tackle complex, multifaceted problems.
Social benefits
Philosophy is, or ought to be, a social activity that’s done in common with others. It involves all kinds of social phenomena: asking and answering questions of one another, raising challenges and critiques, and also issuing praise, suggestions, and compliments. We all rely on the engagement, critique, and praise of others to varying degrees in advancing our philosophical work. However, collaborating and doing philosophy together takes this social dynamic to the next level, creating opportunities to forge more robust philosophical friendships and communities. In our case, through our work together we’ve come to see ourselves not only as collaborators and colleagues, but as friends who are deeply engaged in shared projects that we both value. Accordingly, we go through the ups and downs that are so common to the academic and research process together, as a team. We support one another, boost one another, and when things go well, share in each other’s joy as friends (making Aristotle proud). We have found this to be incredibly rewarding: philosophy as building and strengthening the bonds of friendship.
Cultivating these sorts of genuine friendships is also a way of resisting the hyper-individualist and hyper-competitive nature of the discipline of philosophy and of academia more broadly. In many ways, the culture of academia—set against the backdrop of capitalist “productivity” norms—incentivizes and rewards individuals and their lone pursuit of success and professional status. This can push us to focus on propelling our own careers so much that we lose sight of why philosophy as a social practice matters in the first place. Among other reasons, philosophy matters because we are on a shared pursuit toward knowledge, truth, justice, and a better world—things we can only discover, create, and truly appreciate together.
Personal Benefits
The expectation that one can and should do philosophy alone can be incredibly alienating, especially for those who are already in some way on the margins of the discipline of philosophy (e.g., women, queer and trans philosophers, philosophers of color, first-generation and low-SES philosophers, and disabled philosophers, among others). For philosophers who remain underrepresented in the profession, establishing a sense of meaningful community can be essential for one’s continuation and even for one’s very survival. Collaborative community helps establish the sense that one is not alone, even as they navigate what can be the difficult and daunting processes of research, writing, placing papers under review, receiving feedback, going on the job market, etc. along with navigating what can be a foreign, and at times hostile, professional world. Having a philosophical community—especially a close team of collaborators—to root for and support you can make it easier to keep going in the face of imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and the daily burdens of being underrepresented. As mentioned above, a close collaborator can become a friend, confidant, and mentor. They can make the philosophical process more humane and enjoyable. They can also become a key supporter, helping one resist the weight of burnout or, at times, the desire to give up entirely. In general, a close collaborator in the profession can give us endurance to keep going and doing the work, including (and perhaps especially) when the work or process feels heavy, thankless, or hopeless.
Professional benefits
Doing philosophy together means more opportunities for expanding the reach of the project (e.g., by utilizing more than one person’s time, resources, and networks). This is an obvious benefit if the goal is to disseminate your research as broadly as possible and have it do things in the world (particularly in the case of applied philosophy). Collaborative work, and the way it brings together multiple minds, perspectives, social locations, and orientations, allows us to see problems and answer questions in new and broader ways. Moreover, it allows us to come up with interesting and novel solutions that we or would not and could not have come to on our own.
Embracing the benefits of collaboration in philosophy allows us to resist the limiting professional norms and expectations (which are notably not found in many other disciplines where collaboration and co-authoring are both standard and encouraged). It also allows us to create new possibilities of what philosophy can be and how it can be done, together.
In sum, we think there are strong reasons to resist the ongoing obsession with the myth of the individual, isolated, philosophical genius. Instead, we must embrace the idea that at its core, philosophy can, and perhaps should, be collaborative, practiced together in community with others. Doing so, we believe, can bring about a variety of epistemic, social, personal, and professional benefits.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Heather Stewart
Heather Stewart is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University. Their research and teaching take an intersectional feminist approach to analyses of medicine, healthcare, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on how power, oppression, and privilege shape individual and collective engagement with these institutions and technologies. Their work has been published in several top journals, including The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and Perspectives on Psychological Science, among others. Heather’s first book, Microaggressions in Medicine (with Lauren Freeman), was published with Oxford University Press in February of 2024.
Lauren Freeman
Lauren Freeman is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Louisville; Director of the M.A. in Applied Philosophy; and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research considers how members of marginalized groups are oppressed in both obvious and subtle ways within the context of science, medicine, health, and healthcare. It has been featured in Nature and chosen as the feature article in prestigious health sciences, philosophy, and policy journals. She has written Microaggressions in Medicine (with Heather Stewart, OUP 2024), co-edited of Microaggressions and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), and was editor of The American Philosophical Association’s journal Studies in Feminism and Philosophy (2019-2022).
