On the domain of metaphilosophy

C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 48, Nos. 1–2, January 2017 0026-1068 ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY BOB PLANT Abstract: This article argues for four interrelated claims: (i) Metaphilosophy is not one sub-discipline of philosophy, nor is it restricted to questions of methodology. Rather, metaphilosophical inquiry encompasses the general background conditions of philosophical practice. (ii) These background conditions are of various sorts, not only those routinely considered “philosophical” but also those considered biographical, historical, and sociological. Accordingly, we should be wary of the customary distinction between what is proper (internal) and merely contingent (external) to philosophy. (iii) “What is philosophy?” is best understood as a practical question concerning how members of different philosophical sub-communities identify what is pertinent to their respective activities and self-conceptions. (iv) Given (i)--(iii), understanding what philosophy is requires us to take more seriously the social-institutional dimension of contemporary philosophical practice. Keywords: institutions, background, community, style, integrity, professionalization. The task of philosophers who seek to define their subject is akin to that of fools who attempt to shovel smoke. It is not exactly that theres nothing there, but whatever it is, it isnt amenable to shovelling. (Mandt 1991, 77) 1. Introduction Few philosophers enjoy being asked “What is it you do?” Fewer still relish the follow-up question “What is philosophy?” Even if one is sufficiently confident to describe oneself as a “philosopher,” one invariably struggles to say anything plausible and informative when asked “What is philosophy?”1 Here we routinely sidestep the question, offer platitudes, or say things many other philosophers would reject as an adequate characterisation of what they do. Thus, in a recent survey of professional philosophers, philosophy was variously defined as the 1 I will assume that this difficulty does not arise because philosophy is uniquely demanding. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 4 BOB PLANT activity of thinking hard about fundamental questions, the attempt to make sense of ourselves and the world, an inquiry into what is true, the analysis of concepts, reflection on anything one happens to be interested in, an examination of those things we ordinarily take for granted, the love of knowledge, the search for wisdom, the process of clear and critical reflection, understanding what really matters, an inquiry into what is unknown, and an investigation into the meaning of life (see Edmonds and Warburton 2012, xiii–xxiv). (Some of the surveys participants were unsure how to respond to “What is philosophy?,” two laughed, and one replied with a joke [xiv, xix, xxi].)2 It is striking just how unhelpful these responses are. Allusions to the “love of knowledge,” “search for wisdom,” and “pursuit of truth” are far from enlightening, for it is not as if historians, linguists, or chemists are less capable of saying wise and true things about their respective domains. And here philosophy faces a deeper problem—namely, what exactly is its proper domain? In Sellarss estimation, philosophers aim to “understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term,” including “such radically different items as . . . numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death” (Sellars 2014, 21). It is not surprising that Sellars is cited more than once in the aforementioned survey (see Edmonds and Warburton 2012, xvi, xxiii), for the great virtue of his formulation is its accommodation of a vast array of meta/philosophical views. This is a virtue because we tend to play down the diversity of philosophical practice, often reconstructing philosophys history to suit our own current interests, procedures, and aspirations. (Indeed, we sometimes portray the history of philosophy as a chronicle of error and confusion.) But whatever the merits of Sellarss view, it is unlikely to enlighten those unfamiliar with what philosophers actually do. There are, of course, other ways of responding to the question “What is philosophy?” One might insist that philosophy is an activity rather than a body of knowledge. But not only is it unclear whether our predecessors would have recognised this characterisation of the philosophic enterprise (see Crane 2012, 22), being an “activity” is hardly distinctive of philosophy. In any case, what sort of activity philosophy is permits a wide variety of answers. Part of the problem philosophers face when asked “What is philosophy?” is the essentialist form of the question itself (see Janz 2004, 106). For while it would be convenient to transform “the philosophical point of view” into an analytic truth “that would then determine what is and what is not philosophy” (Weitz 1977, 249), it is unduly optimistic to think that there are necessary and sufficient 2 On what many contemporary philosophers believe, see Bourget and Chalmers 2013. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 5 conditions for a “work of philosophy.” Just as we routinely underestimate the role individual temperament and group psychology play in the formation and sustenance of our meta/philosophical views (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 302–4), rarely do we seriously consider that what we think of as the “real” philosophical issues could ever become passe or no longer part of philosophy.3 But perceived “hot topics” soon go off the boil, just as particular debates fall silent, not because the problems are solved or, once agreement about solutions is widespread, lasting consensus is attained. On the contrary, philosophical debates run their course without ever reaching substantive resolutions, only to re-emerge later in one guise or another (see Unger 2014). Likewise, despite the fact that the philosophical canon is a dynamic assortment of authors and texts, as philosophers we often struggle to imagine particular canonical figures ever becoming of merely historical interest. Indeed, talk of “the philosophical canon” obscures the fact that the status and influence of many philosophers have waxed and waned for different philosophical communities at different times. We might therefore characterise “philosophy” as a family-resemblance term, pertaining to a loose constellation of “overlapping traditions of thought,” with often very different “conception[s] of which texts are canonical and which inquiries are worth pursuing” (Crane 2012, 22). Indeed, as Crane suggests, understanding a philosophical tradition as a “collection of interrelated texts, rather than a body of doctrines or a distinctive technique,” might help to explain why “fundamental disagreement” (2012, 23, 32) is such a pervasive feature of philosophy (see Rescher 1978, 1985; Van Inwagen 2009; Kornblith 2010; Plant 2012a). Of course, to appreciate the diversity of philosophical practice one does not have to trawl through the annals of history. The pages of current journals, publishers catalogues, and conference proceedings abound with discussions of topics that seem eccentric to philosophers of different metaphilosophical persuasions. Indeed, as Rescher notes, there are countless academic societies “dedicated to the pursuit of issues, now deemed philosophical, that no one would have dreamt of considering so a generation ago” (Rescher 1993, 729). It is perhaps natural to consider the time and place we happen to occupy as having unique meta/philosophical importance. But assuming that philosophy survives as a distinct discipline beyond the twenty-first century, we might reasonably wonder how much contemporary philosophical work our successors will judge to have been worthwhile, which texts and authors will achieve and maintain canonical status, and which issues and debates will become solely of antiquarian interest. While some of 3 Recent discussions of women in philosophy (see Saul 2012; Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013) have started to open up metaphilosophy to sociological and psychological questions. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 6 BOB PLANT our currently perceived philosophical achievements may survive more or less intact, our immersion within specific philosophical subcommunities tends to obscure the fact that philosophys future—including its future assessment of us—remains uncertain. So, offering a plausible and informative answer to the question “What is philosophy?” is extremely difficult. It is therefore unsurprising, not only that non-philosophers often have misgivings about the value of philosophy, but also that philosophers themselves are sometimes plagued by self-doubt. Glendinning thus cautions: “Its always a tricky moment for any philosopher to acknowledge that what you are doing, what you think might be worth doing, might just be a spinning in the wind or just a kind of doing nothing at all, or doing something very badly” (2002, 207; see also Vattimo 2010, 114–15). These sorts of worries should not be dismissed as mere expressions of metaphilosophical despair. On the contrary, the difficulty of responding to metaphilosophical questions is exactly as it should be, and sets philosophers apart from their colleagues in other disciplines. For the history of philosophy is a history of disagreements about both specific philosophical issues and the nature of philosophy itself. In this sense at least, philosophers aspirations seem inversely proportionate to their results, for there is no widespread consensus on what such “results” might consist in.4 It is therefore interesting to note that in two of the four multidisciplinary funding panels Lamont studied, “philosophy emerged as a problem field, seen as producing proposals around which conflicts erupt.” Specifically, a number of the panellists “expressed at least one of the following views: (1) philosophers live in a world apart from other humanists, (2) nonphilosophers have problems evaluating philosophical work, and they are often perceived by philosophers as not qualified to do so, (3) philosophers do not explain the significance of their work, and (4) increasingly, what philosophers do is irrelevant, sterile, and self-indulgent” (Lamont 2009, 64; see also 66). Lamont concludes: “[P]hilosophys reputation as a potential problem case is not helped by the fact that the discipline is defined by its own practitioners as contentious. Philosophers tend to approach each others work with scepticism, criticism, and an eye for debate. Disagreement is not viewed as problematic; rather, it largely defines intelligence and is considered a signature characteristic of the culture of the discipline—with often disastrous results for funding” (69; see also 105). That “What is philosophy?” is one of philosophys most stubborn questions is not because philosophers happen to be more cantankerous or befuddled than historians, chemists, anthropologists, or mathematicians. Rather, it is part of the philosophers task to question the nature 4 For extremely negative assessments of philosophy, see Lycan 1996, 149; Unger 2014. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 7 and value of his own activities. For not only is “What is philosophy?” tacitly in play whenever we are doing philosophy, being reflective about what philosophy is constitutes a basic philosophical responsibility. That is to say, “What is philosophy?” is not only a legitimate philosophical question, it belongs to philosophy in a way that, for example, “What is science?” does not belong to physicists, chemists, or biologists. While the latter do sometimes ask these reflexive sorts of questions about their respective modi operandi, only in philosophy are such “meta” questions part and parcel of the discipline (see Sayre 2004, 242–43). Indeed, even where we think it appropriate to begin philosophical inquiry is inextricably bound up with our more-or-less tacit metaphilosophical commitments. There are then at least three things that distinguish philosophy from other academic disciplines: (i) When the latter do examine their own background aims, assumptions, and methods we commonly describe them as doing something “philosophical.” (ii) As previously suggested, there is no specific range of phenomena constituting the proper object(s) of philosophical inquiry. Accordingly, “What is philosophy?” is unavoidably one of philosophys own questions. (iii) As philosophers we often pride ourselves on our ability to critically interrogate those things routinely taken for granted both in ordinary life and in other academic domains. What philosophers take for granted is therefore an unavoidable question for philosophers themselves (though perhaps not only for philosophers). Mindful of all this, deep and sometimes acrimonious philosophical diversity is only to be expected in a discipline that lacks shared aims, methods, communicative norms, and subject matter. It is also unsurprising that philosophy is often taught outside departments of philosophy, much to the chagrin of many professional philosophers. If “[p]hilosophy has a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself” (Derrida 2001, 55), then metaphilosophy is poorly understood as one philosophical sub-discipline alongside others.5 This is not to deny that only a minority of contemporary philosophers would include metaphilosophy in their designated areas of specialisation, competence, or even interest. (After all, we generally prefer to go “directly to the issues” without a lot of agonised “navelgazing” [Couture and Nielsen 1993, 2].) Nevertheless, while the explicit question “What is philosophy?” arises relatively infrequently in the history of philosophy, how philosophers have variously practiced their trade reveals a great deal about what they took philosophy to be. And the same is true of contemporary professional philosophers. Let me be clear: my aim in this article is not to defend a thoroughgoing “institutional theory of philosophy” (see Harries 2001, 51), or indeed 5 On Derrida and metaphilosophy, see Plant 2012b. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 8 BOB PLANT any particular theory of philosophy. I do, however, want to question the assumption that thinking seriously about what philosophy is means thinking about philosophy “in terms that are philosophical rather than sociological” (Sayre 2004, 243). It seems to me that sociological considerations (broadly construed) bear upon metaphilosophical issues in highly significant ways (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 297–98). Certainly, the social-institutional dimension of contemporary philosophy can sometimes be disheartening; there is, after all, no shortage of unbridled careerism, abuses of power, cults of personality, gender bias, intellectual bandwagon jumping, sexual harassment, and other vices. But this too might tell us something about how philosophers understand their own activities, and how particular metaphilosophical views are instilled, disseminated, and sustained. In the next section, therefore, I want to explain why philosophical institutions (philosophy departments, research centres, and so on) are not wholly “external” to philosophy proper (see Bourdieu 1983, 4). 2. Inside/Outside Philosophy Plantinga invites us to imagine the following scenario. Having completed her first degree in philosophy, a Christian student decides to pursue a career as a professional philosopher. While attending graduate school she soon learns how mainstream philosophy is currently practiced, and what academic philosophers consider the pressing issues of the day: It is then natural for her, after she gets her Ph.D., to continue to think about and work on these topics. And it is natural, furthermore, for her to work on them in the way she was taught to, thinking about them in the light of the assumptions made by her mentors and in terms of currently accepted ideas as to what a philosopher should start from or take for granted, what requires argument and defence, and what a satisfying philosophical explanation or a proper resolution to a philosophical question is like. She will be uneasy about departing widely from these topics and assumptions, feeling instinctively that any such departures are at best marginally respectable. (Plantinga 1984, 255) According to Plantinga, however, Christian philosophers should not feel obliged to follow contemporary philosophical trends. For as Christians they will have their own salient questions, problems, and guiding presuppositions. Indeed, they will sometimes have to reject “currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic enterprise,” including what are widely regarded as “the proper starting points and procedures for philosophical endeavour” (Plantinga 1984, 256). In doing this, the Christian philosopher is perfectly entitled to those C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 9 background assumptions she brings to her work (see 256). After all, we each “come to philosophy with a range of opinions about the world and humankind,” and part of philosophys task is to clarify these “prephilosophical opinions” (268). Plantinga is not denying that Christian philosophers have something to learn from members of other philosophical sub-communities. Rather, he is encouraging Christian philosophers to cultivate greater self-confidence in pursuing their own philosophical interests in their own ways (see 255, 258, 268). Plantingas focus on the concrete academic environments in which philosophers are trained and later employed is interesting. Unsurprisingly, however, this broadly sociological emphasis has provoked explicit metaphilosophical criticism. Phillips thus objects that, just as “[t]he nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question,” so too is “Can there be a Christian philosophy?” (1993, 223). Accordingly, he maintains, this question “cannot be answered by saying, Of course there can be, and we have regional meetings to prove it” (223). That sort of response would be misguided in its “attempt to answer, by an appeal to external considerations, what ought to be discussed philosophically” (223). Phillipss demarcation between what is inside and outside philosophy reflects a more pervasive desire among philosophers to keep “properly philosophical” questions uncontaminated by “contingent,” “external,” or “merely empirical” considerations. Indeed, this is part of a more general tendency of philosophers to forget that they are situated human beings, and thereby inheritors of (amongst other things) a specific historical, economic, and cultural context. And we need reminding of this seemingly obvious fact if we are to avoid confusing philosophers aspirations with the reality of philosophical practice. I do not want to paint an unduly bleak picture here. But as philosophers we do habitually underestimate that, for example, changes in the status, reputation, and influence of specific philosophical texts are formed and sustained by a variety of “external” contingencies. (Consider the fractious relationship between the so-called Analytic and Continental traditions. Although the nature of this alleged “division” remains contentious [see Glendinning 2006, 7; 2011, 71], it is surely relevant that studying the history of Western philosophy is central to many European education systems [see Gutting 2001, 382; 2011, 7–23]. For as Schrift notes, the orientation of twentieth-century French philosophy was shaped by which historical figures appeared on the agregation exam in the late 1950s, when many of the prominent names in recent French thought were either students or just beginning their professional careers [see Schrift 2006, 188ff.; 2008].) Despite the fact that the history of Western philosophy is a history of particular texts with often very different aims, methods, styles, and audiences, philosophers often treat this as incidental to the real business of doing philosophy. This attitude is both reflected in, and perpetuated by, the sorts of expectations we C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 10 BOB PLANT commonly have of contemporary philosophers. In the next section, therefore, I want to consider those expectations pertaining specifically to communicative norms. 3. Communicative Norms For the most part, the contemporary professional philosopher is expected to present herself as a member of an established working community, with designated interests, competencies, and expertise in respected areas of the discipline. Accordingly, one of her main responsibilities is to publish in the most prestigious—usually Englishlanguage—journals, and in doing so refer to recent literature in the relevant field(s). Here, then, the philosopher views her research (and wants others to do likewise) as contributing to particular, well-defined debates in which substantive progress can be made. Contemporary philosophys preoccupation with producing short, often highly specialised journal articles thus manifests a conception of philosophers as what Danto terms “vehicles for the transmission of an utterly impersonal philosophical truth” (1984, 7). This, in turn, “implies a vision of philosophical reality as constituted of isolable, difficult but not finally intractable problems, which if not altogether soluble in fifteen pages more or less, can be brought closer to resolution in that many pages” (1984, 7). The journal article has therefore come to be seen as an “impersonal report of limited results for a severely restricted readership, consisting of those who have some use for that result since they are engaged with the writers of the pages in a collaborative enterprise, building the edifice of philosophical knowledge” (1984, 7). In Dantos estimation, all this renders most contemporary philosophy “abstract and distorted,” with few “tethers to human reality beyond the dubious intuitions alleged to be universal” (Danto 2001, 244). While philosophers once employed a variety of literary forms (dialogue, aphorism, meditation, confession, and so on), these are no longer viable modes of professional communication.6 The prose of most academic philosophy is intentionally abstract, dispassionate, and detached in its attempt to mimic the languages of science and mathematics (see Nussbaum 1992, 3, 19; Rescher 1993, 723; Harries 2001, 53; McNaughton 2009, 1–2; Unger 2014). One feature of this dominant form of philosophical communication is the way it suppresses authorial individuality. Of course, how one evaluates this “loss of voice” (see Danto 1984, 7, 19; Nussbaum 1992, 20; Mason 1999, 119; Danto 2001, 241, 244–45) depends on ones other 6 Today, podcasts, blog posts, and tweets play an increasingly significant role in the daily practice of professional philosophers. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 11 metaphilosophical commitments. Thus, according to Smith, Analytic philosophers have rightly distanced themselves from the “more literary associations of their discipline”—not least from any “aesthetic fascination with languages” (1991, 157). For most contemporary philosophers, language is either “merely an instrument” or a “pre-packaged object of investigation” (157). Unsurprisingly, in the wake of such stylistic modesty, there is little room for the philosopher to “manifest himself in his peculiarity as an author” (158). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that most academic philosophers would consider that the main objective of a philosophical education is to produce not engaging, imaginative, and eloquent writers but sharp, clear, robust arguers who can produce, defend, and critique well-defined theses (see Rorty 1982, 221). For not only is ones philosophical seriousness commonly judged on the basis of the perceived quality of ones arguments, it is particularly damning to accuse a philosopher of being unable (or unwilling) to argue. But while Smith judges the voicelessness of philosophical writing to be a virtue, there is no metaphilosophically neutral reason to share this view. Nussbaum, for example, criticises the prose of much recent philosophy, describing it as an “all-purpose solvent in which philosophical issues of any kind at all could be efficiently disentangled, any and all conclusions neatly disengaged” (1992, 19). In her estimation, “there is a mistake made . . . when one takes a method and style that have proven fruitful for the investigation and description of certain truths— say those of natural science—and applies them without further reflection or argument to a very different sphere of human life that may have a different geography and demand a different sort of precision” (19–20). And as Nussbaum proceeds to note, part of the problem here is the way increasing professionalization “leads everyone to write like everyone else, in order to be respectable and to publish in the usual journals” (20). (I return to professionalization in the next section.) It is not difficult to see why the desire for optimal intelligibility generates anxieties about more indirect, oblique, or literary modes of philosophical expression. But while most philosophers feel able to recognise clarity when they see it, exactly what it consists in remains elusive. It is not surprising that we often dismiss as intellectually suspect—if not patently unintelligible—those authors and texts with which we are merely unfamiliar (see Barnes 2008, 10–11). But then, extracted from their broader intellectual contexts, the writings of many philosophers would fail the test of modest “plain speaking” (see Culler 2003, 44–45).7 In any case, it is all too easy to defend the obscurities in those texts we judge to be grappling with deep philosophical issues, while accusing others of manifest nonsense. For how one distinguishes 7 On the numerous “deplorable” styles in academic philosophy, see McNaughton 2009, 3–4. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 12 BOB PLANT between philosophers who are legitimately demanding and those who are irresponsibly abstruse depends on our prior exposure to—and metaphilosophical sympathy for—particular authors, the subcommunities to which they belong, and the specific audiences they are addressing. As such, there is little reason to suppose that members of all philosophical sub-communities ought to be intelligible to one another simply in virtue of being fellow philosophers.8 Given the widespread assumption that the function of style is merely decorative, it is unsurprising that the writing of philosophy is of marginal interest to most contemporary philosophers. As Magee remarks: “If a philosopher writes well, thats a bonus—it makes him more enticing to study, obviously, but it does nothing to make him a better philosopher” (Magee 1982, 230). On this view, any philosophical work that could not be understood independently of its specific mode of presentation would thereby have failed to communicate in an appropriately “philosophical” way. But whatever the appeal of the minimalist, “selfeffacing plain style” (Mason 1999, 31), we cannot assume that the form and content of all genuinely philosophical writing must be easily separable. Indeed, not only can “plain language” be seen as a particular style, embodying a more-or-less specific conception of what philosophy is, one might say that philosophers general disinterest in questions of style is itself “an expressive feature of philosophy” (van Eck 1995, 2). Here, then, we are not faced with a simple choice between either adopting a philosophical style or opting for no style whatsoever. (In fact, one highly effective way of entrenching communicative norms is to deny that they raise any questions of style [see van Eck 1995, 6].) If one sees oneself working in a community of philosophical problem solvers, whose primary task is to contribute to specialised, well-defined debates, then some conception of “plain speaking” will likely be taken for granted. My worry here is not about the detached “voiceless” style per se but about the assumed obviousness that this is the way serious, bona fide philosophy ought to be done. Those who do not share the problem-solving conception of philosophical practice might reasonably feel the need to adopt very different communicative strategies. Varying degrees of stylistic experimentation might, for example, be seen as necessary by philosophers wary of the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, or those who see plain or “ordinary” language as a cause of philosophical befuddlement, or those who believe that the clearest of utterances are already metaphysically and/or politically loaded. It is only to be expected that readers unfamiliar with these more reflexive, even sometimes “playful” texts judge their authors to be 8 Even when we understand what a philosopher is saying, we may not understand why she is saying it, or saying it in that particular way. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 13 less than intellectually serious. But then, of course, to other audiences, texts embodying the ideal of modest plain speaking will seem, at best, metaphilosophically na€ıve. 4. The Philosophy Industry Nussbaums aforementioned concerns about philosophys professionalization are not new. In the early twentieth century, James complained about the dreariness, over-technicality, and cultish appeals to authority of the younger generation of philosophers of his time (see 1920, 15–17). More recently, Stroud laments how increasing professionalization has “rendered much more of philosophy sterile, empty, and boring,” and how this is encouraged (explicitly or otherwise) by demands for “quantity of publications, frequency of citation in the professional literature, widely certified distinction in the profession, and other quantifiable measures of an impressive resume” (2001, 30). Cottingham likewise bemoans the “fragmentation of philosophical inquiry into a host of separate specialisms, and the associated development of swathes of technical jargon whose use is largely confined within hermetically sealed sub-areas,” which he believes “represents a disintegrated conception of philosophising” (2009, 254; see also Norris 2012, 9). Whether one agrees with these specific diagnoses, the continual demand for publications does facilitate a certain type of philosophical output—namely, short, narrowly focussed journal articles that make relatively minor moves in a current “live” debate. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that many philosophers primarily publish not because they have interesting things to say but because they recognise the professional expectation to publish. For some, no doubt, this expectation provides a motivation to find something genuinely interesting to say. But there is little reason to think that, as a general strategy, this engenders philosophical work of deep and lasting significance. For good or ill, then, philosophy has become an industry with “thousands of operatives” and a “prolific and diversified range of products” (Rescher 1993, 722–23). If philosophys professionalization constitutes “the fact that distinguishes the discipline of philosophy at the dawn of the 21st-century from the prior two millennia” (Leiter 2008, 28), then we should not underestimate the extent to which our differing conceptions of what philosophy is are shaped by concrete social-institutional features of everyday philosophical practice. After all, as professional philosophers, we routinely prioritise specific methods and forms of argumentation over others, draw on particular authors and texts, consider only some issues worthy of attention, adopt and endorse particular modes of oral and written communication. Likewise, operating within institutes of higher education, we decide C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 14 BOB PLANT which courses to offer our undergraduate and graduate students, which should be mandatory and which optional, which topics and authors can be safely ignored, and which are essential to maintaining philosophical integrity. (I return to integrity in the final section.) As Mason rightly notes, there is a “close connection between what philosophy is considered to be and the given curriculum of a philosophy department” (1989, 13). Through a variety of activities—including teaching, curriculum design, internal and external examining, conference organisation, refereeing articles, editorial and committee work—members of philosophy departments and research centres sustain metaphilosophical norms throughout a population of students, teachers, and researchers. In promoting their philosophical merchandise to the wider academic world, these institutions compete for international prestige and funding. And, of course, these institutions are seen to possess the requisite expertise and authority to evaluate the intellectual competences and potential of students and professional practitioners by means of peer review, teaching assessments, and research evaluation exercises. There are, no doubt, many things that bind a philosophical community together; a shared collection of texts, salient issues, preferred methods, forms of argument, and modes of communication play a crucial part in this. But members of philosophical communities also share “professional familiarity rooted in meetings and seminars attended together, journals read in common,” extra-curricula socialising, and myriad other seemingly external factors. It would therefore be mistaken to think that “these socalled extra-philosophical factors have no direct bearing on what philosophers think” (Mandt 1991, 99)—including, of course, what philosophers think philosophy is and should be. While there is much to say both for and against the philosophy industry,9 it is not my aim to weigh the relative costs and benefits of philosophys professionalization. I simply want to highlight how much of what we—a “we” that is always more or less local and transient— consider to be philosophy is formed and sustained by a host of contingent background conditions. Accordingly, what lies, respectively, inside and outside philosophy cannot, in good metaphilosophical conscience, be taken for granted. Although immersion in a particular philosophical sub-community is near unavoidable, our subsequent tendency to lose critical distance on our mundane philosophical practice is worth reflecting on. For this immersion diminishes our ability and willingness to see how the borders of philosophy, for historical, economic, cultural, and professional reasons, have changed. We therefore need to take seriously the variety of “external” factors that shape our understanding of 9 See Rescher 1993, 725, 727; Harries 2001, 52; Sayre 2004, 249; Nolan 2007, 12; Leiter 2008, 28; Saul 2012; Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 15 what philosophy is. Mindful of this, let me return to the question with which I began: “What is philosophy?” 5. Is That Philosophy? Thus far I have argued that social-institutional factors play an important, albeit often neglected, role in the formation, development, and sustenance of individual philosophers and the sub-communities to which they belong. Accordingly, these broadly sociological considerations ought to figure more prominently in metaphilosophical inquiry. Because the background conditions of everyday philosophical practice are not wholly external to the philosophical issues philosophers concern themselves with, it is a mistake to ignore what causes particular positions, arguments, and methods to dominate—albeit temporarily (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 298, 301). As Gross reminds us, each professional philosopher “must decide which substantive areas of philosophy to specialize in” and thereby “select one or more intellectual traditions in which to situate their work” (1984, 53). After all, these sub-communities “help define the kind of intellectual problem thinkers see as significant, the style and approach of their solutions to those problems, and the range of other thinkers with whom they are in conversation” (53). Of course, most often we do not consciously choose an intellectual tradition in which to work but rather find ourselves already situated within particular philosophical sub-communities as a result of numerous contingent factors—not least when, where, and from whom we received our philosophical training. Taking these socialinstitutional factors into account thus raises important questions about what is unreflectively embedded in our philosophical practice, including the more-or-less tacit agreement of group members regarding which topics, authors, and texts are worthy of transmission to the next generation of philosophers. In emphasising this, I do not want to trivialise the role played by rational persuasion and argument in ordinary philosophical practice. As I said earlier, I am not proposing a thoroughgoing “institutional theory of philosophy.” (After all, that the distinction between internal—philosophical—and external—non-philosophical— factors cannot be maintained with absolute precision does not mean that there are no workable distinctions available.) But we should not exaggerate the part that rational persuasion plays in philosophical practice, or indeed what argument can reasonably be expected to achieve. It would be pretty odd to think that philosophers are immune to sociological, psychological, and other “non-philosophical” forces. And while it is possible that philosophers qua philosophers are especially resistant to such “external” influences, this is an empirical claim, not something we can intuit from the comfort of our armchairs. It is C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 16 BOB PLANT important that we take seriously the sociological, biographical, psychological, and historical determinants of philosophical practice, not only because they form part of the metaphilosophical terrain philosophers actually inhabit, but also because we cannot assume that the question “What is philosophy?” must be answered in the abstract before it can be answered in the concrete (see Janz 2004, 106). In short, failure to acknowledge philosophys entanglement in sociology, psychology, and history (among other things) can only hinder our understanding of what we are really doing when doing philosophy. As previously suggested, of the aforementioned background conditions that shape our meta/philosophical preferences and aversions, institutes of higher education in particular play a crucial role (see Nolan 2007, 2–3; Kitcher 2011, 259–60).10 Of his own graduate studies, Putnam recalls how he soon learnt “what not to consider philosophy,” as his training involved a more-or-less explicit process of metaphilosophical “narrowing” (1994, 57–58). Schacht likewise recalls how the guardians of orthodoxy of his early philosophical development “did not look kindly upon the interest of many of us in the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger”—indeed, even uttering their names “could get one in very serious trouble” (1993, 432). Desanti similarly recollects that for his generation of French philosophers, mathematical logic was simply not part of their heritage. As a result, Desanti and his peers struggled to “forge a relationship to mathematical logic for ourselves on the basis of what our tradition—which was basically historicizing— had already made of us” (Desanti 1983, 54–55; see also Bouveresse 1983, 10–11, 22; Engel 1987, 1). What interests me here is the general sense of “narrowing” Putnam refers to. For we should not conclude that exclusions and prioritisations of particular authors, texts, styles, and methods are a wholly negative or destructive part of philosophical training. Rather, this sort of “narrowing” plays an important role in sustaining philosophical communities. Let me explain what I mean. I said earlier that the question “What is philosophy?” belongs to philosophy because what philosophy is, is always an issue for philosophy. I now want to suggest further that “What is philosophy?” is better understood as the concrete question “Is that philosophy?”—a question particular philosophers (and groups of them) ask about particular authors, texts, issues, methods, and communicative norms. Understanding the question in this way captures important features of ordinary philosophical practice obscured by the more abstract formulation “What is philosophy?” The first thing to note here is that responding to the concrete question “Is that philosophy?” does not presuppose 10 Sulas “Phylo” project (http://phylo.info/) usefully charts the web of influences—not least between supervisors and doctoral students—that shape an individuals philosophical profile. See also Healy 2013. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 17 that we have an answer to the abstract, essentialist question “What is philosophy?” (see Janz 2004, 106). For answering the former is a practical matter that requires an ability (what I will call metaphilosophical “know-how”) to distinguish between what does and does not qualify as bona fide philosophy, what does and does not count as being of genuine philosophical interest, and so on. This know-how is acquired within, and sustained by, particular philosophical sub-communities. It is doubtless true that ones “awareness of belonging to a particular tradition comes with time” (Davidson 1994, 42). But what also comes with time is the ability to recognise “philosophy” when we encounter it. Early on in our philosophical training, most of us happily include works of literature, anthropology, and many other things under the umbrella term “philosophy.” But the more academic philosophy (and professional philosophers) we encounter, the sooner we come to see these as not being works of philosophy written by philosophers—whatever indirect philosophical insights they might offer. This practical skill of discriminating between bona fide philosophy and what falls outside its boundaries (or somewhere on the periphery) operates more at the level of engrained habit than rational reflection—though, of course, reasons can often be found after the fact. Nobody provides us with explicit metaphilosophical criteria to sort the philosophical wheat from the chaff. Rather, we gradually, and for the most part unreflectively, develop a sense of what properly philosophical texts look like, what sorts of topics are of genuine philosophical concern, what issues and debates are “live,” what institutions, authors, journals, and publishers are respectable, and what modes of expression are appropriate to serious philosophical work. For example, demarcating between so-called Analytic and Continental traditions does not require the ability to produce a checklist of defining characteristics for each (see Mandt 1991, 87–88; Sluga 1998, 107; Crane 2012, 22–23). All that is needed is the practical ability to distinguish between the sorts of books, journals, authors, communicative styles, and topics members of each favour—an ability acquired and sustained during ones training and everyday philosophical practice.11 We should not, therefore, be surprised that professional philosophers are able to recognise philosophy when they see it, though unable to provide widely acceptable criteria for their being able to, or to offer an informative and plausible response to the question “What is philosophy?” It is not that there are no standards in operation here; contemporary philosophy is not an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, metaphilosophical standards are embedded in local practice, and so feel entirely natural to those working within a given philosophical sub-community but at best optional to those working elsewhere. 11 On a related point, see Rorty 2007, 120. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 18 BOB PLANT Before I conclude, let me briefly return to the question of meta/philosophical integrity. 6. Meta/Philosophical Integrity We often assume that our membership of “the philosophical community” ought to ensure a high degree of mutual intelligibility between us. As noted earlier, alongside our general intolerance for the unfamiliar, we tend to avoid metaphilosophical anxieties in order to go straight to the philosophical issues without detour or delay. All of this is perfectly understandable in what has become a highly competitive professionalised industry. As I have suggested, however, in all of this we are prone to trivialise the way sub-communities are “divided from the rest by different priorities as to what the really interesting and important issues are” (Rescher 1993, 719). Immersed within specific philosophical sub-communities, we rarely ask whether there is such a thing as “the philosophical community” or if there is some underlying philosophical solidarity between us simply in virtue of sharing the same profession. (Even if philosophers share an “ineliminable backward reference to Platos dialogues” [MacIntyre 1995, 45], how much metaphilosophical cohesion this actually sustains is unclear.) Of course, we should not over-dramatize the fragmentation of contemporary philosophy; philosophical sub-communities—including departments and research centres—are generally not discrete islands of intellectual activity (see Rescher 1993, 719). But neither should we forget that we rarely engage with philosophical communities much different from our own. Indeed, often we only become aware of their existence when confronted with conference announcements and book releases on topics we barely recognise as “philosophical” by authors we have never heard of. Given all of this, it is tempting to think that when one philosopher accuses another of not being a real philosopher, such charges are merely a “rhetorical gambit” (Rorty 1990, 370), demonstrating nothing more than the accusers failure to appreciate the diversity of philosophical practice. Sometimes, no doubt, that is all there is to it. But these accusations are not always mere posturing. For as I discussed earlier, it is significant that the practical concerns of (for example) curriculum design and implementation manifest the desire of philosophers to draw disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries—not least between authentic and counterfeit philosophy. Identifying oneself as belonging to a particular philosophical sub-community inevitably involves the sort of “narrowing” Putnam speaks of. Sometimes, specific authors, texts, problems, methods, and communicative norms are openly ridiculed as “not real philosophy.” More commonly, particular authors and texts simply do not find their way into university curricula or onto C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V ON THE DOMAIN OF METAPHILOSOPHY 19 the shelves of university libraries and bookshops. Either way, these exclusions are important to the extent that we identify who we are, philosophically speaking, by differentiating ourselves from those in other sub-communities. Williamson therefore maintains that for anyone who acknowledges certain “advances in philosophical standards” in recent Analytic philosophy, there would be a profound “loss of integrity involved in abandoning them in the way that would be required to participate in continental philosophy as currently practised” (2002, 151). If the implication here is that these are standards all bona fide philosophers should at least attempt to meet, then that seems a highly questionable bit of metaphilosophical stipulation. Still, Williamsons allusion to integrity highlights something of broader significance. For being a member of any philosophical sub-community presumably requires (i) a common heritage of recognised authors, texts, issues, methods, and communicative norms, (ii) that this heritage be embedded in ones current practices, and (iii) a shared conception of what is possible for maintaining the future integrity of ones community. This third point is crucial. For at any given time some future possibilities will be significantly unthinkable for members of a particular philosophical sub-community. To exclude, inhibit, or even explicitly caution against specific authors, methods, styles (and so on) need not therefore be an expression of bare intellectual parochialism. Rather, respecting these perceived limits is part of what constitutes community membership.12 7. Conclusion Philosophers have never achieved widespread consensus regarding what philosophy is. Notwithstanding the fact that philosophers themselves sometimes talk of philosophy being in one “crisis” or another, and while the contemporary philosophical landscape is in many ways fragmented, philosophy has thus far managed to avoid total collapse. I have suggested, however, that philosophys relative stability is not due to it possessing some essential core, a set of defining characteristics, or even a unifying genealogy. Rather, it is because members of different sub-communities congregate around specific collections of authors, texts, debates, and issues, and employ more-or-less unquestioned methods and communicative norms. In short, the boundaries of philosophy are secured locally by philosophers everyday activities. If that is right, then metaphilosophical inquiry needs to extend beyond questions of 12 New members of a philosophical community cannot simply till the philosophical soil already laid. To “advance in the profession” one must find more-or-less novel and provocative things to say within the terrain mapped out by the generation who supervised ones doctoral work, and who now sit on the boards of funding bodies, promotion panels, research centres, and academic publishers. C 2017 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 20 BOB PLANT methodology and encompass the wider background conditions of philosophical practice (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 312). Department of Philosophy University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, AB24 3UB United Kingdom r.plant@abdn.ac.uk Acknowledgments Thanks to Joe Morrison, Gerry Hough, Paula Sweeney, and Carrie Jenkins for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 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