PART I: PHILOSOPHY TODAY
What would you say philosophers are up to today?
I guess one thing is that philosophy has taken a more writerly and 'personal' turn – to play off of what Rorty named the ‘linguistic turn’ in Philosophy in the early-to-mid 20th Century, which directed people to highly technical solutions, ways of writing models of philosophical reflection; extreme precision and extreme specialization.
How would you characterise this 'personal turn', as you call it?
I’d say it’s bringing together various combinations of philosophical memoir and intellectual reflection. Lots of people are doing that, and some people are really doing it well. I think this is something that could have a good, long run. A few that come to mind are the likes of Agnes Callard, John Kaag and Mariana Alessandri.
I look at someone like Agnes Callard, who’s originally a Classicist who’s researched Ancient Greek philosophy. She's a character that shocked me when she arrived because she would have been completely impossible when I was her age. She was teaching at the University of Chicago, as an Associate Professor of Philosophy, and then she started placing essays at The Stone, the New York Times philosophy essay series. She also got this public philosophy column at The Point, a contemporary intellectual magazine. So she's really an amazingly bold public figure. She shares all kinds of stuff about her own marriage, and her kids. She’s incredibly eccentric person and amazingly unpredictable; she might do anything and she might write anything. Or someone like John Kaag, who was a student of a friend of mine. We've watched him develop all these years, kind of culminating in his book Hiking with Nietzsche, where he combines his relationships with his scholarship. Mariana Alessandri is another emerging figure along these lines. She wrote the book Night Thoughts, which is all about her struggles with depression and bringing philosophy out of that.
And I guess I like to include myself among them. I felt the yearning throughout my whole life to be in my philosophical writing. I tried to write personally in the early 90s and I have been trying to do personal writing and philosophy together through my career. I didn't get any positive feedback on that really. I was out as a recovering addict in books in the early 90s, and I feel like this directly damaged my career. But that’s no longer the case somehow, and this increasing attention and openness to the personal just fills me with hope.
I guess one thing is that philosophy has taken a more writerly and 'personal' turn [...] because so much of philosophy has been intent on repressing, or concealing, the person who is doing the writing.
WHY DO YOU THINK WE ARE SEEING THIS TREND?
I think it’s because so much of philosophy has been intent on repressing, or concealing, the person who is doing the writing. For instance, I knew a guy wrote his dissertation about the particular indexical ‘I’, and it was 300 pages long. So that was interesting, but it was unreadable unless you were in the technical literature. Or when you're reading Quine or whoever it might be, and you're thinking: what kind of personality does this reflect? Who is this dude? We don't have to speculate what kind of person Agnes Callard is because she's showing you in every damn sentence.
I guess what I wonder, is whether you can make progress on philosophical issues this way. But at least one thing about this is that it’s exploring new ways of writing; which I think is really key because I think philosophical academic writing by the end of the 20th century was just getting so grossly unreadable and so specialized. So at least this is making contact with people.
PART II: PHILOSOPHY THEN
WHAT DO YOU THINK ENDED THE LINGUISTIC TURN?
Maybe the linguistic turn, and philosophy of language as a whole, went about as far as it could in some way. Like, where are we going beyond Derrida? (Who was arguably part of the linguistic turn on the on the continental side). How do we get beyond Wittgenstein, or how can we do better philosophy of language than Kripke or Lewis?
I'm not sure if it was sort of the conceptual maturity of linguistic philosophy, but I guess one problem was that it melted down under the auspices of people like Rorty, and especially people like Davidson. It reached a degree of sophistication, and maybe a degree of excellence, that you can't emulate. And so, the social situation was that you were a graduate student, or a young professor, and you would experience despair in the face of these figures. When I was a graduate student in the 80s, I was secretly thinking: I can be the next Wittgenstein, and I can kick Wittgenstein’s ass. That was a secret – I think I was a megalomaniac! But maybe I was never going to surpass Wittgenstein. That's a hard job.
So someone might try to make the next set of moves suggested by Derrida or Kripke’s work, but by the late mid to late 20th-Century – after Davidson, Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Goodman, Quine – these figures were overwhelming, and it was becoming clear that you weren’t going to go past them. And maybe you could write about them and you could sort of refine their ideas, or argue with other specialists about what they really meant or that kind of thing, but I think by the 2000s, people were asking themselves: ‘What remains to do?, 'What can I contribute?’.
And the answer might not be: well, I'm a better philosopher of language than Wittgenstein, so I'm going go out there and kick his ass! But it might well have been: I’m here and I can write about me, even if I can't out-think David Lewis, I can write differently than David Lewis. So, I think that was part of it; just asking how can we go on. And that was part of the cultural atmosphere in the way writing in general was going in some ways: the rise of memoir in 1990s came late to philosophy, but it came.
So many Philosophers asserted in the 20th-Century that philosophy was over. It made me angry actually because I didn't think that was true at all. And that was a weird dilemma of my generation – or at least some of people in my generation – where their teachers were telling them that the discipline they were passing on was no longer viable and was over.
And when Rorty was suggesting that philosophy was over, one reason for that – even though he maybe didn't say this exactly – was that these overwhelming figures could not be transcended. Or maybe they could be transcended. But who arose to absorb, transcend, and go beyond them? And so anyway, I think that part of it is also just exhaustion – after a while you begin to lose interest, or people lose interest.
HOW DID WE GET FROM THIS POINT OF EXHAUSTION WITH LINGUISITIC PHILOSOPHY TO THE PERSONAL?
One angle is this. So many Philosophers asserted in the 20th-Century that philosophy was over. Rorty did that in my face over and over again when I began to work with him. He’d start rolling his eyes and say things like: ‘This is a bad career move, philosophy will not exist in 20 years… There’s not going to be any professors of philosophy, so what are you doing?’. He was a Professor of Humanities at Virginia University at that point.
It made me angry actually because I didn't think that was true at all. And that was a weird dilemma of my generation – or at least some of people in my generation – where their teachers were telling them that the discipline they were passing on was no longer viable and was over. Many figures within the discipline were left with a bad conscience after Wittgenstein said it was over; our biggest guy said it was over! And maybe Derrida thought it was over too in terms of metaphysics. Dewey thought Philosophy was over practically. Religion doesn't do that. Physics doesn’t do that. I don't hear physicists going like, ‘physics really sucks now that it’s over’.
[...] art has a lot of parallels with Philosophy throughout the 20th-Century where so many artists thought they were maybe bringing an end to art, [...] these disciplines historically seem to have had a similar conceptual move of turning against their own tradition.
In this vein, art has a lot of parallels with Philosophy throughout the 20th-Century where so many artists thought they were maybe bringing an end to art, or people who wrote about them thought they were bringing an end to art – like Duchamp who put a urinal on the wall. I was talking to Rorty about Arthur Danto – the great esthetician – in the 80s, and he drew this parallel: Philosophy is a project that was always misguided actually, and was a terrible mess (lots of people think that, I guess) but then it realised its terrible mess and thus tried putting an end to itself.
Relatedly, Danto himself thought that Art ended when Warhol showed Brillo boxes in a gallery in 1964, and he worked his whole Hegelian story that Art had a certain essence, or a certain purpose, and that it had gone as far as it could to realising that purpose. There might still be people painting but they won't be in Art History in the way that people were from the Renaissance to the Pop Era or anything like that.
The answer I think lies in the fact that these disciplines historically seem to have had a similar conceptual move of turning against their own tradition. That move is problematic, but the traditions themselves were insanely problematic. For instance, I can see why you'd want to turn against Western art if you viewed Western art and Philosophy as artifacts of colonialism and oppression. I think this view is also baked into the new ways of doing philosophy. And in thinking that, you'd want it to be over in a way, and it might be over if it really is bound up conceptually with colonialism, racial oppression, gender oppression and so on.
So, as this kind of view spins out and mutates, these disciplines go on to develop a bad conscience about themselves. I think this was in there too in the 1980s and 90s, where the idea that Western Philosophy as a whole is an artifact of oppression was being raised, alongside conversations about Hume’s racism, Kant's and so on. So there are various reasons why you might want it to end, or think that we'd be better off without it. And those critiques are actually necessary if we are to go on.
[...] this immediately takes you toward the personal just by observing the supposedly objective, sky-high abstractions of a lot of these figures of the great 20th-Century Philosophers and their acolytes – of whom were almost exclusively men – where you could see the whole enterprise as gendered.
But philosophy was already exhausted by then in many ways, and maybe politically too because I think what really drives these sorts of mutations in academic disciplines is more about who's getting hired and who's getting fired, how you can get keep money coming into your department, how you can get another faculty line, and resist getting your department eliminated, et cetera, et cetera… So, a lot of this might have to do with academic politics rather than, world politics. But maybe they work in tandem too…
And in many ways, this immediately takes you toward the personal just by observing the supposedly objective, sky-high abstractions of a lot of these figures of the great 20th-Century Philosophers and their acolytes – of whom were almost exclusively men – where you could see the whole enterprise as gendered. They were philosophizing as though we're not even in here at all because we're neutral: 'I'm just a brain and I'm a brain because I'm a dude actually'. And then this was followed by a Feminist critique of the objectivity of concepts and Philosophy's alleged neutrality – which are all things that had something to do with these self-delusions of oppressors. And so, this personal turn might have been a fairly natural way of addressing that. That is, that philosophizing is fundamentally about human experience and our philosophical forefathers tried to erase it, but actually in their erasure of it, they just expressed their own experiences, or their own needs, or their own fantastical self-image.
If you're caring for small children, I don't think you're probably worrying about whether there are other people with minds or whatever. Or just like the turn in epistemology from Gettier problems to considering the effect of oppression on knowledge – another major development now in political epistemology – from thinkers like Miranda Fricker. Now this literature might not necessarily go that personal, but the suggestion immediately hits the personal; at least in the sense that you can't read this stuff without thinking about your relationships and the social context you inhabit.
And I hadn't really thought about this until now but standpoint epistemology was a fundamental development towards the personal. That is a principled argument in favor of personal philosophy, right? The idea being: I have to acknowledge that I have a particular standpoint; it's raced, it's gendered. So now you can't read that stuff without asking yourself: 'How did I come to this standpoint?’; ‘How is this affecting the world around me?’; ‘How can I ameliorate and acknowledge that I have a particular standpoint?’; ‘What is my standpoint?’.
From when I was in grad school in the 80’s, I knew some of the people working in these areas, like Linda Martin Alcoff, whose work is great on this. And again, I got pretty into this in the early 90s, which is part of what made me go more personal as I thought about it. I wrote a book called Act Like You Know: African American Autobiography and White Identity, and by that time I was reading a lot of standpoint Feminist epistemology and suddenly, it dawned on me: what does it mean that I’m white, really what is ‘whiteness’? And that immediately made me start talking about growing up as a white kid in a mostly black city, and I started that project with some autobiographical writing.
It does seem like 20th-Century Philosophy is coming into perspective.
But overall, I think the key thing in making this turn is to see that this was always the case. That Hume, Kant and Plato were the particular people they were with the social positionings they had, and that is reflected throughout their philosophical works. Now that doesn't necessarily make any particular sentence false, but it makes you read them differently. It might open you to alternatives that seemed irrelevant in a certain way. So this way, you can construct a kind of genealogy of how we got to this kind of epistemology and then that’s an initial way to express an alternative, through a more embodied process. Just like when we read Agnes Callard and other people like this, we feel the body, that their body is there in the philosophy. The person is fully present.
It does seem like 20th-Century Philosophy is coming into perspective. Even a few years ago when I started to think about this, I didn't think there was that much material yet. I thought I was kind of early to the idea of the history of 20th-Century Philosophy, but it really is happening, and it makes sense that this is the right moment. It's a hard swath of stuff to grapple with too; there's a lot of it and it's very complex and ambiguous if you look at the whole damn thing. Anyway, the time is right to wrestle.
PART 3: PHILOSOPHY TOMORROW
SO, WHERE IS PHILOSOPHY GOING FROM HERE?
Now I don't know exactly what this looks like next but I'd like to get to the point where it'd be cool if people would be indifferent to the distinctions of Continental and Analytic philosophy, and were just interested in the figures they're interested in.
I'd like to be in an era of Post-Analytic philosophy, and I do think it's happening [...] I'm not sure what happens next, and feel that there is an open horizon, and that people are experimenting with different ways of writing which I think is really fundamental here.
DO YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS ON THE NOTION OF A ‘POST-ANALYTIC’ ERA OF PHILOSOPHY?
I guess I've heard the term ‘Post-Analytic’ and I suppose I keep thinking that we must in that era – I feel like we are. But then I keep hearing signs that were not; in other words, I keep running into people who still are so strictly analytic, and who still think about analytic philosophy in the same way. That makes it seem like we're not going to get out of this at all.
I'd like to be in an era of Post-Analytic philosophy, and I do think it's happening. It's just that it's hard to do both Analytic and Continental. And I'm not saying that even I do that competently – it's almost impossible. But can something else supersede both, that is neither of those things exactly? I'm hopeful about that still, and I’m trying to think about who a good sign of that could be. But in thinking about who gives a Post-Analytic ‘vibe’, I guess maybe feminists who work in the analytic vein, like Miranda Fricker, who would say they're using analytic philosophy as well as critiquing it too, and maybe they’re moving it toward different possibilities, but without negating it or undermining all its conceptual tools simultaneously.
I mean, I love analytic philosophy and I respect it so much. The training I got at Hopkins made me feel like I was smarter and more rigorous when I got through all of that work than I had been before. But now it’s easy to feel dissatisfied with how it sort of drives you into these trivial corners, or trivial methodologies, where you're giving the hundred-and-twentieth counter-example to a theory of knowledge or something like that, and the question is: am I going to spend my whole life just kind of picking out and sorting out terms? Anyway, I feel very ambivalent about it.
WHAT DO YOU THINK HAS KEPT THESE TRADITIONS APART FOR SO LONG (OR AT LEAST UNTIL NOW HOPEFULLY)?
I guess my basic diagnosis is that a lot of it is a prose style difference – I guess I got that from Rorty too. But they are different ways of writing, or different tones, rather than different positions. Rorty thought Continental and Analytic thinkers were moving in the same direction actually, and that the fundamental figures agreed, even though the fundamental figures didn't think they agreed. I was trying to be indifferent to these distinctions from so early, and I kept hoping that it was over. I kept thinking it was over. But then it kept popping back in. I just kept running into suspicions because I was reading Baudrillard or Latour, and people would look at me like ‘that's not philosophy!’.
Personally, I was trying to read everything; trying to master, Dewey, Heidegger and Quine. That's hard, dude – each of those requires a graduate training. But I'm not sure what happens next, and feel that there is an open horizon, and that people are experimenting with different ways of writing which I think is really fundamental here. But I think we're still groping toward a sort of tone of the next era, or style of the next era – or at least I'm still groping.
ARE THERE ANY NOVEL AREAS OR INTERSECTIONS FOR PHILOSOPHY THAT INTEREST YOU ESPECIALLY?
I really have been working, or trying to work, at the interface of aesthetics and political science or political theory, and that led me to write Political Aesthetics. This is the kind of thing I would hope for in the next go-round for philosophy, a fundamental line of inquiry that asks: how does politics look? How does Donald Trump's politics look? How does it look different than Kamala Harris' politics? Who's creating the imagery, and what's the role of that in the political, between say architecture and politics? What accounts for the built environment and political/aesthetic decisions, and the way the world is made?
I think aesthetics and politics are completely intertwined throughout their histories really, and that this has been under-appreciated. [...] But maybe that could be a sort of Post-Analytic move towards the interdisciplinary.
I guess my position there is that not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic. I mean, maybe all artists political too in some very general sense, but any political position has expression as a form; maybe it has a poetry, a prosody, or has a way people try to use images to construct their personae as public characters.
So, I think aesthetics and politics are completely intertwined throughout their histories really, and that this has been under-appreciated. And partly it's because the specialists in these academic disciplines don't really cross very much. For me, this all required de-specialization, where I was a professor of Political Science and then I was professor of Art History – I know this sounds weird, from having done a PhD in Philosophy to then bopping around different departments at different institutions. I guess I've done a lot of discipline shifting.
But maybe that could be a sort of Post-Analytic move towards the interdisciplinary. I guess I was hoping to do analytic philosophy in that book in some ways, where I tried to clarify the basic terms; like define ‘Politics’, and account for what art is. So approaching it in an analytic vein – of clarifying basic concepts systematically – can be really useful, but then launching far out into subject matters that are not usually in analytic philosophy is necessary at this point.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY IS AS A PROFESSION AT AN INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL, WITHIN THE UNIVERSITIES?
We’re professionally endangered. Schools are losing their departments and people can't get jobs. It seems like a really tough time, at least in the States. At the college I just retired from, we've gone from six professors to four in the last few years. When I retired, I wasn't replaced – that's really typical. I know people who taught at places where the philosophy department died a couple of years ago, or where even whole universities are closing.
I was actually going to pitch myself to teach Art Theory at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, but that university died last June unexpectedly. They just announced to their whole faculty and student body that they were not going to come back next year. So that kind of professional crisis is one thing that might lead to changes, as in conceptual changes, for the future of the field. We might need ask ourselves now: ‘How can we serve the university?’ ‘How can we get more funding?’, ‘How can we convince the world that we're not irrelevant?’. So maybe things will expand conceptually in interesting ways, but I think there’ll be more of a professional crisis, if not a conceptual crisis for philosophy.
And I think the linguistic turn happened because of a professional crisis in academic philosophy in the 1890s. Science was becoming the model of knowledge, and Hegelian Idealism of mainstream philosophy departments at the time had nothing to do with that, and did nothing with contemporary chemistry, for example, or was incompatible with it. And so, departments were getting defunded and professors were upset that their legitimacy was being undermined by this specific problem of a model of scientific knowledge that they couldn’t approach. But the linguistic turn achieved a kind of precision which even in the face of science seemed legitimate; we had these logical techniques, and no one could deny their validity because to deny their validity you'd have to use the very techniques that they were teaching.
So nowadays, I’m wondering about this current economic crisis and political crisis as Trump comes back in. Who's going to fund which academic departments, and how? And that might end up driving what we're writing about, and who we're writing for, and of course, who we're teaching and how we're teaching. It's already affecting that. The department at Dickinson College moved to a model where Ethics/Moral Philosophy is spread across the curriculum, rather than training in philosophical technique or running through the issues. So, it’s now going to help with ethics in Computer Science, environmental ethics with the Environmental Studies department. I wanted to do Aesthetic Ethics with the Arts, but we haven't quite gotten to there. But, in other ways, we’re trying to show how we can be of service across the curriculum. Or maybe empirical philosophy is a pretty explicit way to try to address this: there's some pretty well recognized techniques of research, and there's some interesting results. I think these are ways to try to feel around for how we can stay academically legitimate. Not that I want to worry about that, but every professor has to worry about it in the sense that they want health insurance…
HOW DO YOU THINK ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS IN THE U.S. WILL HOLD GROUND OVER THE NEXT TRUMP TERM?
Well I think everyone that works in universities basically is on the left, really broadly construed – there are few exceptions. And in some ways, everyone is in danger in that way, with all these bills in Florida where they're actually prescribing how professors teach, or trying to ban specific books from college classrooms. There’s been a lot of pretty heroic resistance to that already, but I think fundamentally American universities will accommodate the current political reality. I think they already do, and I think they will continue to do so. I think American universities have been incredibly woke over the last ten years and have floated very far to a certain kind of leftism, and that when the funding is at stake, when the federal grants are in question, they're going to be thoughtful about saying anything. So this is probably going to be four years of them quietly trying not to provoke right-wingers.
[...] if what's going on your campus, with protest movements or whatever, is really pissing off conservative Republicans, your institutional future is bleak. We're going to see all kinds of accommodations to the ruling ideology, because that's what butters your bread.
Probably it will now be even more of a priority for university administrators to repress pro-Palestinian demonstrations, for example. There's less of that this year than there was last year here in American universities, but if what's going on your campus, with protest movements or whatever, is really pissing off conservative Republicans, your institutional future is bleak. We're going to see all kinds of accommodations to the ruling ideology, because that's what butters your bread. I mean, some of these schools can afford to be pretty defiant, even if they aren't going to be; like Princeton, Harvard and Yale have billions of dollars, such that even if someone's going to yank their grants, that's going to suck for them but it's not the end of the institution. Whereas in some places, if you start yanking grants and stuff like that, the economic model collapses real quick.
Now this is just speculation of course, but I think we're going to see a de facto right turn in American universities, just to try to survive the coming period. Anyway, I think every professor is probably worried about this now and how academia is going to look in a few years…