by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
Not long ago, a few philosophers went out for lunch at a small café. As they ate, they argued about the morality of infanticide. Eventually another patron of the café approached the table of philosophers and asked indignantly, “What’s wrong with you people?”
Philosophers have always cultivated an antagonistic relationship with the society in which they work. But recently many philosophers, along with the American Philosophical Association (the principal professional organization for philosophers in the United States), have begun to clamor for philosophers to go public. Within the profession these days, the call for “public philosophy” is loud, but not clear. That is, it is difficult to discern precisely what is being called for, what it means for philosophy to be “public.” Here we want to identify a few possibilities.
First, the call for more public philosophy might be a call for philosophy in public. This would be the suggestion that philosophers should simply take themselves out of their offices and into more public settings. They should go about their usual business, but create and participate in forums where their academic work can be accessed by the general public. Our lunchers above were engaged in public philosophy in this sense. The result was not especially encouraging.
So it seems that the call for public philosophy is not simply a call for a change of scenery. “Public philosophy” must be a different kind of philosophy. Hence the idea that philosophers must go public is the idea that they must do something different from what they currently do. But there are many different kinds of thing that philosophers currently do. What must change in order for philosophy to be “public” in the requested sense?