What is philosophy in the business of doing today?
I think of philosophy in the way that Wilfrid Sellars thought of it in his famous passage from 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man': that philosophy is in the business of studying how things in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.
That is to say that I think it's a very generalist discipline which has been specialising itself recently and I am very wary of that tendency – even though I recognise some benefits of that. Philosophy should be concerned with giving an account that considers all that we know about a specific topic in a way that is both accessible to a lay-audience and well-informed by scientific, sociological and all other kinds of study (such as scientific results about the world, the way the mind works, and how we appreciate art for example).
[...] philosophy is in the business of studying how things in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.
I suppose this has always been what philosophy is about – at least in the Western tradition of philosophy, the one which is traditionally seen as starting in the 5th century BCE. And of course, that's been influenced by everyone, everywhere beyond the Western world. But I think of philosophy as that kind of a discipline and I think it was always that way; it’s the discipline that starts to understand the world until parts of it are outsourced to more specialised sciences. It’s in the business of giving large pictures of what the world looks like and in doing that, paves the way for more specialised, sometimes quantitative, research. It seems especially good in areas where scientific or more specialised research is not there yet; when the study of a topic hasn’t defined the concepts it uses well enough, or hasn't organised the terrain well enough to be able to investigate that subject in an interesting or immaculate way.
Why do you express scepticism of specialism in contemporary philosophy?
I think generalist approaches, especially in science, are lacking at the moment. But I think in philosophy it's especially important that a lot of philosophers – and I'm not saying every philosopher – should be aware of different sub-disciplines because of philosophy’s aim: to give a general account of things. Now I'm not saying every philosopher should be coming up with the ‘Theory of Everything’, but rather that: if you specialise too much, the danger is that you're just not seeing the general picture. As I said, there are dangers of over-specialisation in science as well, but at least in science you can say: if I study this particular phenomenon, then I'm going to have this particular quantitative way or applied, implementable way of dealing with the phenomenon. And that makes sense because then you have a result that is to be used by engineers, or to be used by people to manipulate the world.
It's a difficult discipline to do well and assess. But I think it also has a lot of potential if done well. The history of philosophy shows that.
By contrast, if philosophy specialises too much, there are at least two dangers. One is that we, as analytically trained philosophers, will continue to become more irrelevant in contrast to Continental approaches; which have maintained a broader appeal in virtue of having a broader idea of what philosophy is, and therefore giving broader accounts of the world which are more generalist and less specialised. So, we lose out on that kind of an audience. The other problem is that the more you specialise, the more it's difficult to actually assess the quality of what's coming out beyond a small circle of academics specialising in that topic. Given the way the peer review system works and the way we access each other in academia works, this problem is not specific to philosophy; but I do think it's especially acute in philosophy.
Susan Haack – a very important philosopher of logic from the University of Miami – has referred to this as ‘the problem of publication cartels’. This problem occurs because it's so difficult to assess something so specialised that we need to create a group of experts that will peer review your paper. So once they review your paper, they are likely to judge whether that paper is good enough or not depending on just whether you belong to the group or not, or whether you’re putting forward certain ideas that are consonant with the group or not. So it's very difficult for the outside world – from more generalist philosophers, or even non-philosophers – to assess what we’re doing. Obviously, there are cases in which it's important to know what you're talking about in this specialist way, and so not everyone can assess philosophy papers. But I think it is a matter of degree: don't over specialise so much that there are so few people that can actually assess the quality of what you're doing, and where it has no real use or audience. It's a difficult discipline to do well and assess. But I think it also has a lot of potential if done well. The history of philosophy shows that.
You have expressed concerns of linguistic injustice in mainstream philosophy. What is this and why do you think it is an issue?
There is a trend of self-examination of what philosophy is, why we should be doing it, who does it and for whom it is done, which is happening for different reasons. But one important issue to think about in asking these questions is that of the seeming homogeneity, or homogenization, of what philosophy looks like.
I've become worried that the linguistic diversity of the field has become increasingly homogenised towards native English speakers.
The issue is this: if you think philosophy is supposed to be interesting for the lay-public, and at the same time, interdisciplinary and continuous with the sciences, then you want to have as many people as possible producing that philosophy. You want to have a sufficiently diverse group of people, at least in principle, that can do philosophy. However, after studying in the UK for a long time, being in Anglophone circles for a while and reading around about the history of philosophy, I've become worried that the linguistic diversity of the field has become increasingly homogenised towards native English speakers.
The field needs a lingua franca, and we all want a lingua franca, for the reason that. I think it's important that everyone participate in the general cosmopolitan project of pushing philosophy forward because I do think that it should be a discipline that has the widest possible appeal. But if considerations about the aesthetic or stylistic aspects of the way you present philosophy become so important that they determine whether or not you get hired in an institution, or whether you get a paper published, or whether you get to present your paper at a conference, or a paper cited, and so on, then that cosmopolitan aspect as an aspiration gives out. You just don't have an inclusive and diverse enough group of people doing philosophy. Take, for instance, the editorial boards of the most prestigious philosophy journal in the post-analytic world, and they pretty much all tend to be edited from Anglophone countries. They have in excess of 90% of people who are native-English speakers on their boards. And this is just the data that is available. One of the big problems here is that even though I and others have been advocating for greater disclosure of the origins of people who submit papers, so far that hasn't happened; so, we don't have as much data as we could have.
[...] while it's important to have a lingua franca, I think there should be correctives; you cannot do a philosophy that only represents 6% percent of the world's population.
This linguistic homogeneity is also evident in the citation data. The publication data in these journals all points towards a very wide majority of native-English speakers publishing in the most prestigious journals. Even the way in which the prestige of an institution, or of a journal, is assessed is often decided by an overwhelming majority of native-English speakers. For instance, in what is still the most influential ranking of analytic philosophy departments in the world the "Philosophical Gourmet Report", if one goes and looks at the composition of the evaluators, and at the affiliation of the people who evaluate the departments, they are about 2/3 from US departments and then the remaining 1/3 is more or less from other Anglophone-country departments. Only 7 out of 220 evaluators (3%) are affiliated primarily with a non-Anglophone-country institution. And there are no departments in non-anglophone countries that are evaluated by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. If you look at things like the Stanford Encyclopaedia, or the composition of the so-called "top departments" in the world, you don't see much linguistic diversity either.
And then there are the hiring patterns of these departments. They tend to stay Anglophone and, to be fair, this is not just an Anglophone problem. I think the hiring practices in philosophy generally tend to be very provincial, whereby you tend to get a permanent job from wherever you're from. That is also problematic in the sense that you just don't have as much of a cosmopolitan environment at the level of department composition. And so that's my worry: we are making the opportunities of philosophy departments dependent on what language you natively speak, the way you speak, the way you write non-natively, and the culture that you come from. If you only have Native English speakers who also tend to be monolinguist English speakers – in part due to the situation of English as a lingua franca – then people understandably, have no incentive to learn other languages, or to even know how another language, and by extension its culture, works.
[...] we should be avoiding these sorts of Heideggerian views of language, where there is one particular natural language over others that is considered to be better at doing philosophy.
For instance, some of my acquaintances who completed PhDs in the U.S. used to tell me there was once a strong foreign language requirement for all philosophy PhDs, and that that is now gradually disappearing. That is part of the problem because, again, English is not the most widely spoken language in the world and only 6% of the world's population speaks English natively. So, while it's important to have a lingua franca, I think there should be correctives; you cannot do a philosophy that only represents 6% percent of the world's population. If you think about the distribution of philosophical talent or philosophical ideas in the history of philosophy, there's been incredibly good philosophers coming from all over the world – from across (what are now) Asia, Kazakhstan, Continental Europe, China, Africa, as well of course Britain and the US. So, you would think that if some department might claim to be the best in the world that it’s unusual that 95% of the philosophers in that department are born in the US or UK, right?
This leaves mainstream philosophy in an unjustifiably provincial position. It's not cosmopolitan enough in terms of the distribution of recognized philosophical genius or accomplishment, or whatever you want to call it. You would want to assume that it's going to be a diverse group of people that are going to make the greatest contributions to philosophy, since it's unlikely that those contributions are going to come from a single group of nations that share a single language. And once you bring up the lack of diversity along the axis of language, that naturally includes culture and national background, which for instance strongly influences the kinds of examples you use in philosophy papers. For example, I come from the philosophy of art, which is done under lots of different traditions, but if you look at analytic philosophy papers, including my own, the vast majority of these papers talk about examples from, e.g., British literature or American cinema. And although I think philosophy is supposed to be universalist in spirit, I also think that to the extent that we're analysing domains of human phenomenon – like art-making and art-appreciating – it’s just a little odd to write under these constraints in these kinds of domains of things.
[...] here is this problem of a language centre and a periphery, and analytic philosophy should be more cosmopolitan and include more diverse linguistic backgrounds.
The risk of having a lingua franca – which I think we should try and maintain with corrections – is that we are likely to think that that lingua franca, which is currently English, is the best way or only way to do philosophy. And it’s that implicit and unscrutinised assumption that I'm fighting against. I don't think there is a single way, or even a privileged way, to do philosophy. I think we should be avoiding these sorts of Heideggerian views of language, where there is one particular natural language over others that is considered to be better at doing philosophy. I don't actually think that there is some particular language that you cannot do philosophy in, or that you cannot express some idea in certain languages. I reject this strong linguistic or cognitive relativity thesis – i.e. that you cannot communicate or think some concept in a certain language. But at the same time, I do think insofar as languages always go together with the culture(s) they are associated with, they also might dispose you toward thinking about certain things in a certain way, or expose you to a set an examples from a world phenomena that you're studying. So even if you are a very strong universalist about language, I think you can also accept that there are differences that can become relevant and that all kinds of philosophers – be they of language or art or mind and so on – should take into account in developing their theories.
Can you tell us about your manifesto that aimed to address this and its reception since?
The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy (henceforth, BP) was a manifesto I wrote in 2021 that essentially said: there is this problem of a language centre and a periphery, and analytic philosophy should be more cosmopolitan and include more diverse linguistic backgrounds.
The idea was that by signing this manifesto, philosophers would commit themselves to adhering to five very intentionally and succinctly put principles, that went along the lines of: not giving too much emphasis to the way in which one writes or speaks (in terms of style, fluency, and so on); including more non-native speakers in editorial boards; giving more opportunities for PhDs and jobs to non-native English speakers. This came after many attempts of trying to raise this particular issue, some of which worked more than others. The number of people that signed up for that 2021 manifesto was (to me) surprisingly high. I think we are now at more than 750 signatories, mostly academics and philosophers.
Due to such a big response in the first two months, it looked like it was an issue that people wanted to do something about, so I asked for the help of some colleagues and we put up an institutional version of the BP where instead of saying ‘I as an individual philosopher sign up to respect these principles’, we could get the commitment of an institution, such as a journal, scholarly society or department. I think we have maybe 30 institutions who have signed up so far, which I think is good but it's frankly nowhere near the amount that we would need to change things concretely – (though perhaps the awareness of the issue has grown).
It's interesting that in going from the commitment of the individual to that of the institution, there was a reduction of interest. Most institutions never even replied to our emails, some explicitly said no and that they care about the way in which papers are written, and then some others said that they simply didn’t want to commit themselves to doing this. But the vast majority are just not engaging with us.
I am more in favour of reducing the threshold for some papers to be considered excellent philosophy; that is, reducing the aesthetic and stylistic requirements.
We can speculate as to why, but in any case, we'll keep pushing. The problem is that there needs to be a critical mass of people involved, which you would think there is because, as I was saying, 94% of the world population are non-native speakers of English. But for various reasons, that's not happened yet. There is some interaction but also it just doesn't seem like it is enough. However, I want to note, we're always open to expressions of interest from institutions saying that, for some reasons, they can only implement some commitments and not others. It's never been an issue of all-or-nothing, where we expect them to promise to meet all the conditions.
Do think more funding aimed towards translation initiatives from both journals and publishers could help combat this?
I am more in favour of reducing the threshold for some papers to be considered excellent philosophy; that is, reducing the aesthetic and stylistic requirements. Why that over translation? It's just for a very simple, pragmatic issue: I don't think that we're in a position of, say, literature where there is enough interest and consequently money, very practical speaking, to produce these translations. (And even in the case of literature, the life of a translator does not appear very easy at the moment. There’s not enough money even in literature to translate.) But, again from a practical point, philosophy is not in a position of attracting sufficient interest to fund a massive translation project.
I think that philosophy today has mostly lost the idea of the difference between the substance and the form.
In part, this is our own fault, as we're not as interesting as we should be. I think it would be much easier to translate a book of philosophy by say someone like Slavoj Zizek – that is, someone who is a lot more appealing to people than contemporary, (post-)analytic philosophers. So I worry that the translation project, at least in traditional terms, is just not practical. Then there is the question of AI translation. I'm not an expert but I think that for philosophical works, I don’t see it replacing a good translation for the time being. So, at least right now, the easiest solution is to reduce the importance of style – until things were to change with AI and there was a dramatic improvement in those technologies.
How did we get to this point of an increasingly hyper-specialised, linguistically homogenised mainstream Philosophy?
I often make this comparison between the Sophists and Socrates at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition. The main criticism Socrates made of the Sophists was that they cared not about the substance of what they were saying, but about its form. These Sophists were often hired by people to win debates in, e.g., court, so they had to be fluent, they had to sound smart and convincing. And Socrates was saying: No, that's not what philosophy is. Philosophy is about truth. The way I appear doesn't matter, or whether I’m well-spoken, but it's about whether you can get the content of what I'm saying. At the beginning of the Apology, Plato's Socrates explicitly says:
"I would have you regard me as if I were really a stranger, whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue, and after the fashion of his country; - that I think is not an unfair request.”
I think that philosophy today has mostly lost the idea of the difference between the substance and the form. And so, in the end I have a different view: that the quality of philosophy is more to do with the substance than with the form. Obviously, opponents of this would never say that it's all about formal style. They'll likely say that the way we put things is somehow important; to me, however, form is just something to disregard.
I think we are in a situation in which, 120 years after the analytic revolution, the development of this tradition is a bit tired. We need new ideas.
More broadly, if you look at the history of philosophy, compared to the period that we're living in, we are not that exceptional. I mean, it's exceptional for us because we're living it but it is not in comparison to the history of philosophy. One of the things that my first mentor in philosophy, Luciano Floridi – a philosopher of Information who used to be at Oxford and is now at Yale – taught me was that if you look at the history philosophy as a sort of graph, it’s got crests and troughs. I think that now we're in a period of trough. But the good thing about troughs is that you can only go up – there's so much more that can be done. So I think it's reasonable to think that we’ve gone from the ‘linguistic turn’ – the last great revolution in (Western) philosophy: the analytic revolution – to the present ‘linguistic rut’ because we now have just one single language and you just cannot explore the world conceptually from there alone.
Again, I don't mean to exclude other issues. and I'm talking about Western philosophy also because I think it’s the mainstream philosophy, now even (and increasingly) in departments across Asia and Africa and so on. In any case, the current period of decline won’t continue: I’m sure philosophy will pick up. It's always been the case that some places were more at the centre of the development of philosophy, and some others were less at the centre, and then that changed. So, I don't know if there’s anything exceptionally different about this period.
But I think we are in a situation in which, 120 years after the analytic revolution, the development of this tradition is a bit tired. We need new ideas. We need a new framework to keep going. I think this is perhaps the most interesting way to think about this current moment from a historical perspective: it is to be expected that we are in this moment because it's just been so long since the last breath of intellectual fresh air. There doesn't seem to be excitement in the air about new perspectives in philosophy because it’s just the same old analytic philosophy methods that have been constrained by talking in and about one single language, with one single diet of examples, done by a single type of people in terms of all sorts of axes – including, and perhaps most importantly, linguistic- and class-based, which are often not as talked about.
Could you discuss your history as a core founder of the Minorities and Philosophy UK Network?
I was the founder and first director of the UK Network of the Minorities and Philosophy organisation. I was finishing my PhD at York and this new MAP network was being set up in the US, and I thought that this could do a lot of good in the UK. So, I reached out to the main organiser at the time, Yena Lee, who was at Princeton, and asked her if she had any intentions of making MAP come to the UK as a separate network but still within the same umbrella organisation.
She contacted me six months after my e-mail because until then she hadn't thought about moving outside the US. But after she contacted me, I only had nine months left before the end of my PhD, so I built up the network and helped create maybe seven chapters in that period and started work on another 5 or 10 more chapters. It was all very grassroots.
What urged you to reach out and why?
I guess my experience as a graduate student in the UK was at the roots of my wish to extend MAP to the UK. To cite just one instance, I saw that I was only one of two non-native speakers of English that in the previous eight years had had a PhD scholarship from my graduate studies department. How is that justifiable when you consider the wide diversity of philosophical talent in the world?
In response to those initiatives, my reaction continues to be “Let a hundred flowers blossom”.
In part because of these experiences, I have for a long time tried to make philosophy more of a community and more inclusive. Even before MAP, I for instance I co-founded the White Rose Philosophy Postgraduate Forum between universities in Yorkshire – York, Leeds and Sheffield – trying to make philosophy postgraduates more integrated by having a dedicated forum for them. Since then, I have been engaged in other activities in the same vein (the Online Accessibility Pledge, Freelosophy etc.). I’ve tried to do these things in part because I think it's the right thing to do and in part because it's just interesting to hear more diverse points of view. I want to broaden up my mind and talk to and involve as many people as possible.
How would you respond to philosophers that might think these initiatives for a more inclusive, diverse and pluralistic practice of philosophy as being ‘overly political’ or ‘too woke’?
That is a good question, thank you. I guess I would respond to that ‘wokeism’ critique, by philosophers and others, by pointing out that they should feel free to judge single initiatives differently from each other, as opposed to seeing them always all as a common phenomenon. It is true that there are a number of inclusivity initiatives in philosophy that have been converging as a reaction to a perceived paucity of diverse perspectives in the discipline. In response to those initiatives, my reaction continues to be “Let a hundred flowers blossom”. At the same time, however, people should remain free to judge individual initiatives on the basis of whether they think those initiatives are putting forward genuine issues of injustice and narrowing of perspectives and proposing sensible solutions. My sense is that current reactions to excesses of ‘wokeism’ are to an extent motivated by genuine concerns with the importance of some of the causes discussed and the legitimacy of some of the proposed solutions. That cannot mean that all inclusivity initiatives must be thrown out of the window. The result would be an even more unjust and narrow community.
You are among few academics we have met who so openly use the term ‘Post-Analytic’. Can you explain what you mean by this and why you use it?
The more I see the way in which analytic philosophy is developing, the more I think that although we should still strive to be analytic, to the extent that we can, we should also really call what we do now ‘Post-Analytic' Philosophy. This is because I see a lot of people in the so-called ‘analytic tradition’ doing topics that the analytic philosophy founders would have found very objectionable. Take for example: analytic phenomenology; analytic metaphysics; analytic philosophy of religion. All of these are topics that the founders of the analytic movement would have found oxymoronic. These topics just aren’t what the founders were thinking about, so I think it would be more correct to call this movement post-analytic. Doing otherwise risks being a mere branding exercise. I use the term ‘post-analytic’ to be descriptively accurate.
[...] even if there ever were an analytic method, it is no longer true that the vast majority of contemporary mainstream philosophers use it.
I also dislike the ‘Analytic-Continental’ terminology, which is still implicated in the term ‘analytic philosophy’. Here I probably agree with many more people. But I also note that, even if it's not ideal, it is in a sense prescient of the situation we are now in terms of linguistic diversity. The Analytic-Continental distinction was in some ways not simply, or perhaps not even mainly, one method versus another; it wasn't the analytic method versus some other kind of method that was phenomenological or whatever. The distinction was also driven by early analytic philosophers stating: we have a method, and the others are from a different non-Anglophone culture. There are studies (and here I recommend Akehurst’s book The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy) that provide support for this analysis, in which the emergence of analytic philosophy occurs around the Second World War, in a context of really strong ideological confrontations between the totalitarian powers of ‘Continental’ Europe and the liberal Anglosphere.
However, even if there ever were an analytic method, it is no longer true that the vast majority of contemporary mainstream philosophers use it. Also, again, the kinds of ideas that analytic philosophy had once historically associated itself with – that is, a reaction from metaphysics and idealism – have now been completely abandoned by the vast majority of philosophers who call themselves ‘analytic’. For these reasons, again, I don't think it's accurate to continue to use the qualifier ‘analytic’. However, there hasn't been a new revolution, or a new, even if imperfect, idea of a possible method that would replace the analytic method. Yet, there's still a tradition that's still going in some ways in that direction, still not reading the Continentals and still behaving as a sociologically united group. So then the only thing I can think of is to call the current tradition ‘Post-Analytic’. If there's a better term, I'm happy to use it.
[...] analytic philosophers haven't been as good at reaching out to audiences as Continentals have been, so they just have just a comparatively more significant market.
So far, there's never so far been any major backlash in my use of the term, but for sure people ask: ‘What do you mean by that?’. And the more sort of immersed in the tradition they are, the more the tone of the question is slightly charged. And I tend to respond that I’m trying to be accurate with my terminology as I think good philosophy should be. However, I also think there is still is a battle for funding between Analytic and Continental philosophers. (Post-)analytic philosophers are for sure winning, especially with larger funding agencies. But the fight is still there in part because these divisions don't go away quickly, and in part because we analytic philosophers haven't been as good at reaching out to audiences as Continentals have been, so they just have just a comparatively more significant market. And so, because there is this fight, and branding is very important, if you say you are post-analytic, then you're not identifying with the success story that analytic philosophy has been. Having said that, there is also I think a process of Continentalization of analytic philosophy underway that could before too long make the distinction obsolete.
On a more speculative note: will there be a Post-Analytic ‘peak’ coming out of this ‘trough’/ ‘linguistic-rut’ as you put it? And how might that look?
There will be a peak. The problem is I don't know when that is going to happen and how. This is wild speculation but there's two ways it can go. Speaking mostly about the linguistic diversity issue – because that's what I think about most often – one way things can go is that there are people who will embrace the suggestions that I've been making; in terms of making the discipline more cosmopolitan and accepting of different linguistic backgrounds, different ways to write papers, a much more varied diet of examples and so forth, such that we keep English as the lingua franca and we can again become a cosmopolitan enterprise that's based on rigorous dialogue and debate, where there is meritocracy and diversity in terms of who is recognised. This is what I want to fight for.
Alternatively, parts of the global South of the world – I'm from Southern Europe, but I get a lot of comments from people in Africa and South America that feel, correctly, a lot more anger and exclusion for this discrimination – could end-up dislodging the lingua franca. And if the lingua franca is lost, then I think you might have a more equitable result than the current one because there's not going to be a global centre. But my worry there is that we're going to lose out on progress because I do still believe that the best way to do philosophy, like the best way to do science – and again, we should continue to think of philosophy as continuous with the sciences – is for it be a cosmopolitan and collaborative project, to which everyone from different viewpoints can contribute in a single language. I think that this outcome will happen if the global centre doesn't accept the kind of moderate suggestions that people like me have been making to be more inclusive within the confines of the system.
[...] we can again become a cosmopolitan enterprise that's based on rigorous dialogue and debate, where there is meritocracy and diversity in terms of who is recognised. This is what I want to fight for.
So those are the two scenarios that I see. I don't know which one is going to win over. The end of Latin as a lingua franca was a similar phenomenon, so I think people should be studying the story of that period a lot more to see where we're going to go.