tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post4767355708235240708..comments2024-03-22T00:20:38.510-07:00Comments on Adam Riggio writes: There Is No Point to Doing Philosophy If You Don’t Care About What It Achieves, Jamming, 29/08/2013Adam Riggiohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-68576045747738047582013-08-29T06:42:26.282-07:002013-08-29T06:42:26.282-07:00If it wasn't over something that's importa...If it wasn't over something that's important to my writing career, I wouldn't put it here. Ultimately, this is a problem of professionalism too. P is the guy who attacked me as an idiot for not agreeing with the (clearly and obviously to any rational mind correct) Hyppolite interpretation of Hegel. But one of the hallmarks of professionalism in academia is knowing who has the ground to critique you and who doesn't. It isn't a matter of pulling rank as much as respectful behaviour and putting your money where your mouth is. In philosophy, people disagree all the time; that's no problem. But I don't think P and I have had a meatspace conversation about philosophy where he didn't constantly interrupt me trying to refute my points before I'd even finished them. He also has a vision of philosophy where, if the public doesn't care about this high discourse and meditation on the eternal truth of being (sarcasm intended), then that's their problem. It's easy to say that when you have no skin in the game: he's an amateur who did really well in his degree, knows Hegel and Heidegger works and scholarship very well, and has no intention of a career in universities or writing at all. He's content to work effortless 9-5s, meditate on the universal, and lord himself over people at parties full of nerds. He only cares about philosophy as the isolated life of the mind. I care about philosophy as a living public tradition. Of course the public image of the discipline matters to me. He considers such worldly concerns crass and worth breaking a friendship over. I won't apologize for wanting philosophy to survive past the next couple of generations.<br /><br />The truth is, no discipline has retreated farther into the ivory tower than philosophy. When I talk about what some of the major philosophical debates are with my friends in the social sciences, they're incredulous that people would still consider this controversial. Here's a major example. I published a paper this summer on the rational disagreement problem in epistemology. This is the debate over whether it's possible to disagree on one's interpretation over a given set of evidence and still be epistemic peers with that person; only one interpretation can be the true one (or at least closest to the truth), therefore one is more rational than another. My stance on the problem is that this whole dilemma is ridiculous, and it's no problem for equally rational people to disagree over the same evidence. Their reaction to this dilemma is that I'm obviously right, and they wonder why philosophers get in so much of a stink over it.<br /><br />I think this is part of why philosophy is relatively disrespected, or at least misunderstood and shunned, by so many other university disciplines. No one can understand why we get upset over so many of our key problems, because in every other discipline, they've become non-issues. The discipline overall can't talk to others anymore. Adam Riggiohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14606510835439580828noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8708273719674528189.post-3960311322825334772013-08-29T06:01:13.509-07:002013-08-29T06:01:13.509-07:00Sorry to read here about your falling out with a f...Sorry to read here about your falling out with a friend. This may not be the place to write about it but I think your turn to PR is very significant and want to add my vote to your continued exploration thereof (and not only because this is the focus of my own work on the Army!). Definitely enriches any account of an ecological horizon of action.Tom Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04942888225118081569noreply@blogger.com