“we would not have had the contemporary stereotype of the public philosopher: unshakeably confident in the realm of abstract reasoning; able to say preposterous-sounding things without laughing; content with displaying a child-like naivety about many obvious aspects of the world; but also able to suddenly illuminate the ordinary, and place order into the chaotic, in ways few other minds can match.”
That characterization of a modern, public philosopher doesn’t ring true for me, and certainly not as a description of Prof. Callard. I can certainly imagine the type, though: it’s a man who bears a striking resemblance to Stephen Frye complete with tweed jacket and pipe. It’s a century ago and he’s in a quad at Cambridge idly chatting to Ramanujan who’s struggling with one of his more complex mathematical proofs. The philosopher is absent-mindedly discoursing on the nature of bird song, then remembers a lunch appointment and as he leaves says, “Oh, by the way, R., I think you’ll find if you set y to zero the problem will solve itself.” Ramanujan is left astounded. Such is the rarefied, child-like, illuminating genius of yesteryear (assuming it ever existed).
What about today’s philosophers? I don’t regard them in a similar light. They appear to be the wokest of the woke, as Prof. Stock can attest. Their discipline, in my view, is hopelessly politicized. However quaint or abstract their predecessors might seem, they at least sincerely tried to make sense of human existence. Nowadays it’s pure ideology.
I wonder if Prof. Stock would write an essay about modern philosophy’s commitment to scholarship? I’d be particularly interested to learn about current philosophy students. Do they even bother studying the great philosophical works and acquire the techniques of reasoned analysis, or are they rewarded simply for reciting ideology? Are they still encouraged to question every assertion, as mentioned in the article, or mindlessly accept whatever under-cooked idea is thrown at them by their politicized professors? Are able students, capable of profound abstraction, still attracted to philosophy or do mediocrities mouth platitudes on their way to a First?

Callard is not really a philosopher here she is just a naughty girl revelling in her ability to be naughty without any push back because she is a “philosopher” and she is not going to get cancelled the way she would if she broke one of the taboos against “racism” or “trans ideology”.

Nothing clever, bold or philosophical to see.

I have hung with a bunch of philosophers, been drunk with them a lot (they tell good jokes when drinking – clever and odd ones)

I think it was the movie ‘Rude Boy’ about The Clash, played by them selves, the lead singer is asked by some reporter what Punks really are about – and he tells them

” Punks are just a bunch of Wan *ers.”

haha – you see where this is going….

But really – this is not the case. First – Philosophers are going to be at some point on the Asperger scale – they are not normal people.

The other thing is the harm they do – people think they are just Wan *ers but most of the great evil in the world if from these modern bunch of Philosophers – and If you know me you know I will be talking of Modernism, Postmodernist, Post-Structuralists, Neo-Marxism, and I would toss in Freud.

Really they began their destruction of the Modern west in Warmer Germany at the Gothe Institute and what became the ‘Frankfurt School’ drawing on Utilitarianism, Existentialism, Nihilism, Marxism, Freud, and the big dose of Atheism.

These wicked and pernicious people gave us all the degeneracy of Woke – the evil of Liberal Lefty – the destruction of the Family, Faith, Ethics and Morality……. after they captured Columbia University first in the 1930s and then 1980 the took it fully…and Focoult and Derrida et al have loosened their despair and amorality….

Being Aspies they do not quite really get the whole good and evil thing unless that take that fork – I would say like so many Christian Philosophers, say Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov, and Simone Weil who took the fork with God, they produced Good Works… but ones who turn to Secular Humanism – they can produce the philosophies of the greatest evil man has ever known, they produce Evil works.

Anyway – a funny bunch – but as deadly to humanity when they go to the dark side..say like Yuval Harari – basically Satan’s Saint…..

So yea, they are just some Wan*ers – and fun to get drunk with – but when absent from god, the devil can lead them, and have loosened darker forces on the world than any other kind of person in history.

The story of Professor Callard, I feel, may be not yet complete. There may possibly come a time when she gets to discover the heartbreak and humiliation of being left by her new love, the graduate student, and realising how foolish she was to sacrifice her position in her family for him. She would doubtless also find it near impossible to square her own sacrifice with the inevitable truth that the graduate student was experiencing an infatuation, not the sort of mutual love that adults can feel which is the basis for a long-term relationship.

Would this experience, too, be described from a position of abstraction, as if her emotional self is something she can observe dispassionately from within? I have my doubts.

As to the rest, I think Professor Stock has a book in her on this subject herself. She is ideally placed to describe how the abstraction of the academic world can lead to destructive consequences far outside itself. Yes, I get that academia must be free to pursue rational inquiry without fear of immediate practical consequences (we’ll leave aside the question of how much this principle is honoured in practice for now), but the protections given to academics in this respect can be abused, and it is fair to say that Kathleen Stock knows first-hand how badly this can go wrong.

Nassim Taleb’s book, Skin in the Game, possesses some relevance here, I suspect. There must be some ways in which a degree of accountability can be restored to academia without endangering its legitimate right to independence of thought. I wonder how Professor Stock would feel about assisting with this?

Interested in all the comments of course, but another thing that struck me is the male-female asymmetry in the original story. Imagine if it had been a male professor who had declared his feeling for a female student and ended up leaving his wife and marrying the student. The outcry would have been deafening and he’d likely have lost his job. I’m not saying that male professors should be allowed to prey on female students, but there does seem to be a double standard at work here.

To quote that great titan of investigative journalism Kent Brockman: “things aren’t as happy as they used to be down here at the unemployment office. Joblessness is no longer just for Philosophy majors – useful people are starting to feel the pinch.”

I had a run-in with Jason Stanley 15 years ago as a philo PhD student. I can’t remember what it was about, but my impression of him as singularly unpleasant was reinforced by his subsequent participation in the witch hunt against Kathleen Stock.

OK, I am a philosophical ignoramus, but the philosophers covered in Krishnan’s book can be summed up, in the words of Ford Prefect, as “mostly harmless”. I am not so sure about Prof. Callard and her like. Their mix of pseudo-psychology and philosophical reflection just provides a smokescreen for them to be dishonest about themselves in an honest-sounding way. Prof Callard’s confession come across as even more excruciating than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.
Many thanks, as always, to Dr. Stock for her consistently brilliant writing!

When I did my degree I avoided philosophy and philosophers like the plague. The lecturers (all male) were perma-smoking wannabe Left-Bankers (also rhyming slang) who seemed to use their strange views to justify sleeping with anyone they felt like and generally behaving like spoilt children. They could only exist within the confines of academia and would be utterly unemployable anywhere else. My view hasn’t much changed in the 35 years since.

The oddest thing: I cannot make out if this is a hagiography or a (mildly self-loathing) pisstake of the genus. The author is a Brit, so I will assume the latter.

The whole of modernity is characterized by confusion about the what are the rules and what do they mean:

Philosophers don’t think nowadays, they analyse thinking, musicians don’t write (classical) music, they investigate soundscapes, journalists don’t report they challenge stereotypical (rule based) culture.

Everywhere what were traditional rules are seen as the enemy. When society was more traditionally rule based it was in fact more creative and dynamic, but now that these rules are a kind of anathema, the only ones that are allowed are flattening ones, flatten society, flatten race relations, flatten musical structures, flatten thinking to a kind of algorithm. It’s all just escape from what we really are. It’s completely end game stuff in my opinion.

It all started with the enlightenment, when we began to reject the divine and moral order of the universe. For example Bach believed he (i.e. was) in communication of the creator of the universe and so was deeply invested in the rules that governed musical harmony and structure. He had no qualms with that fact and felt that he was unveiling Gods work. But this enlightenment period was one of rapid deconstruction of real religion and spirit.

Then came science – the analytical method par excellence – and began tearing apart traditional views and methods. Nietzsche neatly summarizes this in his work but despite realizing this is a catastrophe decides that there is no way back. In madness he offers Dionysian religion – a kind of religion for geniuses and the best of the best. This is clearly not going to work in a democratizing world. What happens instead is a religion of analysts and super intellectuals decide that meaning will exist in technology and industrial landscapes, now the Gods are google and Apple and heaven is silicon valley.

So it seems to be like this: any analytical field or enterprise can survive this kind of shedding of rules and order because analytical subjects can survive a shedding of axiomatic rules. It does have axioms of course (e.g. big bang is one for physics) but they are negligible compared to the methods compound structure and so the method survives and has to be built upon past work, as science obviously is. Music however, though clearly capable of being rule based and expansive, is not simply an analytical method. It does have some analytical aspects but fundamentally isn’t that, it’s expressive, emotional, purposeful and human. As such it can’t survive this shedding of human rules and order; when axioms such as melody are left in the waste bin it collapses into degenerate noise making. What here Nietzsche would call values rather than method count for everything, values (axioms) mean order that is imposed for the benefit of our and out interests growth rather than merely wallowing in disorganized valueless folly.

Ultimately philosophy is similar, it is not simply an analytical endeavor, Nietzsche proves that, Wittgenstein proves that, Voltaire proves that, Shakespeare proves that…they can all philosophise with more power than pretty much all modern philosophers, but each followed various sets of artistic and methodological rules for producing work, rules as well as using their deep knowledge of the past and from the human condition and intuition, rather than mechanical analyses.

I don’t know what the answer is other than courageousness from those that know better than these big whig fools in high towers, and I really do believe they are laughing at most of us, since they have the power to spout nothing and to win and of course live equally in luxury and meaninglessness whilst others toil away.

Having taken my philosophy PhD about 15 years ago I understand what Stock is referring to. However, she is slightly unfair in failing to point out that the analytic method wasn’t simply in opposition to harmless old Bradley, but also to the whole of what was called ‘continental philosophy’. And my word, they were right. For it is the kind of metaphysical clap trap peddled by the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and others that led to Critical Race theory, identity politics, and the rejection of reason as bedrock, and hence the deep theory beneath trans extremist ideology.

I always felt that in intellectual terms analytic philosophy had won the battle, but clearly not as, in practical matters, the continental approach has (disastrously for the West generally) won hands down while analytic philosophy as practiced in UK and USA (taken there by Vienna Circle Jewish escapees in the late 1930s) has largely disappeared up pointless alleys of obfuscation.

There’s a sense in which we’re all philosophers, even those who’d neither understand or be in the least bit interested in what this article is about (which isn’t just one thing). By doing these things: rejecting or not understanding, they’d be engaging in an act of philosophy.

By choosing to accept the world at face value, or even ridiculing the idea they were doing so if it were put to them, each human being who does so is using their experience, language skills and analytical ability.

Someone who kicks a football around with their mates, or even solo against a wall, is a footballer. Not a professional one, obviously, but nevertheless engaging with a football in exactly the same way. The pro footballer does so in a specifically codified way (with some very arcane methods) and in front of a crowd. That’s what a professional philosopher does, and this article takes us through some of the ways in which this occurs, which indeed might seem strange and alien to many. When a footballer stands guarding a football at the corner flag at 90+ minutes in order to secure a result, that’s not something you’d catch someone doing having a kick-around with their mates and with their coats as goalposts – there’s no corner flag for a start.

The professional philosopher simply engages with the world according to a codified way, whilst also having the option of critiquing, even changing the codification. This applies to the point made about current trends in philosophy. But like everyone else, professional philosophers are doing this even whilst “just living”, which is why the story that Kathleen Stock tells us about the philosopher, her erstwhile husband and her lover is significant, and a fascinating inclusion. The revelation about finding love as being the way we describe the connection with something outside ourselves, with otherness, is simply the most profound means of doing so. It’s what all philosophers (professional or otherwise) seek to do.

Every so often I read a list of well-known, successful people who didn’t go to university. It helps restore my faith in the sanity of the general public.

Logical positivism is the narcissistic equivalent of the selfie obsession.
The ‘profession’ of philosophy has long cried out for the parody that Krishnan’s book seems to offer. Thanks for the recommendation, Kathleen – and just about everything else you write here.

Another well-known physically and morally unattractive philosophy cuckle are Carrie Jenkins and Jonathan Ichikawa, who were also active participants in the witch hunt against Kathleen Stock.

Here is a link to an illuminating discussion between Iris Murdoch and Bryan McGee, basically about the differences between the way in which philosophical ideas are expressed and the ways in which stories are told; Murdoch makes it clear that ‘stories’ are the ways in which we normally describe our lives and the world, as well as the stuff of literature. In a nutshell, stories are ambiguous, philosophy is clear (though, she says, ‘true’ ,can be applied to both).. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tbr5Y7iLwY
Craig Raine’s 1979 ‘A Martian sends a postcard home’ shows that philosophy isn’t actually unique in adopting what Prof Stock calls the ‘puzzled alien’ mode – poetry can do it too. Some sci-fi works like this – Philip K d**k is a case in point (incidentally sci-fi can be a good medium for discussing philosophical ideas)..
The trick IMHO,is not to let philosophical thinking interfere with our thought processes in ordinary life. My wife and I both have philosophy degrees, but we love the ambiguities, the stories, the fictions, the metaphors, the compromises, that make up the comfortably lived experience.

I majored in philosophy 50+ years ago. I didn’t get Wisdom or Enlightenment (nor did my university promise those). But I did get a much improved BS (bad argument) detector. It’s constantly in use these days!