Part of a special issue of Parallax on 'Field Philosophy and other experiments'. In a number of accounts, field philosophy has been described as providing freedom from disciplinary constraints. In this paper, however, I suggest the importance of paying closer attention to the strength of philosophy’s boundary policing and the consequences this might have for those interested in the approach. Discussing field philosophy in terms of disturbance, I highlight some of the difficulties and opportunities it produces. In particular I focus (...) on the labour involved in adopting new methods and working in new sites of enquiry. I suggest that reconstituting the ‘philosopher’ outside of their traditional habitats is no simple task. Still, I argue that field philosophers should lay claim to the boundary policing question ‘how is this philosophy?’ in order to proliferate accounts of what philosophy is and can be, with the hope that the discipline’s future might be turned more strongly towards supporting diversity rather than defending purity. Keywords: field philosophy; feminist philosophy; inclusion; methods; field research. (shrink)

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research (...) design and data interpretation toward one discipline’s epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines. (shrink)

This essay offers a critique of disciplinary philosophy, the dominant form of academic philosophy in the United States and elsewhere across the twentieth century. It argues that disciplinary philosophy represents an aberration compared to the main tradition of two thousand years of Western philosophy. It describes the characteristics of a dedisciplined philosophy, and emphasizes that dedisciplining philosophy requires attention to be paid to the linked institutional and theoretical elements of philosophy. The essay bases its argument in part on the results (...) of a survey sent to more than 500 philosophy departments across North America in the summer of 2010. (shrink)

Empirical moral psychology is sometimes dismissed as normatively insignificant because it plays no decisive role in settling ethical disputes. But that conclusion, even if it is valid for normative ethics, does not extend to bioethics. First, in contrast to normative ethics, bioethics can legitimately proceed from a presupposed moral framework. Within that framework, moral psychology can be shown to play four significant roles: it can improve bioethicists’ understanding of the decision situation, the origin and legitimacy of their moral concepts, efficient (...) options for implementing decisions, and how to change and improve some parts of their moral framework. Second, metaethical considerations suggest that moral psychology may lead to the radical revision of entire moral frameworks and thus prompt the radical revision of entire moral frameworks in bioethics. However, I show that bioethics must either relinquish these radical implications of moral psychology and accept that there are limits to progress in bioethics based on moral psychology or establish an epistemic framework that guides radical revision. (shrink)

The value of applied philosophy is often taken to consist in its contribution to our understanding of practical issues with which applied philosophy engages and in its contribution to their satisfactory resolution. This chapter examines the relationship between the nature of applied philosophy and its value. It regards the value of applied philosophy as dependent both on its philosophical quality and on its contribution to the understanding and (potential) resolution of practical issues with which it engages. These dual points of (...) reference are difficult simultaneously to fulfill and arguably sometimes in tension with one another. The chapter takes issue with the idea that the value of applied philosophy consists, or ought to consist, in its direct impact on actual policy or practice. (shrink)

This is an essay in environmental philosophy on the way toward field philosophy, using the Chinese National Park System as a case study. The CNPS was initiated in 2015, which began with the...

This article focuses on public philosophy, the main approaches to interpreting it, current ways for philosophy to reach the public, and obstacles to this. A major hindrance is that philosophy is an area of professional expertise. This circumstance has both conduced to the development of a large close-knit academic community and enfeebled its already weak communication ties with society and other fields of scientific knowledge. It is argued that, on the one hand, publicness has been immanent in philosophy from the (...) very beginning, and, on the other, philosophy needs a public upgrade and a new experience of a constructive dialogue with society. This new publicness of philosophy may be the way to recovery it. It is also shown that tendency towards greater publicness, which is distinctive of modern academic sciences, is a response to the new economic situation. Sciences are becoming engaged in an info-struggle for the attention of the state and society. This is affecting philosophy as well, although the value and importance of philosophical knowledge have been traditionally recognised and emphasised in culture and by the education system. It is stressed that the idea of recovering philosophy is closely linked to what function the philosopher has in the life of society. The contribution considers various possible types of public philosophers. It is concluded that, contrary to the common belief, society needs not an expert philosopher or a mediator in the field of science but a professional consultant capable of calibrating the thinking routines of people and helping them adopt a rational attitude towards themselves, that is, acquire an ability to think critically, form a conscious judgement of their life, and take responsibility for their decisions. (shrink)

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise, the REF. Every university department put together a submission describing its broader impact in case narratives, and these were graded. Philosophers were required to participate. The resulting narratives are publicly available and provide (...) a unique resource permitting a more comprehensive, empirically based consideration of philosophy’s influence outside the academy than has hitherto been possible. This paper takes advantage of this data to develop a cartography of the ways in which philosophers engage society in their work. We identify five approaches: dissemination, engagement, provocations, living philosophy, and philosophy of X. We compare these along the six dimensions proposed by Frodeman and Briggle to characterize the ideal field philosopher. We conclude that there are multiple ways of being a field philosopher, which vary in their emphasis. This pluralism bodes well for the expansion of philosophy’s societal influence, since there are routes available to suit different preferences. (shrink)

The rise in popularity in recent times of dystopian fiction is reflective of contemporary anxieties about law: the inhumanity of judicial-coercive machinery; the influence of corporate power; the lack of democratic imagination despite the desperate need for political reform; and the threat of order imposed through violence and victimisation. These dystopian texts often tell fear-inducing stories of law’s failure to protect; or of law’s unsuccessful struggle against unbridled power; or even sometimes of law’s ‘bastardised’ reconstruction. Indeed comics, with their visual (...) and narrative intricacies, thrive on dystopia as a key vehicle for contributing to collective notions of fear and trembling about the future. Yet, at the same time, these texts also contain within them the blueprints for hope—the idea that with transformation, heroic intervention, and/or faith in ‘justice’, the law will ultimately prevail. Law’s ability to be transformed is thus simultaneously portrayed as society’s downfall, AND as the key to enlivening humanity. This article attempts to understand this schismatic role of law as presented in the recent dystopian comic book series From Above by Australian creator Craig Bruyn. In this series set in futuristic Melbourne, where law has given way to an unaccountable corporate rule, the social divide is made manifest by the absence of ‘order’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in certain segments of society, and yet hope in law’s return is ever-present. The paper will interrogate expectations of law and justice that is mediated through the complex interaction of fear and hope, and contextualise this within current contemporary anxieties. (shrink)

Neoliberalism, in various ways, is radically new. It is nevertheless constructed from the conditions of liberal modernity, the inadequacies of which are crucial to neoliberal success. Liberalism in practice restricts moral agency through an impoverished, structurally-reinforced conception of practical reasoning, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, and this is important to understanding neoliberal durability. This article argues that a bureaucratic culture that fails to evaluate or critically question the ends it pursues is both symptomatic of liberal inadequacies and a key factor in (...) neoliberal success. Beyond its purely explanatory power, there is a political relevance to MacIntyre’s Aristotelian-inspired politics of local community. It is from those practices and communal movements that embody alternative conceptions of the good, that those interested in resisting neoliberalism can learn how it becomes possible to successfully challenge aspects of the contemporary social order. (shrink)