Abstract

Do philosophers need to be clever? Let us use a simplified model. There are two kinds of people: clever and stupid. The clever are few and the stupid are many. Philosophy is done only by clever people. Then one day someone wants to expand the discipline, so that stupid people can also contribute. They introduce training for stupid people and stupid philosophers arise. But now there are lots of philosophers. It is impossible to keep track of all the research in one’s specialism. So how does one write a philosophy paper? One tries to do something really clever and strange, which others are unlikely to do. That is the best way to avoid just reproducing the content of another paper. But to do that you need to be clever. So the age of stupidity ends and philosophers all have to be clever again.