Last week, something historic dropped through my letterbox: issue 80 of The Philosophers’ Magazine, its 20th anniversary edition. Since I gave up its editorship in 2010 I’ve not been involved in its production, but if anything that makes me even more pleased to see it still going. Like any good parent, my ultimate wish was for my baby to have a life of its own and not always depend on me for its survival.
I wrote a piece about the early days of TPM for the celebratory edition. I’ve also been musing about the difference between then and now. From a personal point of view, twenty years is both an eternity and the blink of an eye. The time has flown but when I think back to myself then it seems like another life: in a bedsit in Finsbury Park with a partner I’m long-separated from, before I had published a single journalistic article or written a book.
But how does twenty years look from the perspective of philosophy? I’ve always thought of the discipline as somewhat glacial. “Recent developments” span decades, not years, let alone months. However, thinking back to the late 1990s when I did my PhD and started the magazine, I can see several significant things have changed.
First, it seems to me that the days of people doing armchair philosophy of science or mind are now largely gone. When I read philosophy of mind, I needed to know next to nothing about how the brain actually worked. Knowing that neurones fire in the brain when mental events occurr was good enough. Two decades ago people who got seriously into neuroscience, for example, were often dismissed as no longer really doing philosophy. Now, it is those who are not fully versed in the science who will be accused of doing substandard philosophy. This looks to me like a wholly positive development.
Related to this has been the explosion of experimental philosophy. Dismissed by some as a fad, “X-Phi” saw philosophers questioning reliance on intuitions, instead trying to find out what and how people actually thought. Like any fledgling sub-discipline, quality of the early work was very mixed but again I think this has been a positive step. Philosophy’s over-reliance on hunches has been its embarrassing secret.
A third major change concerns the position of women in philosophy. Aware of their marginalisation, we devoted the fifth issue of their magazine to this subject. What we have seen since is a mixture of progress combined with ever greater recognition and anger that this progress is not enough. The blog What’s It Like To Be a Woman in Philosophy? opened many people’s eyes to the casual sexism encountered by far too many. Work by leading philosophers such as Jennifer Saul, Miranda Fricker, Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby has cast light on the problems, both in the sense of bringing them into the open and bringing analytical clarity to them. At the same time, when so many of our best philosophers are now women, the question of whether women had as much aptitude for the discipline as men – which was for many a live one in the late 20th century – can now be considered closed.
The final change has been philosophy’s relationship with the intelligent general public. Thirty years ago, it hardly had one and nor did it care for one. When Nigel Warburton published Philosophy: The Basics in 1992, it did not help his academic career one bit. Slowly, that changed. We like to think TPM played a role but I’ve always thought the real game-changer was the success of Simon Blackburn’s Think. No one could dismiss attempts to reach a wider audience when someone of Blackburn’s calibre did it with such skill and success (and with Oxford University press to boot).
Despite this progress, philosophy remains marginal in the cultural and intellectual life of Britain. Few philosophy books sell very well and those that do tend to be very general introductions. But at least the direction of change is positive, as it is with scientific literacy, reality-checking and the status of women. Twenty years on, there is plenty to cheer but still very much to do. Time to both raise a glass and remain sober.
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