Philosophy

Peter Fosl said in a post that philosophers are "astonishingly" bad writers. What exactly does he mean by this, and what makes writing bad or good? I assume he does not mean to say that it is bad because it doesn't appeal to a wide audience since, as he says earlier in the post, our culture is heavily invested in what may be considered shallow pursuits. Certainly it's not philosophy to blame if the masses aren't interested, is it? But I don't mean to direct this question just at Peter Fosl. First of all, every other panelist let this comment go without so much as a protest. Do you all consider yourselves bad writers, then, and astonishingly bad ones, at that? Or, perhaps, does philosophy, by its very nature, lend itself to uninteresting, technical, boring writing?

Comments

I am sure Peter does not think he is a bad writer, and if he does then he is mistaken! But it is certainly true that as philosophy becomes more technical and professionalized it has often lost its connection with ordinary language and issues. Some say that it started with Kant, who was one of the first people to actually earn his living as an academic and so developed a style of staggering complexity in order to persuade the public that here was a discipline deserving of a unique professional status and official funding. A certain degree of difficulty of expression does after all tend to lead to respect.

Yet many philosophers are excellent writers, and they write well at the same time as expressing complex and subtle ideas. We all have our favourites here, and also those whose writings we only read because we have to. I don't think philosophers are any better, or worse, than anyone else in the academic world today. Some issues now have become so technical that it seems to be impossible to represent them in ordinary language, and one only has to compare the articles in a journal today like Mind and thirty years ago to note this.

I think what Peter was suggesting is that philosophers ought to try to communicate better with those outside the profession, and on this I am sure he is right. Many of us today have very specialized professional lives and do not participate in a wide range of activities, and the latter is helpful in getting us to communicate in more general sorts of ways. I remember the moral philosopher Richard Hare saying that one of his college duties at a stage of his life involved climbing up ladders to inspect gutters in the quad, which must have been an amusing sight, and then discussing his findings with the college workmen, and it was to this sort of activity that he attributed his ability to write in pretty clear and comprehensible English. If philosophers just shut themselves up in their rooms and leave the gutters to others, then perhaps their prose will deteriorate accordingly.

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