What Aren’t We Philosophizing About, But Should?

“The singular magic of philosophy lies in its pairing of imaginative liberty with analytic clarity, but the field has come to privilege the latter at the expense of the former” That’s Mala Chatterjee (Columbia) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reviewing All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld, the non-fiction book critic for The Washington Post and self-described “(lapsed?) philosopher”. She continues: analysis is merely our tool, our vehicle for exploring and making sense of the world. Empty in itself, it is only animated and rendered valuable by the inquiries we have the imagination to ask. It can only take us where we are adventurous enough to go. In her review, Chatterjee focuses on ways in which Rothfeld’s book shows that contemporary analytic philosophy—“a method in which I am as devoted a believer as any,” she reassures us— is “too small”: first, the range of inquiries that we regard as philosophical; second, the materials that we deem appropriate to discuss; and, third, the forms and conventions to which our writing must conform.  To my mind, the essence of analytic philosophy is the care and precision with which it approaches the question of what follows from what… But it seems to me that our discipline too often operates as though the stringency of the philosophical method somehow requires stringently constraining our philosophical inquiries, materials, and forms. If her account of analytic philosophy as too narrow is correct (and I suspect some readers will think it isn’t), what’s the explanation for that narrowness? We have become comfortable—too comfortable—with the limitations we have imposed on ourselves. It’s easier to determine what exactly follows from a set of materials when they are unambiguous propositions rather than, say, works of art, our lives, or any other phenomenon that does not already present itself to us in forms most amenable to our methods. Thus, we find ourselves increasingly siloed in the conversations others like us are already engaged in, and in the forms that they most easily take. Then, since she knows her audience all too well, she adds: But philosophy is supposed to be hard. Chatterjee picks some pieces from Rothfeld’s book as examples of the types of places analytic philosophy could go. These include an essay that uses horror films..
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