If Only Niezsche had Wikipedia
So there’s a link over at 3quarksdaily, ever the boiling-over cauldron of splendid eccentricities, pointing at The Philosopher’s Annual 10 best articles in philosophy over the past year. Up until this moment, I had no inkling there even existed a thing called “The Philosopher’s Annual” or that it might publish lists about stuff, but here it is, and here I am talking about it.
If you, as an enlightened yogi of the modern Internet, can stomach the antique, Summer of ’95 layout of the site (indicating that the philosophical leaders of our time really need to hire an IT intern or something) you will be treated to a reservoir of archived papers with tantalizing titles such as “Innocent Statements and their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts“, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism:The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions” and my personal favourite: “Epistemic Modals“.
Doesn’t that just get you hot? Rarrr.
Yes, I poke fun at philosophy, but I do love it. I’ve long held the perception, like many of my confederates, that the field of pure academic Philosophy is representative of the most concentrated and unfettered Ivory Tower-ness present on this Earth, which is a bold stone to throw in the shiny crystalline hallways of a Political Science degree, I’m aware. I don’t intend to demean the practice of philosophizing at all, I’m just given over to chuckle about the nature and peculiarities of these disciplines, especially when they’re so absurdly similar.
Most folks wouldn’t shy away from painting Political Science and academic Philosophy in the same stroke, especially if they’ve spent some time with introductory courses in each. They use so much of the same jargon and go over so much of the same material that it’s frequently difficult to discern the separation of one from the other, and if you’re going to make a list of the great contributors to each field in history you’d be hard pressed to not come out of the exercise with two nearly identical lists. Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Aurelius, Rousseau and Hobbes, Locke and Mill, etc.
So what makes them different?
The delineation seems so clear to my mind, yet unpronounceable. At parties, and I do bring this sort of thing up at parties, I like to quip that Politics is the useful bits of Philosophy. Practical metaphysics. Applied existentialism. Solipsism in motion. You know, I’m a dick. But I wonder if some aspect of the jest doesn’t carry a gem of truth. Politics, upon my reflection, behaves much like an activated subset of Philosophy at large, something that’s drawn its livelihood and independence entirely from its algorithmic acquisition of only those pieces of the philosophical cloth that promote, demand, restrict or otherwise directly concern action.
If I were the kind of guy who throws down Venn diagrams like he throws gauntlets, and I only am just barely not such a man, I might visualize the existence of these two disciplines with Politics’s lively circle completely encompassed by the greater domain of Philosophy, and I’d be pleased with it. To call all things in Politics philosophical makes sense to me, and I find it impossible to think of something which is pure Politics without an inch of Philosophy to it, but with the caveat that not all things Philosophical are necessarily Political.
If we were to make a rule for determining where the border lies between these two strange counties, I’d gravitate toward a line being drawn along the axis of action, that whatever piece Philosophy necessitates, as part of its own terms, a contingency of doing – something normative or compelling – that is Political.
And I realize that this boundary is tremendously vague and ill-defined, but it’s difficult to offer up better when discussing wholesale academic fields on a Thursday afternoon. It adds up to my mind insofar as certain philosophical theories of metaphysics, seeking only to define the existence of phenomena as they are, not as they should be, do not enjoy Political status to my mind or in my experience with others, while the collected works of the Political philosophers I’ve read in my three years at school thus far all carried normative and active qualities at the forefront.
I wonder if this isn’t a decent way to separate the two, and it would explain my sarcastic joy in mocking the greater realm of Philosophy for being inert where there is so clearly incredible energy poured into it every day. And maybe it’s a laugh at how we Political Scientists like to do this mocking and pretend we aren’t in essence an unruly organ of the thing we’re skewering. Thoughts?
And oh my God, could you imagine a world where Applied Existentialism was a thing? It would be like Emo, only with worse haircuts and Livejournal as a leading academic publication.
Shudder.
BIT PART 