Philosophers should blog!
Philosophers should blog!
It's good when intellectuals and experts share their thoughts more widely
The core job of an academic is to produce and disseminate knowledge, so as to improve our collective understanding. Some academic knowledge is highly technical, and unlikely to be of interest or relevance to general audiences. Some valuable philosophy can take this form too. But a lot of the most valuable philosophy addresses issues of broad interest, relating to how we should think about the world and our place in it, and what we should do about it. Accordingly, I see a lot of value in “public philosophy” — doing philosophy in a way that is accessible to the interested public.
It’s great to see things like Barry Lam’s Philosophy in Media Initiative to prepare more philosophers for writing op-eds, longform magazine articles, trade books, and podcasting. It all sounds like great stuff—though potentially difficult to break into?1 A supplementary idea I’d like to throw out there is that more philosophers2 should consider starting their own blogs.3
Why philosophy blogging is valuable
Blog posts are more interesting, and cost much less time, both to write and to read, compared to other academic writing (e.g. papers). Most papers contain a lot of bloat; converting the central idea into a blog post of 1/10th the length creates something that is much more worth reading.
As a result, blog posts can easily reach a much larger audience than other academic writing. For example, my blog series Parfit in Seven Parts appears to have been read by at least three times as many people as my book on which it’s based. (And that’s assuming, unrealistically, that everyone who downloaded the book then read it.) So if you want others to learn from your insights, blogging could plausibly help with that goal.
Blog comment threads facilitate immediate feedback and valuable discussion. Compared to conference presentations, they have the three advantages of:
(i) asynchronous discussion allowing time to think;
(ii) competitive pressures: without a captive audience, “speakers” with nothing particularly interesting to say will soon find no-one listening to them;4
(iii) a wider space of potential interlocutors, with opportunities for conversing with wonderful philosophers from all over the globe.5
It’s not for everyone; but I think these advantages rationally ought to prompt more academics to blog than currently do so.
How blogging could be rewarded
One difficulty is that there is currently very little professional incentive to blog.
But it would make sense for (substantive, high-quality) blogging to have positive reputational effects. My sense is that it’s often worth increasing the variance of people’s attitudes towards you: the benefits of standing out positively to some outweigh the costs of standing out negatively to others (especially if you can reasonably expect to be doing more of the former than the latter).
Consider that blogging is a costly signal of philosophical passion. Precisely because it isn’t professionally rewarded in any direct way, substantive philosophical blogging seems like a very reliable sign that someone both (i) really loves philosophy and (ii) has a lot of ideas; and isn’t just a boring careerist who will become dead wood as soon as they’re granted tenure. Those seem like features that should appeal to academic hiring committees!6 When I read interesting prolific bloggers like Eric Schwitzgebel,
, or , something I find salient is that they seem like they’d be fantastic colleagues to talk philosophy with. So I’d encourage more junior philosophers—though just those who predict they’d actually enjoy the process—to consider trying to likewise stand out in this way.How to Get Started
It’s very easy to create a substack. The next steps are to (i) come up with blog-sized ideas to write about; and (ii) find and grow your audience. I’ll discuss each in turn.
What to write about
The obvious advice is to write what interests you.
A lot of my blog posts stem from thinking about ways I think others go wrong (esp. when thinking about topics I care a lot about, like beneficence, effective altruism, utilitarianism, etc.). Common thinking is very often confused. At any given time, I tend to have a half-dozen or more ideas jotted down that I hope to blog about soon. If you have (or are working towards) a Ph.D., you must surely have some insights that you think are worth sharing too. So, share them!
It can be especially helpful to write up brief discussion notes, informally but critically engaging with published papers in your field. Share your post with the paper’s author, and boom!—instant engagement.
I’d also encourage academics to share their suggested readings, whether from their own work or those of others. You could take a stab at summarizing your “big ideas”—major themes from your work—and invite disagreements by asking what you’re most wrong about.
Growing your audience
If you’re already on social media, you can share your posts there, for starters. Other than that, you can benefit from Substack’s network effects by doing things like:
Recommending other philosophy substacks (and inviting the authors to consider recommending yours in return).
Commenting on (and “re-stacking”) posts on other substacks (which might prompt people to follow you, if they find your contributions valuable).
And more generally:
Extend conversations: write posts linking to and engaging with posts from other bloggers. (This will help you to get on their radar.)
Good luck! And if you start a new blog as a result of this post, feel free to share your link in the comments :-)
I’d be curious to see stats about how often philosophy pitches to established media are successful.
Including students who plan to continue in the discipline.
To be clear, I mean substantive philosophy blogging, not “gossip about the profession” blogging (the latter also has its place, but seems sufficiently well-served already).
If only we could leave a boring talk, or skim past an obtuse or belligerent question, as easily as we can on the Internet!
For example, one of my favourite blog discussions (later reproduced here) was with an Ivy League professor from the US East Coast, while I was an undergraduate in Australia, half the world away.
Though I doubt they would ever appeal so much that it undermines the signal by making it actually prudent for a careerist to grit their teeth and grind out boring blog posts when they could instead be writing boring papers for professional journals.
My concern here is that I think engaging with the public creates certain obligations/responsibilities that many academics aren't willing to accept. In particular, a responsibility to give an accurate perception of at least what you believe your expertise supports on topics you engage in or near and that includes a responsibility not to selectively omit views on subjects you address. If you are willing to accept that responsibility, that's wonderful but I think people should consider it before jumping in.
In particular, I'd argue that once one starts engaging in public commentary you have a duty not to do so in a selective way that helps create misunderstandings. For instance, go back to the pandemic if you were a health expert blogging about risks who had mentioned the risks from participating in earlier protests I think that created a duty on your part to speak up and say that BLM protests were also a health risk. It would be wrong to -- as many public health officials did -- suddenly go 'shit if I say something about this people might think I support the wrong team' and shut up.
The less direct the connection this weaker this argument but I think it particularly relates to philosophy blogging in a number of ways. For instance, I think you can reasonably make it clear you aren't going to ever talk about philosophy which relates to anything about race, gender etc etc but if you publicly discuss related issues it creates a responsibility not to selectively avoid the places your view might be controversial (see below). It erodes trust in academia generally and in aggregate makes you part of a misinformation/compliance machine. After all, there will always be some people who believe even crazy things and if you let them be the only expert voices heard I think you end up kinda intellectually laundering the accepted view rather than challenging it when wrong.
I think you generally do a decent job with this but I think it's important to be upfront about this because I think academics got themselves into trouble because they didn't think about that duty before they started blogging and when it came up they realized they weren't willing to take that risk so ended up undermining public trust.
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For example, on Facebook I remember a discussion on a philosopher's page where someone essentially used the argument that since race was socially constructed one could exclude the possibility of robust differences in average intelligence by race. Now I think we have empirical evidence suggesting any such differences will be small and aren't the cause of differential outcomes (racism is empirically unjustified) but that's still obviously a bad argument yet suddenly all the philosophers who had been discussing things declined to comment and I don't think that's ok.
Great post -- and thanks for the generous call-out! I agree with basically everything. Some complementary thoughts on why blogging is a good form of philosophical cognition here:
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2015/04/blogging-and-philosophical-cognition.html