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Why I’m a Shameless Sophist (guest post) - Daily Nous

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Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession

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Why I’m a Shameless Sophist (guest post) - Daily Nous

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A "more vocational attitude to philosophy is a constant temptation; I still sometimes slip into it now. But what calls me away from it is always just being reminded of the mundane ways in which this is just a living." The following is a guest post* by Liam Kofi Bright, assistant professor of philosophy at the

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Why I’m a Shameless Sophist (guest post) - Daily Nous

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A "more vocational attitude to philosophy is a constant temptation; I still sometimes slip into it now. But what calls me away from it is always just being reminded of the mundane ways in which this is just a living." The following is a guest post* by Liam Kofi Bright, assistant professor of philosophy at the

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https://dailynous.com/2022/06/28/why-shameless-sophist-guest-post/

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Why I’m a Shameless Sophist (guest post)

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A “more vocational attitude to philosophy is a constant temptation; I still sometimes slip into it now. But what calls me away from it is always just being reminded of the mundane ways in which this is just a living.” The following is a guest post* by Liam Kofi Bright, assistant professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is the fifth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer. Why I’m a Shameless Sophist by Liam Kofi Bright It’s a clichéd observation that we professional philosophers are, in Socrates’ terms, sophists. We may profess to love wisdom, and be ever so sincere in claiming as much, but we’re still getting paid—even if (for many of our adjunct and underfunded grad student comrades out there) not quite so much as we should be. Plato had his own specific and interesting reasons for making this such a central charge against the sophists, but reflecting on his charge recently had me thinking about us, today: how does doing this for a living affect our relationship to philosophy? Or, at least, I have been thinking about this in my personal life. Of course there are specific elements of professional philosophy which surely nobody would choose if it was not a professional requirement. For instance I am, ah, not a fan of our present system of peer review, and if it had not been a condition of my securing future employment I doubt I would ever have submitted myself to it. Certainly when I was a teen first starting to read philosophical texts I never thought to myself, “one day people will be reading my own thoughts like this, just as soon as I can convince an anonymous stranger who seems to irrationally hate me that no I do not need to review the literature on the ground-maker semantics of counter-factual uses of the definite article.” But let’s set aside these more superficial or contingent aspects of professionalisation. Ignore the details of how exactly we organize the profession. I am interested in whether the bare fact that it is a primary source of income changes our relationship to philosophy. In particular, I have the following somewhat counter-intuitive hypothesis: philosophy being my primary..

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