I was just reading Daniel Dennett’s memoir for no reason in particular, it had some interesting glimpses into how professional philosophers actually practice philosophy. Like I guess there’s a thing where one person reads their paper (word-for-word!) and then someone else is the designated criticizer? I forget the details. Extremely different from my experience in physics academia though!!
(Obviously, reading that memoir is probably not the most time-efficient way to learn about the day-to-day practice of academic philosophy.)
(Oh, there was another funny anecdote in the memoir where the American professional philosopher association basically had a consensus against some school of philosophy, and everyone was putting it behind them and moving on, but then there was a rebellion where the people who still liked that school of philosophy did a hostile takeover of the association’s leadership!)
Academic culture/norms—no or negative rewards for being more modest or expressing confusion. (Moral uncertainty being sometimes expressed because one can get rewarded by proposing some novel mechanism for dealing with it.)
A non-ethics example that jumps to my mind is David Chalmers on the Hard Problem of Consciousness here: “So if I’m giving my overall credences, I’m going to give, 10% to illusionism, 30% to panpsychism, 30% to dualism, and maybe the other 30% to, I don’t know what else could be true, but maybe there’s something else out there.” That’s the only example I can think of but I read very very little philosophy.
I was just reading Daniel Dennett’s memoir for no reason in particular, it had some interesting glimpses into how professional philosophers actually practice philosophy. Like I guess there’s a thing where one person reads their paper (word-for-word!) and then someone else is the designated criticizer? I forget the details. Extremely different from my experience in physics academia though!!
(Obviously, reading that memoir is probably not the most time-efficient way to learn about the day-to-day practice of academic philosophy.)
(Oh, there was another funny anecdote in the memoir where the American professional philosopher association basically had a consensus against some school of philosophy, and everyone was putting it behind them and moving on, but then there was a rebellion where the people who still liked that school of philosophy did a hostile takeover of the association’s leadership!)
A non-ethics example that jumps to my mind is David Chalmers on the Hard Problem of Consciousness here: “So if I’m giving my overall credences, I’m going to give, 10% to illusionism, 30% to panpsychism, 30% to dualism, and maybe the other 30% to, I don’t know what else could be true, but maybe there’s something else out there.” That’s the only example I can think of but I read very very little philosophy.