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Publicly Available Published by De Gruyter October 15, 2021

Presenting philosophy – What science has taught me about it

  • Massimo Pigliucci
From the journal Human Affairs

Abstract

Presenting philosophy properly, in a way that is clear and accessible to our target audience, is of paramount importance. In this essay I draw on my dual experience as a scientist and a philosopher (as well as science and philosophy communicator) to arrive at some general recommendations for good practice. Specifically, I discuss why presentation matters, whether a bad presentation style is a valid criticism of a philosopher’s work, how we may adapt our message to the variety of communication media available today, and what, if any, is the relationship between how we present and how we conceive of philosophy itself.

Science and philosophy are two areas of human endeavor that currently have, shall we say, a complex relationship. Arguably, the scientific approach to understanding the world was invented by the Pre-Socratic philosophers — folks like Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the others — when they took the crucial step of rejecting mythical “explanations” of phenomena and realized that true understanding begins only when we look for natural causality (Waterfield, 2009). So was born natural philosophy, a branch of philosophy separate from metaphysics, ethics, logic, aesthetics, and so forth.

Jump forward to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries (Shapin, 2018) and we begin to discern clear elements of what we nowadays refer to as science, fundamentally distinct from philosophy. Even though the word “scientist” wasn’t introduced until 1833 by philosopher and historian of science William Whewell (Cahan, 2003), and even though Galileo, Newton, and Boyle considered themselves natural philosophers, the irreversible divergence of science from philosophy had clearly started. It continued with a series of new scientific fields sequentially spinning off natural philosophy: physics, with Galileo and Newton; chemistry, with Boyle; biology, with Darwin; and psychology, with James. The process is still ongoing, with the classic field of philosophy of mind (Heil, 2019) increasingly turning into cognitive and neuro-science (Bermúdez, 2020).

One might think that this continuous history of, shall we say, mother-child relationship between philosophy and science would be something to celebrate for both philosophers and scientists alike. One would be sorely mistaken. I began my academic career as a biologist, interested in empirical questions related to gene-environment interactions and how they shape the appearance and behavior of living organisms. However, I eventually found myself drawn to increasingly conceptual questions within evolutionary biology, and gradually shifted toward what could be more accurately characterized as philosophy of science. Since I didn’t want to be a scientist who played philosopher during the weekend, I took the time to enroll in a graduate program in philosophy, began to publish in my new field, and eventually completely shifted to the other side of campus, from the science building to the humanities one.

Naively, as it turned out, I thought that I would be welcomed by my new colleagues as a scientist who actually took their field seriously enough to go back to the basics before embarking on it. I also thought my old colleagues would consider what I had to say to them as a philosopher, since I had an established record in the sciences. With some exceptions, often quite the opposite happened: I was still too much of a scientist for the philosophers, and had become too much of a philosopher for the scientists. Oh well. But I learned a number of things pertinent to the topic of this special issue of Human Affairs, since I have also engaged—from very early on in my career —in public speaking and writing, in both science and philosophy. I therefore learned approaches as a science communicator that turned out to be useful as a philosophy communicator, as well as a number of things that don’t quite translate from one field to the other, or from one audience to the other.

In this essay I’m going to summarize some of what my experience has taught me, with the lessons organized around a number of crucial questions that any philosophy communicator ought to ask themselves in order to be more effective at what they do.

Does presentation matter in philosophy?

Presentation matters in any context, because the goal is not just to convey information, but to maximize the chances that one’s audience understands that information, and often to persuade people that it is at least worth taking the speaker’s arguments seriously.

My first lesson in this department came decades ago, when I was an assistant professor of biology at the University of Tennessee and agreed to debate a creationist regarding the scientific nature of the theory of evolution. Naively, I assumed this was going to be a cakewalk, since I was the biologist, while my opponent was a preacher, and surely I had the facts and reason on my side. Imagine my surprise when the individual in question began with a comment on the local football team and their quarterback. I thought, why is this guy wasting precious time chitchatting with the audience, rather than plunging straight into his arguments?

Because the preacher in question had a better intuitive understanding of rhetoric than I did. In fact, this is one area where philosophers can teach scientists a thing or two. Specifically Aristotle, whose treatise on rhetoric is still deservedly studied today (Bartlett, 2021). In chapter II of book I of his work, Aristotle distinguishes three parts to the art of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos.

The logos deals with the validity and soundness of your arguments. You want to make sure that your reasoning is correct (validity) and that your factual information is true (soundness). In both respects, I was far better off than my opponent at the debate.

Ethos has to do with one’s credibility. Here I thought that my PhD in biology and my career as a published academic would put me far ahead of my opponent, but Aristotle teaches us that ethos is a broad concept. The preacher’s credibility didn’t stem from academic merits, but from the fact that he was projecting the image of a man of faith who was concerned not just about mere facts and theories, but about the souls of the people who came to listen to the debate. It was hard for me, an avowed atheist, to even begin to compete with that.

Pathos refers to the emotional connection with one’s audience, particularly in the sense of making the audience care about what you are saying, because it is relevant to them. There my opponent completely outclassed me. As a trained scientist I was actually consciously staying away from anything that might smell of psychological or emotional manipulation, while he dove right into it, immediately making the debate one about religion, not science.

I eventually learned how to conduct myself a little better during public debates, but a lot of scientists and philosophers still make the same mistake I made, and for the same reasons Aristotle pointed out: we focus on the logos at almost complete detriment of the ethos, and especially of the pathos. That said, there is a distinction to be made within philosophy that may shed some light on how to improve the situation. Modern philosophy is roughly, very roughly, divided into analytic (Martinich & Sosa, 2011) and continental (Kearney & Rainwater, 1995). While the divide is less sharp and more porous than it is often presented to be, it is there nevertheless, both in style and in content. Broadly speaking, analytic philosophers communicate in ways similar to scientists, which is no surprise, since Bertrand Russell, one of the inspirations for the analytical approach, very much wished to model philosophy— somewhat anti-historically—after science. The result is a strict emphasis on the logos and a natural instinct to recoil from the pathos. Continental philosophers, by contrast (think Foucault, for instance), while sometimes perhaps a bit unpolished in the logos department, make a point of showing why the audience should very much care about the issues they focus on, which often have to do with social and political life.

Here, therefore, is my suggestion for how to present philosophy effectively: let us relearn from Aristotle, and let us try to bridge the analytic-continental divide in the most constructive way possible, by making sure that our logos is rigorous, our ethos such that people think we are worth listening to, and our pathos of the kind that allows our audience to clearly see why they should care about matters philosophical.

Can it ever be a valid objection to a philosopher that they are boring?

It should follow from (1) above that being boring can be very much a valid objection against a philosopher. Not, of course, to the content of her arguments, but to her effectiveness in communicating. Ever since I began my academic career I noticed a strange, and entirely empirically unfounded, assumption that is often taken for granted in our circles: the notion that a good scholar is ipso facto a good teacher, and hence a good communicator.

There is, of course, no logically necessary link between those two sets of skills, and if we are honest we all know someone who is a good scholar but a mediocre teacher, or someone who is an excellent teacher but whose scholarship leaves much to be desired. And of course we all think of ourselves — usually without independent evidence — as excellent scholars and communicators (90% of surveyed college professors say they are better than average teachers, which is mathematically impossible) (Cross, 1977). The fourth logical box, corresponding to someone who is both a bad scholar and a bad teacher, presumably is eliminated by hiring procedures and subsequent pre-tenure administrative selection.

Just because the two sets of skills are logically independent, of course, it doesn’t mean that they might not turn out to be somewhat correlated in practice. More importantly, there is no reason at all why someone who is proficient in one set could not significantly improve, if not excel, also in the other set, with proper training.

And therein lies the rub. The typical academic gets his training in terms of research and scholarship largely during his PhD. We can think of a modern doctoral program as equivalent to the Renaissance schools of apprenticeship. You want to become a good painter or sculptor? Go to work, for little or nothing, with the local Giotto or Michelangelo, and you’ll learn the trade. If you are really good, you may in time become better than the master, but even if not, at the very least you’ll be likely to get some commissions. The same goes for PhD programs, which is why one’s choice of advisor is so crucial, more so than the general quality of the graduate program at any given university.

The problem is, most aspiring academics are not taught the other set of skills: communication. Which presumably accounts for the relative high frequency of bad teachers and boring speakers at professional meetings. This is a problem because, again, we are not just in the business of doing scholarship. We are also in the business of communicating such scholarship, both at a professional level to our peers, and at a more general level when we address the public. It should be unacceptable when a philosopher (or a scientist, for that matter) is bad at that part of his job. The solution, I think, is to begin adding serious training in communication and teaching to our graduate programs (or augmenting it, in those few cases where this already happens), as well as to truly consider that aspect of our job when we make decisions about promotion and tenure, as opposed to the lip service so often paid to teaching, especially in research universities.

Are certain media more (or less) apt for the presentation of philosophy than others?

Contra Marshall McLuhan, I don’t believe that the medium is the message. But my experience as a communicator in both science and philosophy has taught me that different media are more (or less) effective at communicating specific content, or in addressing specific audiences.

Take, to begin with, the difference between lecturing and engaging in an interactive discussion, as in the Socratic method (Trepanier, 2017). Generally speaking, lectures are a good format to convey a large amount of information in a short period of time to a large number of people. This works well, for instance, in many introductory science classes, where the balance between factual information and conceptual issues is often very much skewed toward the former (with some exceptions, such as in physics courses). It does not, by contrast, work well at all in introductory philosophy courses, because that ratio is exactly reversed: we don’t really care about whether students come to know new facts about historical philosophical figures, say, but we do care very much whether they understand what those philosophers were saying. Philosophy, as I tell my students at the beginning of the semester, is a participatory sport, it cannot be done while sitting back and eating the popcorn.

Teaching philosophy, even at an introductory level, is more akin to teaching math or logic, or science experiments: the student needs to be actively involved, with the difference that while exercises in math, logic, or science have predetermined outcomes, philosophical discussions don’t. Accordingly, they require an ability on the part of the teacher to be sensitive to where the conversation is going and to intuit whether it is worth pursuing or it is time to redirect the students somewhere else in order to avoid a possible rabbit hole.

One of my most rewarding experiences over the years has been a Socratic-style group that (before the pandemic, and hopefully after) meets in person in New York City to discuss philosophical topics of interest to the general public. I started the group back in 2007, and it now counts over 4,600 members, a figure I never tire to bring up when some administrator at my university tells me that it is difficult to get people interested in philosophy. Each meeting is often limited to 15-20 individuals, which is already a large number in order to effectively practice the Socratic method. I could, of course, reach many more people if I were to switch to a lecture format, but in that case the medium would change the meaning of the word “reach.” Sure, many more people would listen to my lectures, but it is doubtful that they would gain as much from the experience as participants to my smaller discussion groups do. Some things just don’t scale up.

The Socratic meeting format, incidentally, is one that works better for philosophy than for science, unless science discussions are designed to build on reading background material distributed ahead of time. This is because of the same difference between public philosophy and science that I pointed out before: in order to meaningfully discuss science topics one has to have mastered a certain amount of factual information, without which the discussion is empty. Broad philosophical issues, by contrast, can be meaningfully discussed, up to a point, without any background knowledge or preparation, just as Socrates did in the Athenian agora almost two and a half millennia ago.

The current frontier in philosophy communication is provided by the new media, particularly in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, and social networks. I will briefly comment on each in turn, stressing their respective advantages and disadvantages. I have had a long experience with each form, and it has been instructive to learn the differences and how each medium, in its own way, lends itself to effective philosophical outreach. In many cases, the path has been first charted by science communicators, who still have a large footprint on the new media. But philosophers have caught up quickly, and once again exploited the ease with which it is possible to engage even an entirely naive audience in productive philosophical discussions.

Blogs have been around since the late 1990s, the successors to earlier platforms, such as email lists and electronic bulletin boards. While a large number of blogs are still single-author, it has become increasingly popular to aggregate various contributors on the same blog, as well as to use shared platforms like Medium to publish one’s posts in an environment already characterized by a robust readership. There is a large number of philosophy blogs out there (Agarwal, 2021), covering the whole gamut of the discipline, with a sizable number of entries equaling or exceeding the length of a typical newspaper op-ed (~6-700 words), and a significant number of “long reads” (often exceeding 1,500 words).

A blog allows a philosopher to write to a potentially large audience, with essentially unlimited space to express one’s thoughts (though posts much longer than 2,000 words are not recommended). Blogs also typically build a community of regular readers, who then are invited to comment on the main posts. If the author engages in conversations, there can be a meaningful exchange that certainly augments what both authors and readers get out of the experience. Of course, one potential problem is the danger for an author to get so caught up into dialoging that the blog becomes a significant time drain, especially since a successful blog has to provide a steady diet of posts, often two or three times weekly. Hence the recent trend toward multi-authored blogs, where the burden is shared.

Philosophy videos come in a variety of formats, and tend to be published on YouTube, Vimeo, or similar platforms. Videos from some well-established outlets, like The School of Life, or PBS’ Crash Course Philosophy, can reach millions of views. Some videos — like the two series just mentioned — are mini-lectures, often animated or integrated with animations. Others consist of long conversations between two or more hosts, or between a host and a variety of guests, as is the case of the popular bloggingheads.tv, established in 2005. Bloggingheads was started by two journalists, Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus, but now counts over one thousand individual contributors, several of whom are philosophers.

Both dominant video formats — mini-lectures and open ended conversations — can be highly effective at communicating even complex philosophical ideas, though I have recently been experimenting with live shows made possible by close, invite-only, platforms like Zoom, which have some interesting features. In the case of two monthly shows I co-host, the Philosophy Book Club and the Stoa Nova Conversations (dedicated to Stoic philosophy), the dialogue is watched live by dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, who can ask questions to the host and guest either via chat or video call. The entire thing is then saved, lightly edited, and posted on YouTube so that a broader, asynchronous, audience can benefit from it later on. This secondary audience can still contribute to the discussion by way of posting comments, which the host and/or guest can answer at leisure.

Podcasts have been increasing in audience over the past few years, and have become a ubiquitous, if not dominant, type of new media. Philosophers have entered the fray with gusto (https://truesciphi.org/phipod_series.html), producing highly effective and very popular shows, including Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy Bites and Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The typical formats are similar to those of the video productions just discussed, with episode lengths ranging from a few minutes to over an hour. Podcasts tend to be less interactive than videos, simply because few of them are broadcasted live, though of course listeners frequently contribute comments after publication.

Last but not least, social networks. Philosophers have a strong individual presence on Twitter (https://truesciphi.org/phicasters.html), while Facebook hosts a large number of philosophy discussion groups, some of which have tens of thousands of members. These two platforms differ significantly in format, and therefore in the sort of interactions they lend themselves to. My experience is that Twitter is best used as a broadcasting system, where a philosopher (or scientist) publishes links to her own work or to external resources she thinks her followers would find interesting. Discussions are possible, but not advisable, given the strict limit on the number of characters per tweet and the difficulty to follow threads.

Facebook, conversely, is not very good as a broadcasting system, but allows members of a group or community to have meaningful, in-depth interactions about any given post over a period of days or weeks. This can be an invaluable channel of communication for philosophers, but it requires a significant investment of time and a good amount of patience and self-control. The frequency of trolls, or simply of people who don’t take a given topic seriously, is often very high, so my recommendation is to make the group private (i.e., people have to apply to be allowed in) and to moderate discussions. Used this way, Facebook becomes a powerful tool indeed.

Does presentation reflect the individual philosopher’s conception of what philosophy is, and what it is good for?

The last question I am going to address here is one of those that more clearly differentiates how philosophy and science are presented, for the simple reason that few, if any, scientists bother to pause and reflect on the nature of their own discipline, while for philosophers this sort of questioning comes with the territory and seems to be pretty much inevitable.

For instance, there are at least two very distinct conceptions of philosophy, going back all the way—within the Western tradition—to the Pre-Socratics. On the one hand, philosophy understood as a kind of inquiry into a number of specific areas, such as logic, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, or aesthetics. On the other hand, philosophy as “the art of living” (Hadot, 1995), an approach that Cicero (Brittain, 2006) attributed to Socrates:

Socrates appears to me, and indeed it is the universal opinion, to have been the first person who drew philosophy away from matters of an abstruse character, which had been shrouded in mystery by nature herself, and in which all the philosophers before his time had been wholly occupied, and to have diverted it to the objects of ordinary life (Academica, I.4).

These two conceptions of philosophy have evolved in parallel throughout the ancient world, during the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance and Enlightenment. However, throughout much of 20th century philosophy turned academic and technical, with the practical philosophy strand not only neglected, but positively seen with suspicion or disdain. Things have begun to change again in the late 20th century and during the first couple of decades of the 21st, with the increasing popularity of Socratic cafes and of philosophical movements like Modern Stoicism (Pigliucci, 2017).

How one presents philosophy is, therefore, markedly affected by whether we are concerned with the academic discipline or the practice. Academic philosophy is no different from any other technical-academic field, including science. It has its published corpus, its technical vocabulary, its system of peer review, its journals, its conferences, and its graduate training programs. Academic philosophers are often accused of using obfuscatory language, and even of committing “epistemic injustice” because such language automatically excludes lay readers. But, again, this is no different from what goes on in other fields, where we find both some unnecessary obfuscation and a lot of very necessary technical jargon.

By contrast, if someone is attempting to communicate practical philosophy, the approach is entirely different. For one thing, by definition practical philosophy is meant for everyone, shifting the very definition of “philosopher” from someone who writes technical articles or books to someone who attempts to live in a particular manner. Second, the emphasis is on practical, despite the fact that to contemporary audiences the term “practical philosophy” may sound rather oxymoronic.

Take, for instance, my experience communicating about Stoicism. It takes pretty much all the forms discussed above: Socratic-style discussions, social media, blog posts, videos, etc.. And it is composed of a theoretical component, dealing with the basics of Stoic philosophy and its history, and a — much larger — practical component, guiding people in carrying out a number of exercises and meditations, as well as discussing specific real life problems and how they might be approached from a Stoic perspective.

It is important to emphasize that these two conceptions of philosophy are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic, but rather complementary, as demonstrated by the Stoics themselves. Chrysippus of Soli, the third head of the Stoa, who lived c. 279 – c. 206 BCE, was considered one of the foremost logicians of the ancient world, and therefore a “technical” philosopher. But his teachings were also very much aimed at improving people’s everyday life, by sharpening their ability to engage in practical reason about whatever they were facing. The fact that most contemporary academic philosophers disdain practical philosophy is a parochial attitude that is to the detriment of the discipline, not the result of some sort of logical incompatibility between theoretical and practical philosophy.

Philosophy, science, and the art of presentation

Effectively presenting complex material is an art form, and there is no particular reason to think that philosophers are better trained in it than any other professional academic. Still, we can learn from how it is done in other fields, for example in the sciences, adapting media and techniques to our specific aims and audiences. In this essay I have pursued four specific questions related to presenting philosophy, proposing some answers.

Yes, presentation very much matters in philosophy, and it would be useful to keep in mind Aristotle’s lesson about the three components of effective persuasion of an audience: the logos, the ethos, and the pathos.

Yes, it may be a valid objection to a philosopher that he is boring. Not in terms of the specific content of his ideas, of course, but because one has a duty to engage rather than simply communicate. The major problem here is that academics are still, by and large, simply not trained in not being boring, and some of us even consider their dense and opaque language a mark of distinction.

Yes, some media are more or less apt to the presentation of certain content, and modern philosophers ought to familiarize themselves in particular with the new media, including blogging, podcasting, and interactive aspects of social media.

Finally, how a philosopher conceives of the discipline itself very much affects how she presents it, an obvious example being the sharp difference between theoretical and practical philosophy, which diverge markedly in scope, aims, and target audiences.

References

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Published Online: 2021-10-15
Published in Print: 2021-10-26

© 2021 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences

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