When I described philosophy in my “Why Philosophy?” interview, I hadn’t intended my description to be controversial. Only when Céline Leboeuf gave the interview a title did I realize that it is.
Leboeuf entitled the interview “philosophy crosses boundaries”, which is a phrase that had just felt obvious to me when I wrote the interview answers. But when I saw that that was the title Leboeuf had picked, I suddenly realized that it isn’t. Many philosophers, I recalled, don’t think that way.
Indeed, there’s an obvious way in which professional philosophers would reject my proposed boundary-crossing. I said, “Being philosophical means crossing boundaries – refusing to let your inquiry be contained by the bounds set by a discipline. You’re looking for truth wherever it is to be found.” For most people who identify professionally as philosophers, on the other hand, philosophy is a discipline, a single professional academic field in which they received their doctorates and teach in their academic departments and publish in their scholarly journals, as sociology is for sociologists and computer science is for computer scientists. But I think that professional philosophers’ rejection of boundary-crossing actually goes even deeper than that.
I myself have a very interdisciplinary background: an undergrad joint honours in sociology and geography, a master’s in development sociology with a minor in political science, a PhD in the study of religion, another master’s in computer science – and then teaching in a prestigious philosophy department and publishing in philosophy journals. Being interdisciplinary may well be the biggest reason I didn’t land a faculty career in the end: I was too much of a religionist for the philosophers and too much of a philosopher for the religionists. Yet in the fields I got degrees in, it was a commonplace for professors to say “our field is an inherently interdisciplinary field”. Computer science required math and was tied to electrical engineering; sociology’s work always bled over into anthropology and political science; religious studies brought together historians, anthropologists, philosophers and sociologists around what was taken to be a common subject matter. I generally came to assume that that’s just how academia works and should work: disciplinary boundaries are always somewhat arbitrary, so every discipline recognizes that it’s actually interdisciplinary.
But I slowly came to realize there was at least one discipline whose practitioners typically didn’t consider it inherently interdisciplinary. And that was philosophy.
Whether I was a visiting scholar in a philosophy department or teaching in a philosophy department or attending the APA or reading and publishing in philosophy journals – at no point have I ever heard anyone say “philosophy is an inherently interdisciplinary field”. And it turns out this wasn’t just a matter of them neglecting to say it, or of my missing them saying it. It shows up in the practice of the discipline.
I noticed this in my debate with Charles Goodman, whose background is in philosophy, about Śāntideva. (I should reiterate here that I respect Charles greatly and consider him a friend.) We were talking about the possibility of naturalizing karma. What was startling to me was the particular way in which he dismissed one aspect of that question (at 1:00:53 in the video):
If stealing also makes you perceive the world as a place where resources are limited and nothing you get is ever quite good enough, if it turns you into a naturalized hungry ghost, well, then, that’s karma. And I think that might be true, I think there may be some evidence for that, but that’s an empirical question for the psychologists to talk about.
The last bit is the move I object to: for philosophers to cast a question aside on the ground that it’s “an empirical question for the psychologists”. I’m not blaming Charles for making that move; it’s a perfectly common move that analytic philosophers in philosophy departments make all the time. But that is exactly the problem!
It matters a great deal to our philosophical inquiry whether related empirical claims are true. We are not the experts on those empirical claims, but that doesn’t absolve us from learning the work of those who are. It is one thing for philosophers to have proper humility and defer to particular experts in related fields who have spent more time examining questions in that field than we have. It is quite another to wash one’s hands of such questions entirely, when they are directly relevant to the philosophical topic at hand. That, it seems to me, is an abdication of the philosopher’s responsibility.
Answering empirical questions with proper scientific rigour is hard, of course, and we philosophers don’t have the resources to do that. The process of doing the research to answer the empirical questions of psychology – that we must leave to the psychologists. But learning what psychologists’ proposed answers are, and even learning how to decide between them – that is a task that we philosophers, as philosophers, must undertake. Look up the scientific journal articles and take your best shot.
No biologist would refuse to discuss a topic because “that’s a question for the chemists”. A biologist will rarely know as much chemistry as a trained chemist does, and may defer to the expertise of trained chemists when they’re in the room, but a biologist who was completely ignorant of new work in organic chemistry is not going to be a good biologist. Nor would a sociologist say “that’s a question for the anthropologists”.
I might even argue that philosophy is the discipline that should be least ready to dismiss other fields in this way. Philosophy as love of wisdom needs to be synoptic: the point is to see the bigger picture, the larger whole. That has been the enterprise that most philosophers have engaged in since the field began. If you know anything about Aristotle, you cannot imagine him saying “that’s an empirical question!”
The problem of navel-gazing, of refusing to step outside one’s disciplinary boundaries, is most commonly found in analytic philosophy, so it’s tempting to blame analytic philosophy for this problem. But many analytic philosophers do still properly cross disciplinary boundaries. My job at Northeastern works with a large number of applied ethicists, who need to be experts in the fields ethics is applied to – biology, AI, environmental science – as well as in ethics per se. The problem in analytic philosophy, I think, is really a reflection of a deeper one in academia writ large, that pushes scholars to specialize in ever smaller questions. In “continental” philosophy this typically comes down to small points of interpretation in great philosophers of the past. In analytic philosophy, it comes down to hacking out a smaller and smaller question one can answer with exact precision – and that is when one starts to lose the thread.
The problem comes when one forgets that that small question only matters when it is embedded in a complex of larger questions that make it significant. The best analytic philosophers situate themselves in that complex – as when Christine Korsgaard makes the precise ethical argument of The Sources of Normativity only after showing how it comes out of the history of Western metaphysics. Analytic philosophy in practice often leads people to draw within narrow lines and refuse to cross boundaries – but it doesn’t have to.
I guess this issue is most salient if your life path brings you into contact with the gatekeepers of academic philosophy departments and related academic disciplines.
In my case, when I started college/university, I almost immediately developed a hostility to academic disciplines, and I wrote a manifesto against them in my first year. My hostility abated later, after I had thought more about why disciplines were valuable to other people, but I continued being a generalist and graduated without an academic major/concentration. (Was I crossing boundaries or ignoring them from the start?) In college, I always felt at home not in the classroom but in the library, where all recorded knowledge was interconnected hypertextually and shelved like dominoes in a continuous line that one could walk from A to Z without any gatekeepers.
I like the title and spirit of an article written by librarian Jeffrey A. Knapp, “Plugging the ‘whole’: librarians as interdisciplinary facilitators” (Library Review 16(3), 2012, 199–214). Knapp wrote:
Somebody has to be an advocate for the “whole” of knowledge, and librarians often take that role.
Grand synoptic systematic philosophy can be a lot like library and knowledge organization science in that both are concerned with the organization of the “whole” of knowledge. For example, knowledge-organization scholar Birger Hjørland even wrote an article titled “Theories are knowledge organizing systems” (Knowledge Organization 42(2), 2015, 113–128):
The importance of crossing boundaries increases as the scale of theories becomes larger (although even micro theories are at least implicitly connected to larger theories) and as the subject becomes more “meta” (as in meta-analysis and meta-science), and philosophers (or anyone else) who have large-scale theoretical ambitions can and should be advocates for the whole much like librarians.
Yeah, I’ve often wondered how much I really need to care about the way academic disciplines organize themselves. Certainly a lot less than I would if I worked in an academic department as my job. (And I did briefly consider becoming a librarian as I made that career transition.)
Still, most of the rigorous thinking on the matters of interest to me remains done in academic departments – for the moment at least. (In the longer term I’m much more optimistic about the future of the humanities outside academia than within it, but we’re not at that turning point yet.) I’ve benefitted enormously from conversations with Charles Goodman (including the video dialogue linked to), so when someone as smart as he is still thinks “knowing the psychology isn’t my job”, that can affect how those conversations go.
Your anecdote about Charles reminds me of a couple of times when I was startled to hear two Zen priests (one was a student of the other, but they were speaking on separate occasions) say, “Buddhism is not psychology.” I can imagine cogent ways of arguing to that position, but that position is so far from what I find most valuable in “Buddhism” that I would never say anything like that claim; I could never portray the boundary between Buddhism and psychology as so clear and dichotomous.
I wonder if the anecdotes of both Charles and these priests are just examples of people who really know better saying something not as precisely as they should have (something I have certainly done often too).
They could be, yeah. I didn’t take it that way because Charles is very good at analytic philosophy, and therefore generally a pretty precise guy. But things can come out differently in the moment.
Because yeah, as far as I’m concerned, Buddhism absolutely is psychology, among the many other things that it is. How could it not be, when it insists that the most pressing problem of life is duḥkha and that the causes of that duḥkha are mental?
I have been following for a while and decided to jump in. Please let me know if my participation is inappropriate. The current discussion dredged up many thoughts, even though I am not academically trained in philosophy.
Background: I like to think of myself as a thoughtful person throughout my career in medicine as a primary care internist, seeing people over years and decades through health and illness and coming to know them on a personal level.
I have tried to organize my experience and perceptions over the years in medicine into a unified understanding. As time progressed, I began to see people and their thinking change, especially how they organized and interpreted their experiences later in life. That blew my idea of a magnum opus out the window. It made me wonder if some of the “normal” brain deterioration seen in everyone was a structural determinant of their thinking and ideas. And even further, does our neuroanatomy define how we can and do think?
The religious, psychological, and philosophical frameworks I had learned in my earlier years ceased to provide adequate answers as I watched people change over their lifetime, especially their later years.
The burgeoning field of neuroscience over the last 20 years seemed to provide an understanding left blank by the other non-science-based fields of inquiry about behavior, experience, and life.
A thought that I cannot rid myself of is the theory that how our brains are wired, both inherently/genetically and experientially, defines how we organize and synthesize our ideas, concepts, and paradigms of thinking and perception. In essence, we can only think and understand as we are wired and use that wiring.
Is there inquiry between the philosophical world and the neuroscience field as it is coming to understand how our brains work?
Do you have any thoughts on this crossing different fields for a more unified, global understanding of the origins of our thoughts and philosophies?
Thank you for your time and my apologies for the first few paragraphs of background.
Terry
Terry, the relationship between the brain and various areas of human culture are treated in new fields that begin with the prefix “neuro-“: neuroanthropology, neurophilosophy, neuropolitics, neuropsychology, and so on. If your library research skills are good, you should be able to find relevant publications in these fields that would interest you. There is research that suggests that people’s political positions, for example, are affected by genetic differences in their personalities, but attributes of people that are acquired through life experience, such as thinking skills, are also obviously very important factors. Brain damage, also rather obviously, will affect how people think.
You said: “I began to see people and their thinking change, especially how they organized and interpreted their experiences later in life. That blew my idea of a magnum opus out the window.” I don’t see why this should destroy ambition for a magnum opus, which is something written down and not stored in the ever-changing human brain. As I suggested above, the ultimate magnum opus is the “collective collection” stored in libraries.
Thank you for a kindly thoughtful response to my awkward attempt to express something within. I am very grateful.
This blog post makes a powerful argument for a more interdisciplinary approach to philosophy. It’s so insightful to read about the author’s personal experience and their call for philosophy to engage more with other fields to see the “bigger picture.”