A Little Taste of Canadian Philosophy

J.S. Porter finds much to complain about in this recent anthology of popular writing by Canadian philosophers. Most of these objections focus upon sins of omission—authors who, as a result of either snootiness or parochialism, have been left out of the collection. On this point, I must agree with Porter wholeheartedly. I should add, however, that the most grotesque omission is one that he passes over without comment. Indeed, the glaring problem with this collection is that it contains nothing at all written by me.

Having suffered this egregious snub, I am as ill disposed toward this motley and half-baked stew as Porter appears to have been. Yet, at the same time, I think I have a somewhat better understanding of what the editors were trying to accomplish. Indeed, scanning through Porter’s review, the main problem seems to be that he would have liked to have been reading a completely different book. And someday, someone may publish that book. In the meantime, however, it’s worth dwelling a bit more upon this book, and thinking more carefully about what the editors were up to.

For example, this is a collection of contemporary writing. So why is there nothing by George Grant in it? Setting aside the half-dozen intellectual reasons I can think of, let me just point to the one most crushingly obvious reason for leaving him out. He’s dead.

Why no David Suzuki? Well let’s just say that Suzuki, unlike many of the professors represented in this collection, suffers no lack of opportunities for self-promotion. He has ghost writers who are more famous than some of these poor folks.

Why no Malcolm Gladwell? Maybe they couldn’t get past his agent. It’s bizarre to assume that the absence of a piece by some famous writer reflects a lack of interest on the part of the editors. Not all celebrity authors leap at the opportunity to donate their work to collections published by second-tier academic presses.

But all of this is beside the point. Like it or not, philosophy is an academic discipline. And like most academic disciplines, it is dominated by a relatively small set of ongoing conversations, which are carried on at an extremely high level of sophistication. It takes about five years of university education to figure out what is going on in these conversations, and another five years to figure out how to make a useful contribution. Needless to say, the topics of these conversations are also quite far removed from the concerns of everyday life. As a result, most of the people who go down the rabbit hole of academic philosophy simply never re-emerge to say anything remotely intelligible to the rest of the human race. They don’t even know how to make small talk at the bus stop.

There are, however, exceptions to the rule. Some academics manage both to participate in the very abstract, specialized conversations of professional philosophy and to write popular work that is accessible to a general audience. These are the writers who are represented in this collection. Mark Kingwell and Malcolm Gladwell both write lovely sentences, and they both express many thoughts that sound “philosophical.” The difference is that, when he puts on his other hat, Kingwell writes very pedantic sentences and develops complex arguments, which appear in peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of Philosophy. Gladwell has no other hat.

Thanks to the institution of peer review, you cannot build a career in academic philosophy publishing work that an overwhelming majority of smart people with the same sort of education as you think is garbage. In popular writing, on the other hand, this is manifestly not the case (as witnessed by the success of several authors whom Porter mentions). The interest in this collection lies in seeing how philosophers who have done work that meets the intellectual standards of their fellow philosophers try to translate their reflections into writing that will be of some use to non-specialists.