The thing I hate most about philosophy is the ways that “older” traditions seem hell bent on snuffing out “younger” traditions before these traditions have a chance to contribute to the rich tapestry that is philosophy.

Here, I’m not talking about the leveraging or application of philosophy and its tools in ways that do not contribute to human flourishing, in ways that maintain inequalities. I’m talking about the tendency of “older” traditions to attack “younger” traditions for their difference.

Part of that is the adversarial ways that philosophy is done and in which many philosophers are trained, and part of this is the very real understanding of philosophy as a discipline of the mind, as something to bring thought in line, something to clarify concepts.

And this is where the truly fucked up shit happens: difference in thought is treated as a lack of clarity in thought, a lack of precision, of discipline, of a disordered mind that cannot possibly have the correct view of the world because it doesn’t align with the logos.

To this end, these disordered thoughts must be brought in line, these younger traditions brought to heel and forced to demonstrate their claims through the established order, the discipline of philosophy. Moreover, you must have the right objects of thought to do philosophy

Put more affectively, if philosophy is the love of wisdom, in order to do philosophy, you must love the right objects of wisdom, in the right ways, otherwise your love of wisdom is something perverse, disturbed, unfit for serious consideration and you must be taught how to love.

Moreover, you must be taught how to love the right objects of wisdom. Which seems fucked up until you actually listen to the ways we tell grad students not to study some things, that some things aren’t worthy of philosophical consideration, or aren’t philosophy itself.

Which, again, is to say that some wisdom isn’t worthy of being loved, that some ways of loving wisdom aren’t appropriate, or that the thing they feel isn’t love itself. In short, much of what we do to our students is discipline their affective connections to the field.

Or, to be Mencian about it, we’re carving our students into bowls and telling them that this is their natural state.

But, the reason I’m using these affective metaphors is because this is the part of philosophy that the discipline has tried to snuff out, and it is the part of philosophy that lies at the center of the analytic/continental grudge match.

In fact, I’d say that the biggest conceptual rift in philosophy is not analytic vs continental: it’s between those who think philosophy only exists to clarify concepts and ideas, and those who think philosophy can do so much more than conceptual analysis.

And this shit gets played out through institutionalized oppression through the exclusion of less commonly taught philosophies on the basis that they don’t do philosophy because they don’t fall into one of these two camps.

I say played out through institutionalized oppression, because the structures of oppression preceded their being made use of in this field wide fight. This field wide fight just provides neat cover for people to be oppressors without committing to their bullshit.

All this is just cover for a worry of mine that the widespread devastation of the academy and philosophy that will come in the wake of COVIS-19 will enable the consolidation and concentration of philosophy’s bullshit through putting off hires which could diversify the field.

That is, philosophy will double down on its bullshit in the moment when it needs to be taking risks, expanding its borders, and helping people make sense of the massive changes in the world, which is something that philosophy has excelled at when it isn’t analyzing concepts.

This isn’t to say that conceptual analysis doesn’t have its place, but that philosophy needs to be doing more than that, especially now when the world is struggling to cope with death on a scale that it hasn’t seen before.

It is to say that philosophy as a field needs to start taking real fucking seriously those traditions whose core is addressing fundamental tragedies and losses like the ones we’re experiencing now, like Africana, Queer, Latinx, and Indigenous feminisms to start.

Or, those traditions that can provide us with the tools to think critically about how and why our leaders have failed us and what we should be doing about it. Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi can be helpful here. As can the wider field of feminism.

Hell, most crip theory, philosophy of disability, and disability studies have long since grappled with the issues that able bodied folks are dealing with as we enter and engage with social isolation and social distancing. They had the resources: y’all just didn’t want to listen.

Moreover, philosophy of technology, STS, and CRITICAL philosophy of education dine by black and brown scholars and women has been warning us about the problems of online education, platforms like Zoom and Blackboard for decades, but weren’t taken seriously unless we did AI.

But anyway, all this is to say that I hope that philosophy will take this as an opportunity to rethink what it does and how it does it, to reconsider the value and place of less commonly taught philosophies and philosophers to our department and field, but I doubt that it will.

And I fully expect our next wave of hiring priorities field wide to reflect a doubling down on a conservative canon that will doom the field.