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This post helped to clarify for me one of the reasons why I find the increasingly partisan atmosphere among many academic philosophers, and the tendency to charge one another with hidden agendas or hateful motives, so totally inimical to the spirit of philosophy. It's this: https://twitter.com/jasonintrator/status/1276284988292509697
One way that philosophy is different from other human activities is that it's fundamentally a shared enterprise. We are in this together, all seeking the same thing, and this shared commitment defines our identity as philosophers and supersedes any other differences between us.
I'm naive enough that my default position is to take the above as descriptively, and not merely normatively, true of what philosophers do. Of course there are some hacks and charlatans, but my default position is that if someone has given their life to philosophy it's because /
/ they are driven by the desire to get at how things are.
Taking this as a default position means, of course, accepting that many of the people who are motivated by this desire nevertheless end up getting things terribly wrong. But we are still in this business together!
Taking this as a default position means, of course, accepting that many of the people who are motivated by this desire nevertheless end up getting things terribly wrong. But we are still in this business together!
And so I count as friends and colleagues people who think things that I find wildly false or even abhorrent, e.g. that it can be good to massacre civilians in wartime or selectively abort the disabled.
As long as I assume that these people are out to get things right, then if they are unconvinced by my arguments against these positions I need to take seriously the possibility that it is I who am at fault, not they, and that I just need to work on making a better case.
And to the extent that I do this work, I am doing philosophy, and so contributing to that shared enterprise.
By contrast, to the extent that it's acceptable to respond to disagreement with "You only think that because ...", this route into philosophical thinking is shut down.
By contrast, to the extent that it's acceptable to respond to disagreement with "You only think that because ...", this route into philosophical thinking is shut down.
I find that to be really unfortunate. And I think it's because of this, rather than because of some abstract commitment to free speech or liberal neutrality, that philosophers need to work on listening to one another and cultivating the kind of respect that's described in the OP.
