There was a recent flutter on Twitter about public philosophy, what it is and what counts as public philosophy. I opined that I didn’t think that you could be both a public philosopher and an academic one, but quickly realized that maybe what I meant was that you couldn’t easily be a “good” academic and public philosopher at the same time . Doing public philosophy goes against the grain of what it takes to succeed in an academic career, and is often thought to be at the expense of, and detrimental to, “real” academic work.1 Academia actively discourages scholars from venturing too far outside of academic settings. Maybe some academics can do some public philosophy without becoming public philosophers, but we’ll need more than the scraps of academia for public philosophy to succeed.

A thriving public philosophy space doesn’t yet exist. I envision a space where philosophers can make a living outside of academia as philosophers, and train others to do so as well. The emergence of Substack, a place where intellectual work can be made sustainably, opens a new chapter in the history of the production of knowledge, now outside academia. So I wanted to return to this post I on public philosophy and assess the possibilities.

There are independent philosophers, philosophers who are affiliated with an academic institution and may even have an office space there, but who are largely self-funded. (Shout-out to Maxine Sheets-Johnson who has done some amazing work as an independent philosopher. Here is a lecture of hers on YouTube.) Traditionally, independent philosophers have been people of independent means, but this need not be the case if a philosopher can find her or his tribe of supporters. Instead of departments, we need many philosophy tribes producing knowledge, and more kinds of philosophers. If we can replicate the best aspects of philosophy outside of academia, philosophy will have been set free. And she wants to be free.

10 Kinds Of Public Philosophy

Here is list of the forms that public philosophy currently takes, in no particular order. I’d like to know from you if I’ve missed any, and see if we could imagine some that are not there yet. Take a look-see:

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And A Doubt About the Name

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It will take time and creativity to develop public philosophy independently, but I believe philosophy has a great future outside of academia. There are more and more trained philosophers out in the wild, and the technology is more than here. What we don’t yet have is a recognized space to congregate and amplify each other’s voices —I have found Twitter to be a stand-in for such a place, and #philosophy Twitter certainly has grown. (This was written pre-Elon take-over, I now microblog on Bluesky instead, although I have not killed-off my old thinkPhilosophy twitter account).

What is yet to be proven is whether this society will tolerate practicing public intellectuals in mainstream spaces to scale up relative to the available technologies. Remember, platforms like Twitter and Youtube are POPOs, privately owned “public” spaces. Our ability to become visible in these spaces is contingent on our acceptability and popularity, often not a philosopher’s strong suit.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the existing kinds of public philosophy practices, and any that I might have missed. And if you are doing public philosophy, I’d love to hear of your experiences in the comments ꜜ down below.