Who to talk to about philosophy?

One of the things that I have to do as an academic is publish philosophy books, papers and chapters. The idea is that this is my research output. In producing this work I am advancing human understanding. That's the idea. And, it's worth saying, I enjoy it. Like many folks, I got into academia via research--through writing a PhD and then publishing journal articles.

Teaching is also a central part of what I do. I enjoy it. I don't enjoy marking. And I don't actually enjoy preparing to teach. Trying to find the right paper to set for readings, working out where the pitfalls are with *that* paper, then trying to find another one that will better suit the students, and the narrative of the course. And then trying to think about how these fit with the lectures, and writing the slides *just so* to try and make sure that they support students in the most useful way possible (and what happens if a student misses that lecture and doesn't do the catch up work? How will they find it? And.. And.... And.....). Well: I don't find that terribly pleasurable (though it's certainly satisfying. Oh, and please don't equate 'I don't enjoy doing the prep' with 'I dislike doing the prep'; I don't dislike it, I just don't get a buzz from it. But teaching is great. Working with students, supporting them, talking to them, watching pennies drop, watching students develop their own arguments and thoughts about the material: that's great.

But the last group that I talk to are people who don't research philosophy and they don't study philosophy. They're people who are outside of Universities. If you take a look at some parts of my webpage, you'll see I've done a bit of this kind of thing. I find it absolutely fascinating and really enjoyable. Here are people who don't have to read what I've written (like other academics and students might), but are choosing to engage with philosophy and with me. And they want to try and use the work to make a difference in the world. So, they're not reading it to write a paper of their own (again, like a student or another philosopher): they want to take what I've thought about and use it to make the world a little bit of a better place.

If you'd described that last kind of work to me 10 years ago, I'd have said that I wasn't the right person to do it, or that my bits of philosophy weren't the right ones, or that.... You get the picture. But what I've learned about working with folks outside academia is that they know way more about it (working outside academia, that is) than I do. That means that they know what they need and what they want to do their work better. I know about the philosophy. They know how to use it.

The take away from this? I wish that more philosophers put themselves in the kind of environment where non-philosophers could find out about their philosophical research. Don't just write about it. Go and talk to people about it: find business fora, local events, whatever and wherever there are people who might be interested in your work and able to use it. As a discipline we often talk a good 'we want to contribute to society' game, but we don't often act on that. I'd really like to see more action.

First trust paper published

Today, 'Commitment in cases of trust and distrust' found its way into the December issue of Thought.  This is the first paper I've had published on trust. It feels a little weird to be publishing in an area that's so far removed from most of the work that I do in metaphysics. Still, it's fun to stretch! 

The basic gist of the paper is that some things that Katherine Hawley says in her (excellent) 'Trust, Distrust and Commitment', aren't quite right and need a little tweak. I look to provide the tweak, too. In particular, I argue that we should think about distrust as follows:

"To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment because of reservations about whether or not they can be relied upon to do it."

This is intended as the first in a series of papers about trust. One theme I’m particularly interested in is the connection between the philosophical literature and the business literature. I was genuinely staggered when I started looking at the business literature at how much of it there is, and (I think) how many places we might be able to usefully offer philosophical intervention. So, alongside the usual nonsense about metaphysics, I’m trying to provide some of those interventions. I hope to have more to say about some of that soon.

New paper: 'Presentism Remains'.

Today I got the good news that my paper 'Presentism Remains' has been accepted for publication at Erkenntnis. It's a chunky paper, at about 13500 words. If you want to, you can read it here. The gist of the paper is that the way in which some people have been thinking about presentism and methodology in the philosophy of time is wrong; that there are some advantages to holding existence presentism (that I've defended here, here and here), which I describe as the view that existence is presence, and that when it comes to the philosophy of time we should be careful to distinguish ontological questions from metaphysical questions. I contrive to take a lot of words saying all of that. My primary targets in the paper are folks like Daniel Deasy, Timothy Williamson, Sven Rosenkranz and Fabrice Correia, all of whom have written about the way in which presentism could and should be thought of, and about methodology in the philosophy of time.

What am I doing?

As much to get things clear in my own mind, as anything else, here's what I'm currently working on.

Two papers on trust, with a particular focus on how to move from theoretical claims about trust, to applications in business. (Me, trust? Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are. A while back I taught a class on epsistemology and taught a fabulous paper by Katherine Hawley--which is to say that it was a paper by Katherine Hawley. It got me hooked.)

I've got some way through a(nother) paper about the epistemic objection to hybrid A-theories in the 'how can you know that you're now, now' literature, kicked off by Craig Bourne and DBM.

With David Ingram I'm doing a bit more work on the presentism and truthmaking literature. We also have plans for something more extensive, but that's still very much in the TOP SECRET category (aka: insufficiently well formed to discuss publicly). On my own I'm also kicking about a few things to do with presentism. One day I'd like to write a book about presentism, but I don't think I'm quite there yet.

Two papers (and then maybe a book?) on timelessness.

I have a funny little project on advice and recommendation, too. I'd like to know what they are and whether they differ from one another.

Sam Baron and I have some very early stage work on parsimony and fundamentality that we're trying to work up. It follows up earlier work that Sam and I have done together on parsimony and fundamentality.

Oh, and I've just started work on a paper on mereology and intuitions. We'll see where that ends up.