A Companion to Public Philosophy

1What Is Public Philosophy?

LEE MCINTYRE

After years of misgivings, false starts, and concerns about “what are my colleagues going to think?” – usually followed by furious clandestine activity – I am elated to think that public philosophy has finally arrived. This is more than just the philosophical profession “having a moment” over an enlarged view of what issues count as philosophical and who counts as a philosophical audience, but a full‐fledged acknowledgment that public engagement is now returning to the rightful place it had at the time that philosophy was founded.

When Socrates began to engage people in the streets of Athens 2400 years ago, philosophy was very much a public enterprise. The idea was that through philosophical discussion, we could learn more about not only the important questions of knowledge, reality, morality, and justice but also how to make ourselves better people in the process. At its inception, philosophy was practiced by and with ordinary people, and it was responsive to their questions and concerns. Somewhere along the way, philosophy got taken over by scholars, but it was not always thus. Indeed, for most of its history, philosophy’s most celebrated practitioners often did something else for a living: Confucius was a governor, Maimonides was a physician, Descartes was a soldier, Hume was an administrator, Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, Locke was a government official, Bishop Berkley was a religious cleric, Sri Harsa was a court poet, Anselm ...