A Companion to Public Philosophy

3Rekindling Public Philosophy

TOM MORRIS

My name is Tom, and I’m a public philosopher. It’s been four days since I last pondered in public. But it’s been more than 30 years since I first got hooked.

I had a PhD from Yale in philosophy and in religious studies, around 10 academic books out in the world with publishers like Oxford, Cornell, and Notre Dame, and dozens of articles in academic journals like Mind, Analysis, Nous, The Philosophical Review, The American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and others. I had been able to pioneer new work within my area of focus during the early 1980s, helping to retool for modern times a domain within philosophy of religion known as philosophical theology. I had become a full professor at a great university; and then, only a few years later, I left that position to go out on my own and set up shop as a public philosopher.

There was to my knowledge almost no public philosophy in America at that time, at least of the sort that I suddenly sought to craft in response to a flurry of unexpected invitations. I quickly found myself no longer in small seminar settings or even large classrooms but bringing ideas to people in huge convention centers and corporate boardrooms. I’m sure you can imagine my astonishment at then having any of my books become bestsellers. But I’d found my audience, or they had found me.

It was a career twist I never anticipated. Sometimes, when I look back on the range of experiences I’ve ...