A Companion to Public Philosophy

23Say What? Talking Philosophy with the Public

RUTH CHANG¹

Although I’ve been invited to write a how‐to of public speaking for professional philosophers, I am at best a fair to middling public speaker. This is not false modesty; we all know a great public speaker when we hear one, and sadly I’m not one of them.

But, fortunately, being run‐of‐the‐mill puts me in a good place to reflect usefully on the large gap that exists between giving a philosophy talk to professional philosophers and giving one to a more general audience. Experience helps, too. Repeated episodes of doing philosophy with diverse and sometimes very large public audiences, followed by the conviction that I didn’t do it right, has put me in a good position to have thoughts about what does and does not work, and to point out some surprisingly common pitfalls we face in massaging our rather specific and methodologically narrow philosophical training into a digestible talk for the layperson. Also, as someone who has shared the stage with some truly exceptional public speakers, I can report on some of the tidbits I have picked up from observing the masters and mistresses in action. However, no one should take what I say here as more than one philosopher’s musings about speaking philosophy with the public.

There are three main types of “public lecture” that a professional philosopher might be asked to give. The most common is the Faux Public Lecture, a public lecture typically at a university, where the vast majority ...