A Companion to Public Philosophy

39Troubling the “Public” in and Through Philosophy

GEORGE YANCY

If all agony were kept alive in memory, if all turmoil were told, who could endure tranquility?

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

Education can, and should, be dangerous.

– Howard Zinn

I have hidden or disguised nothing.

– Socrates

I find problematic the distinction between “public philosophy” and philosophy done within the classroom or within academia, especially where this distinction implies an incommensurable difference, a pure separation, a clean break. The “public” is always already operative within the academically cloistered spaces of the classroom, and philosophical thinking is always already occurring outside the walls of academia. Within this context, I also find problematic the distinction between “philosopher” and “non‐philosopher.” These “dichotomies” threaten to obscure more than they illuminate.

Agnes Callard writes, “Philosophy is a bubble. Not much of it happens in high school, or after college. It lives inside academia, or, more precisely, inside a space that is itself inside academia” (Callard 2019). Part of the problem here is that Callard leaves unmodified the term “philosophy.” She also limits where philosophical activity takes place. Is it that philosophy simpliciter is a bubble, or is it that a specific historical emergence of philosophy, along with its legitimation practices, self‐image, and professionalization, constitutes the fact that philosophy is a bubble? For me, it is the latter. ...