A Companion to Public Philosophy

40Esse est Percipi: Public Relations for Philosophers

PATRICK LIN

At first blush, public relations and academic philosophy couldn’t be further apart. The former evokes images of people who are shiny, smiley, schmoozy, and salesy; the latter decidedly not. But, as this chapter will explain, philosophers would do well to take some pages out of the public relations (PR) playbook.

I offer this advice from two perspectives. As an academic philosopher, I’ve done a lot of PR, which includes writing about 50 contributed articles in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, Forbes, etc., as well as giving 400+ media interviews on technology ethics. In 2015, the American Philosophical Association awarded me a Public Philosophy Op‐Ed prize.

But I was also an insider in the PR industry. During the dot‐com days, I managed multi‐million‐dollar client accounts for Niehaus Ryan Wong near San Francisco. As one of the very first pure‐play technology PR and strategy firms, it was known for launching Yahoo!, Pixar, Netflix, and many other companies you’ve probably heard of.

So, the following is not theoretical advice or from a textbook but from real experience. Even as we hear more calls for philosophers to engage in PR (Dean 2015; Arvan 2015; Millard 2016) and understand the value of public philosophy (Pigliucci and Finkelman 2014), there’s not much written for philosophers on how to conduct PR. That instruction, as offered here, is distinct from the philosophy of PR (Grunig ...