Since when is philosophy a branch of the self-help industry? | Aeon Essays

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is a scholar in media and cultural studies based in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, The Guardian and Philosophy Now, among others. She is the editor of Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (2018) and the author of Death and the Machine: Intersections of Mortality and Robotics (2018). Edited bySam Dresser Richard Martin i quit teaching philosophy in university, and abandoned writing my PhD thesis in 1970, realizing that at the age of 30 I lacked the life experience to either teach philosophy or to formulate a significant contribution to the area. Now at the age of 84, with my lived life mostly behind me and my impending death tangibly ahead, I can begin to formulate views on philosophy, which for me has been, in retrospect, a process of experiencing and examining alternatives, weighing and balancing the immediacy of my moment-to-moment, day-to-day life with the received teachings and learnings and evolved perspectives of those who have gone befor

‘As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is not hated so much as it is viewed with a mixture of uncertainty and indifference. As Kieran Setiya recently put it in the London Review of Books, academic philosophy in particular is ‘in a state of some confusion’. There are many reasons for philosophy’s stagnation, though the dual influences of specialisation and commercialisation, in particular, have…

Since when is philosophy a branch of the self-help industry? | Aeon Essays

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