CONTENTS
5 Alexandra Grant: The Publisher and the Public “The private act of writing can become public and political through the authority of publishing.”
WHAT IS PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY?
10 Jonathon Hawkins and Peter West: A Democratic Approach to Public Philosophy “There is a tension at the heart of the notion of public philosophy between the rigorous, challenging crossexamination of beliefs and opinions and the accessibility that any form of public engagement demands.”
17 Jana Bacevic: What Does it Mean to Think Together? “What does it mean to think with others even if, or particularly when, our living (social, political, climactic) conditions may not be conducive to thought?”
22 Ellie Robson: Mary Midgley on Water and Thought: Is Public Philosophy Like Plumbing?
“What makes someone especially good at philosophy, argues Midgley, is a kind of perceptiveness, a ‘power to distinguish what really matters’.”
27 Mary Midgley: Rings and Books “Great men, simply by their ignorance of a topic, can lay a remarkably strong taboo on the mention of it even where it happens to be entirely relevant.”
developed in the academy to meet the evolving needs of our social and political realities.”
43 Yarran Hominh: The Hope of Public Philosophy “To live in hopeless times is thus not only subjectively to feel hopeless. It is for that feeling in a real way to reflect the way things are.”
THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
32 Angie Hobbs: Philosophy in the Agora: Past, Present and Future “Perhaps most vital of all, public philosophy has a critical role to play in calling out the lies, deceptions, half-truths and fantasies which are so polluting social media, the media and politics all over the globe.”
39 Aaron Wendland: Circling Back to the University: Public Philosophy and Pedagogy in the 21st Century “The future of public philosophy will be driven by the efficacy of using ideas
CONVERSATIONS ON PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
49 What is Public Philosophy? a conversation with Peter Adamson, Evelyn Brister, and Lucia Ziglioli “ You learn to be epistemically humble and doing so helps tackle the epistemic injustice that exists within philosophy as a discipline.”
55 The Intrinsic Goodness of Public Philosophy: a conversation with David Edmonds “Some of the best philosophers are those who are best at public philosophy, precisely because they’ve got the confidence to dispense with the footnotes.”
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