Public Philosophy and Public Studies

How to Escape Irrelevance: Performance Philosophy, Public Philosophy and Borderless Philosophy

 Carlo Cellucci has rightly pointed out that contemporary professional academic philosophy has a serious problem of irrelevance. Performance philosophy and public philosophy are two recent attempts to solve that problem and radically transform professional academic philosophy into what I call real philosophy. Nevertheless, performance philosophy and public philosophy have some prima facie probl...

The Nature and Possibility of Public Philosophy

The article argues that there is a central problem with the concept of public philosophy, in that philosophy is partly defined by questioning reflection on its own sense, while public or popular culture characteristically relies unreflectively on its ultimate givens, and these are mutually exclusive modes of thought. The article proposes, however, that because of philosophy’s reflection on and ...

Environmental Aesthetics and Public Environmental Philosophy

We argue that environmental aesthetics, and specifically the concept of aesthetic integrity, should play a central role in a public environmental philosophy designed to communicate about environmental problems in an effective manner. After developing the concept of the ‘‘aesthetic integrity’’ of the environment, we appeal to empirical research to show that it contributes significantly to people...

Public Shockwave Studies

Science Studies Goes Public

I believe that tenured historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science— when presented with the opportunity—have a professional obligation to get involved in public controversies over what should count as science. I stress ‘tenured’ because the involved academics need to be materially protected from the consequences of their involvement, given the amount of misrepresentation and abuse tha...