One of the regular themes on our blog (thank you for joining Catarina!) is implict bias in philosophy. In thinking about this week's most underrated philosopher of the week, I reflected on the unspoken, but quite prevalent tendency in the discipline to evaluate each other in light of 'our' ability to ask focused questions at talks (and to give focused answers) as well as 'our' collective joy at an apparently clear and tightly argued paper. (I am leaving aside all the rhetorical one-upmanship this sometimes involves when engaging with Oxbridge philosophers.) When in the Anglophone academic world, folk defend the system of hiring based on 'our' sense of who is a good philosopher, people will say that the written record (writing samples, etc) trumps all of this display of verbal fire power. I am not so confident about this.
This week's most underrated philosopher (for the up-to-date-criteria, see last week's entry) is Ed Slowik. While working in a teaching intensive department, Ed has been quietly building a terrific ouvre in contemporary space-time theory, philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, and history and philosophy of science, not to mention a whole string of papers in philosophy of music and popular culture as well as book reviews much of it published in terrific journals. I have not read it all. But I know the online CV is not completely up-to-date because some of his splendid recent work on Newtonian space and Cambridge Platonism is not included on it. One of my favorite papers is an old, sadly neglected one, on Huygens and Newton's De Gravitatione (lovingly known as "De Grav") written well before the current obsession with DeGrav. It shows how Ed thinks through all the options available to Huygens and Newton; you can just see the relentless twists and turns of Ed's restless mind in action, and the sheer delight of thinking alongside great natural philosophers!
Happy Thanksgiving, Ed!
Recent Comments