I'm going to abuse my prerogatives as a blogger here and, instead of posting this as a response to Berit's nice meditations and the resulting discussion HERE, start another top level thread.
First let me note that I think the worries about problems caused by hyperproffesionalisation in the commenters are not without basis. However, I have equally valid worries about the romantic cult of genius that seems to me to infect professional philosophy. There are just so many ways that pursuit of the great is the enemy of the good.
Here are four:
- it is in some ways complicit with sexism, since the prototypical budding genius is a certain kind of promising young man,
- slick people (and I take slickness to be both a philosophical and moral vice) who are pretty mediocre philosophers (not itself a vice, all of us are mediocre in many respects) can be pretty good at playing to the expectations game of hiring committees looking for the next star (a friend of mind actually calls this "promising young man syndrome," and I should note that I have empathy for job candidates who have to play up to it),
- related to (2)- for a very large passel of other reasons, hiring committees are not very good at selecting who will go on to be a great philosopher (on the other hand, I think that if everything is working with a modicum of virtue, they can be good at selecting someone who will almost certainly be a very solid interlocutor, colleague, teacher, and researcher),
- there's tremendous hubris here; we're all trying to engage in roughly the same kind of activity as the mighty dead, let's show some humility in our uses of superlatives (the overwhelming majority of academic stars will leave no philosophical trace in even the medium term of fifty or so years) , and
- because of the romantic cult of genius most philosophers have way too difficult a time crediting both co-writers equally in co-written work. If philosophy arises spontaneously in the mind like a Beethoven quartet (according to the mythology that arose around Beethoven), then it must have really arisen in one of the writer's minds with the other writer just sort of helping out.
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