Notes to a Bright Young Philosopher

I got a long blow-by-blow email cum critique from a good student of mine of a philosopher we are reading, which was some 20 pages long, single-spaced and was of the blog-style “there’s this problem, then this problem…” approach. I wrote this to him, so I figured I’d just post it:

There is really trenchant stuff here. But let me share a story and you’ll catch my point: there is a lot of really weak stuff (and great stuff!) out there and some of it I have to respond to at conferences and some of it I have to write articles about. The point is to see the problems in the forest, identify the best parts of something that you can take away, and leave the acorns and trees alone. If a philosopher has so many problems, then they’re not worth writing about. (I did run into this problem writing about [X philosopher] since I kept wanting to attack so many idiotic smaller things he said, it took me forever to even find the damn forest that was his stupid system.) Thus any writing on a philosopher should less be filled with questions (as yours seems to be) than at attempting to reconstruct their “system” and then trying to find problems with it overall.

Now to the story: when I was your age (I was once, I swear!), I was the assistant editor for a journal. There was another young grad student from another university who wrote an article challenging a big name philosopher’s approach to a given political question. The Big Name philosopher then writes back with 35-40 pages of singled spaced notes going line-by-line about how the grad student wasn’t just wrong, but apparently had subtle problems (he used the “word liberal here when he means libertarian” or some such) in places. The guy looked like an ass, since he didn’t respond to the main point of that article and wasn’t giving enough to see that someone was critiquing his work and thus in a sense showing an appreciation of it. What you’re doing isn’t really like this, but if you’re moving from “problem x” here to “problem y” there in some philosopher, you might come off as some rodent chewing on acorns [ouch, my student is assuredly not a “rodent,” I better email him/her and apologize for any such inference…] and just shooting someone down, instead of souring like an eagle (yes, an eagle, I’m going with that metaphor!) and getting a glance of how the hold wild thing is put together and what it’s supposed to do.

This is not a critical point, since some of the problems you raise are my problems, too. You raise excellent points, but this is more about how to approach it and how to organize your thoughts (If i may say so) in a paper: start with a systematic exposition, maybe with bread crumbs left behind that suggest problems, but then don’t get to anything until later when you simply have a section on what is problematic. But by doing moving from problem A to problem B to problem C, it makes it hard for others to see what I know is a really good overall point you are making, and not just smaller critiques.