Philosophers' Spouses
Between the new daughter and two and a half weeks (so far) of raging sinusitis, it's been hard for me to keep up with the blog. Thankfully, Hagop and Bryan have done some interesting guest posts in the meantime!
But I can't let things go entirely, not without at least tossing out a little food for thought. Here's the food: In my experience, philosophers' spouses (unless they are themselves philosophers) are almost universally disdainful of the value of philosophy -- much more so than the average comparably-educated non-philosopher, it seems to me, and much more so than the spouses of professors in other fields are of the value of those other fields.
Here's a tiny bit of empirical data: Eleven people with no academic affiliation, mostly philosophers' spouses, responded to Josh Rust's and my survey of people's opinion of the moral behavior of ethicists. None of them thought ethicists behaved better on average than non-academics, six thought they behaved the same, and five thought they behaved worse (two-tailed binomial, p = .06). Although the sample size is obviously very small, of all respondents, philosophers' spouses appeared to have the darkest view of ethicists' behavior. (I wonder what ethicists' spouses in particular would say.)
Suppose I'm right about the disdain philosophers' spouses generally have for philosophy. What might explain that? Do they have a clearer view of philosophy than we? Bryan complains that (American) philosophers don't get no respect. Maybe we don't deserve respect, and our spouses are just the ones who know this best?
Update, May 14: Here's one possibility: Philosophy is about confronting questions that resist straightforward resolution and many of which are pretty much timeless. When faced with such a daunting task, most of what we mere mortals can provide is only bunk, even if the bunk-providing philosophers themselves don't realize it. (It doesn't follow that philosophy isn't worth doing.)