Will Today's Philosophical Work Still Be Discussed in 200 Years?
I'm a couple days late to this party. Evidently, prominent Yale philosopher Jason Stanley precipitated a firestorm of criticism on Twitter by writing:
I would regard myself as an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years. I have zero intention of being just another Ivy League professor whose work lasts as long as they are alive.
(Stanley has since deleted the tweet, but he favorably retweeted a critique that discusses him specifically, so I assume he wouldn't object to my also doing so.)
Now "abject failure" is too strong -- Stanley has a tendency toward hyperbole on Twitter -- but I think it is entirely reasonable for him to aspire to create philosophical work that will still be read in 200 years and to be somewhat disheartened by the prospect that he will be entirely forgotten. Big-picture philosophy needn't aim only at current audiences. It can aspire to speak to future generations.
How realistic is such an aim? Well, first, we need to evaluate how likely it is that history of philosophy will be an active discipline in 200 years. The work of our era -- Stanley and others -- will of course be regarded as historical by then. Maybe there will be no history of philosophy. Humanity might go extinct or collapse into a post-apocalyptic dystopia with little room for recondite historical scholarship. Alternatively, humanity or our successors might be so cognitively advanced that they regard us early 21st century philosophers as the monkey-brained advocates of simplicistic views that are correct only by dumb luck if they are correct at all.
But I don't think we need to embrace dystopian pessimism; and I suspect that even if our descendants are super-geniuses, there will remain among them some scholars who appreciate the history of 21st century thought, at least in an antiquarian spirit. ("How fascinating that our monkey-brained ancestors were able to come up with all of this!") And of course another possibility is that society proceeds more or less on its current trajectory. Economic growth continues, perhaps at a more modest rate, and with it a thriving global academic culture, hosting ever more researchers of all stripes, with historians in India, Indonesia, Illinois, and Iran specializing in ever more recondite subfields. It's not unreasonable, then, to guess that there will be historians of philosophy in 200 years.
What will they think of our era? Will they study it at all? It seems likely they will. After all, historians of philosophy currently study every era with a substantial body of written philosophy, and as academia has grown, scholars have been filling in the gaps between our favorite eras. I have argued elsewhere that the second half of the 20th century might well be viewed as a golden age of philosophy -- a flourishing of materialism, naturalism, and secularism, as 19th- and early 20th-century dualism and idealism were mostly jettisoned in favor of approaches more straightforwardly grounded in physics and biology. You might not agree with that conjecture. But I think you should still agree that at least in terms of the quantity of work, the variety of topics explored, and the range of views considered, the past fifty years compares favorably with, say, the early medieval era, and indeed probably pretty much any relatively brief era.
So I don't think historians will entirely ignore us. And given that English is now basically the lingua franca of global academia (for better or worse), historians of our era will not neglect English-language philosophers.
Who will be read? The historical fortunes of philosophers rise and fall. Gottlob Frege and Friedrich Nietzsche didn't receive much attention in their day, but are now viewed as a historical giants. Christian Wolff and Henri Bergson were titans in their lifetimes but are little read now. On the other hand, the general tendency is for influential figures to continue to be seen as influential, and we haven't entirely forgotten Wolff and Bergson. A good historian will recognize at least that a full understanding of the eras in which Wolff and Bergson flourished requires appreciating the impact of Wolff and Bergson.
Given the vast number of philosophers writing today and in recent decades, an understanding of our era will probably focus less on understanding the systems of a few great figures and more on understanding the contributions of many scholars to prominent topics of debate -- for example, the rise of materialism, functionalism, and representationalism in philosophy of mind (alongside the major critiques of those views); or the division of normative ethics into consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-ethical approaches. A historian of our era will want to understand these things. And that will require reading David Lewis, Bernard Williams, and other leading figures of the late 20th century as well as, probably, David Chalmers and Peter Singer among others writing now.
As I imagine it, scholars of the 23rd century will still have archival access to our major books and journals. Specialists, then, will thumb through old issues of Nous and Philosophical Review. Some will be intrigued by minor scholars who are in dialogue with the leading figures of our era. They might find some of the work by these minor scholars to be intriguing or insightful -- a valuable critique, perhaps, of the views of the leading figures, maybe prefiguring positions that are more prominently and thoroughly developed by better-known subsequent scholars.
It is not unreasonable, I think, for Stanley to aspire to be among the leading political philosophers and philosophers of language of our era, who will still read by some historians and students, and still perhaps viewed as having some good ideas that are worth continuing discussion and debate.
For my own part, I doubt I will be viewed that way. But I still fantasize that some 23rd-century specialist in the history of philosophy of our era will stumble across one of my books or articles and think, "Hey, some of the work of this mostly-forgotten philosopher is pretty interesting! I think I'll cite it in one of my footnotes." I don't write mainly with that future philosopher in mind, but it still pleases me to think that my work might someday provoke that reaction.
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