The Nature and Tasks of Philosophy
Complementing Philosophy's Big Chance, especially Chapter 1, these are higher-level and sweeping critiques of Philosophy’s leading self-conceptions, alongside pleas, prompts, and possibilities, hopefully provocative and inviting, for what Philosophy might make itself today instead.
Space and Air in the Mind
Revised version of an essay I drafted in Summer 2022 for an American Association of Philosophy Teachers volume on “What and Who is Philosophy for?”? (not published)
“Here we begin to glimpse a Philosophy willing, even eager, to move: a Philosophy with an exploratory, imaginative, possibilistic strand... Sometimes “going so far as...” is exactly what we should or must do – and it can be the job of Philosophy to lead the way (because who else?) or at least to open some ways.”
A 21st Century Conceptual Toolbox
Outline for an invited talk for the Atlantic Region Philosophers Association Conference, October 2009.
“What becomes possible when we give the same attention and energy [as was so enthusiastically devoted to deconstruction] to the re-construction of genuinely better alternatives in the new space of freedom that broadly deconstructive moves create?”
Jobs for Philosophers
I self-published Jobs for Philosophers through Xlibris Corporation in 2004 as a kind of edgy circular for my friends. It’s my favorite of all my books, and by far the least known. In form, Jobs for Philosophers is a collection of book reviews and the occasional manifesto, with the small peculiarity that none of the manifesto-issuers or books reviewed actually exist (except the first one, which is Jobs for Philosophers itself). A series of sources appear, including myself, all reviewed from yet another and incompletely-specified authorial point of view. Sometimes the putative authors are multiple, even entire putative movements, as in the manifesto reprinted here. The whole book, then, a literary conceit to allow a sweeping re-vision of philosophy’s possibilities, without the scholarly hyper-development and fortification often expected. The book presents itself as “a manifesto-in-disguise for a style of philosophy that doesn’t exist (yet) but should”…
You'll notice that the book begins by warning you off. Definitely not for everybody. Some of my philosopher friends have been so puzzled reading it that they wanted to throw it across the room. (Because they told me.) On the other hand, my sister-in-law thinks it's the greatest thing ever.
“The author’s philosophical “jobs” are for social inventors, theologian-cinematographers, guitarists who jam with orcas, and assorted other misfits, cultural tinkerers, iconoclasts, and free spirits…”
Table of Contents
- Anthony Weston, Jobs for Philosophers
- Calypso St James, Projects for Reinventing the Culture
- Aner Benjamin Marcus, The Hidden Possibilities of Things
- Ceil Cappelletti, “Second Comings”
- Inge Anderegg, On the Natural History of On the Natural History of Values
- De-Anthropocentrizing the World
- The new Deweyan Caucus, Teaching on the Edge
Citations