Eva Weber-Guskar contributes some clarifying remarks to the many interesting facets offered by the relationship between academic philosophy and so-called popular philosophy. In the "Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie" (Vol.71, Issue 1, 2023 / De Gruyter), she asks about the peculiarity of the concept of "philosophical expertise", namely under the conditions of a public, media-mediated philosophizing.
Christian Geyer-Hindemith
Editor in the feuilleton.
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Weber-Guskar, Heisenberg Professor in Bochum, has trained her concepts on the analytical method of her doctoral supervisor Peter Bieri. As a litmus test for philosophical reflection, she sees the refusal to pronounce patent remedies: "Philosophy not only asks questions, but it also not only provides answers, but in the best case it offers a systematic overview of what is at stake and how conceptual and logical connections are stored, so that transparent, reasoned judgments are made possible." A negative determination: Philosophical experts have nothing to do with those in the know.
When philosophical experts are invited to interviews, talk shows or guest contributions in newspapers, the author observes "that expertise is often interpreted somewhat differently for philosophy than for other disciplines". While specialists from the natural sciences are asked for specific topics, for a voice from philosophy one seems to fall back more on "well-known minds" who, as generalists, say something about all sorts of things. Just as if there were no special questions in the sphere of philosophical reflection that require one's own expertise to deal with.
Astonishment: "You're talking about something!"
In other words, public philosophizing is often misunderstood as a professional way of thinking about everything and everyone. Or as Matthias Warkus, the magazine's editor-in-chief, explains in the same issue under the headline "You're all about something!": In the German public, it is often not even expected "that someone who speaks as a philosopher does more than just 'mess around'".
As examples of the propensity to mistake the great palaver for philosophy, Weber-Guskar cites the moral and political issues raised by the Covid pandemic. For their discussion, researchers from moral philosophy, medical ethics and political philosophy were not primarily consulted, but well-known all-rounders, gladly also philosophizing journalists. All these media guests could, of course, contribute to a discussion as educated, clever and linguistically trained people, Weber-Guskar said.
But that doesn't mean incorporating philosophical expertise in the strict sense; it is virtually avoided by the prominent minds invited as a substitute: "Instead of academic expertise in the relevant field, these people are characterized by the fact that they are publicly known faces who have been and are being interviewed not only on this topic, but just as well on many other topics." Even in philosophy magazines, political and psychological approaches are falsely passed off as philosophy for the sake of easier connection to publicly tracked questions.
But what exactly, in contrast to such a fraudulent label, can philosophical expertise contribute to one's own, comparable to other separate scientific expertise? In other words, what characterizes the philosophical expert opinion, which in one way or another is always about unnerving supposedly self-evident facts with a Socratic questioning method?
According to Weber-Guskar, such an expert opinion is not only characterized by "particularly precise argumentation skills and one's own methods and conceptual analyses, but there are also questions that can hardly be approached other than philosophically". This, however, means making tightly lashed registers float so that they open up to new contexts.
The Flow Effects of Philosophical Questioning
In terms of craftsmanship, this is to be done in staged procedures: "This includes the determination of fundamental concepts such as dignity, freedom or truth. Based on them, detailed discussions about triage, foundations of communities or fake news can then be developed. It can be helpful, from the current state of research, which is based on long and intensive study of these topics, to analyze theses and arguments in terms of their initial premises and to clarify the dialectical relationships in which they relate to each other."
Is that cumbersome? Yes. Is that difficult? Yes. But it's also child's play, because the philosophically knowledgeable examination of arguments requires a kind of attention that can trigger flow effects. After all, this is about an accuracy that can only be achieved by floating spirits.