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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 47, No. 1, January 2016
0026-1068

THE INSTITUTION OF PHILOSOPHY:

ESCAPING DISCIPLINARY CAPTURE

ADAM BRIGGLE AND ROBERT FRODEMAN

Abstract: Philosophers view themselves as critical thinkers par excellence. But

they have overlooked the institutional arrangements that govern their lives. The
early twentieth-century research university disciplined philosophers, placing them
in departments, where they wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary (and
now increasingly subdisciplinary) peers. Oddly, this change has been unremarked
upon, or has been treated as simply part of the necessary professionalization of
an academic field of research. The department has been tacitly assumed to be a
neutral space from which thought germinates; it is not itself an object of
reflection. We find no explorations of the effects that departmentalization might
have on philosophical theorizing, or speculations about where else philosophers
could be housed, or how, by being located elsewhere, they might develop
alternative accounts of the world or have come up with new ways of
philosophizing.

Keywords: academic discipline, applied philosophy, twentieth-century philoso-

phy, impact, institutions, societal relevance.

Philosophers pride themselves on challenging every shibboleth, but it

has been a hundred years since philosophy has questioned its place in
the world. We grant that this will strike readers as an unlikely claim.
We actually mean something quite simpleso simple, in fact, that phi-
losophers have not considered the question we raise to be a philosophi-
cal question at all. But it is a philosophical question, and today needs
to be treated as such.
We are referring to the early twentieth century, when philosophy set-
tled into its current place within the modern research university. John
Dewey watched this happen. In his 1917 essay The Need for a Recov-
ery of Philosophy, he reflected on the role of philosophy in American
life. He was concerned that philosophy had become sidetracked from
the main currents of contemporary life, too exclusively the domain of
professionals and adepts. While taking pains to note that the classic
questions of philosophy had made contributions to culture both past
and present, Dewey felt that the arguments being made by professional

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philosophers were too often, as he put it, discussed mainly because

they have been discussed rather than because contemporary conditions
of life suggest them (Dewey 1917, 6).
Dewey, of course, was widely recognized as a public intellectual as
well as a professional philosopher. But since his death in 1952 Ameri-
can philosophers have followed another path. Being engaged with the
practical question of actually living well has not been part of the remit
of the professional philosopher.
We offer three passages as representative of this attitude:

1. W. V. O. Quine on philosophy as a technical exercise: Think of

organic chemistry; I recognize its importance, but I am not curi-
ous about it, nor do I see why the layman should care about
much of what concerns me in philosophy (Quine 1981, 193).
2. Saul Kripke on the relevance of philosophy: The idea that philosophy
should be relevant to life is a modern idea. A lot of philosophy does
not have relevance to life . . . the intention of philosophy was never to
be relevant to life (in Chick and LaVine 2014, 139).
3. Brian Leiter on whether the discipline of philosophy should be
concerned with developing a philosophy of life: Most of philoso-
phy, both contemporary andimportantlyhistorical, does not,
alas, live up to this expectation . . . it would hardly be obvious, on
an initial reading of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or
Husserl that this is what they were after (Leiter 2004, 1).

But is philosophy really analogous to chemistry, a domain of exper-

tise populated by specialists? Could it be that philosophy has never
sought to be relevant to life? And do Aristotle or Humeor for that
matter, Plato and Descartesreally show such disinterest in developing
a practical philosophy of life? Or are philosophical questions part and
parcel of everyones life? If the latter is the case, what should this por-
tend for the future of philosophic research, especially in an era of
reduced budgets and increased demands for relevance?
A hundred years after Deweys essay, we believe that it is time for another
reconstruction of philosophy, one that takes seriously questions concerning
the audiences and institutions of twenty-first-century philosophy.

1
Over time domain of action previously accepted as given evolved into something
deemed worthy of sustained critical commentary, often in association with partic-
ular social, economic, or political processes.
Michael A. Rinella (2011, xi)

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28 ADAM BRIGGLE AND ROBERT FRODEMAN

In making our present argument over the past decade, we have

noticed that a few points are prone to misunderstanding. So let us be
clear: there is a crucial distinction between philosophers working with,
as distinguished from writing about, the concerns of nonphilosophers.
It is of course salutary that philosophers write about the challenges
that nonphilosophers face. Since the 1980s the field of applied philoso-
phy has grown up around this task, and has generated a wealth of
insights about a variety of social issues. This work should continue. But
such work is entirely different from what we explore here: philosophers
working day to day at the project level, in real-world settings. We are
talking about philosophers leaving the office, the study, and the class-
room in order to go out into the field.
This concept of the field is a metaphor. Since a fair amount of our
own work has been in environmental ethics, we have in some cases
actually engaged in fieldwork, that is, working in natural surroundings
with geologists and hydrologists. But the field can also consist of a
laboratory, a government agency, or a community group. The point is
to do philosophy in an active and participatory sense with nonphilo-
sophers, under real-world conditions, engaging in what can be called
just-in-time philosophizing. We are also happy to acknowledge the
recent creation of organizations like the Public Philosophy Network
and Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering that
have grown up to engage in such work. However, among the mass of
philosophers, including the overwhelming number of applied philoso-
phers, significant ongoing engagement with real-world issues just
doesnt happen.
This is a shame, since we are surrounded by phenomena crying out
for philosophic reflection. Today we are regularly confronted by philo-
sophic questions, in many cases spurred by advances in science and
technology. Browse the Internet and you can find thoughtful explora-
tion of issues as varied as the creation of autonomous killing machines,
the loss of privacy in a digital age, the remaking of friendship via Face-
book, and the refashioning of human nature via biotechnology. In this
sense philosophy abounds. But professional philosophers have remained
largely on the margins of this growing cultural conversation.
It neednt be this way. Take the subject matter of metaphysics. Every
philosophy department teaches courses in metaphysics. But how is the
subject handled? As evidenced by a sample of university syllabuses
posted online, metaphysics classes are overwhelmingly exercises in pro-
fessional philosophy. Classes begin from the concerns of philosophers
rather than from contemporary problems. This is evidently the case in
the leading textbooks of philosophy. Consider as magisterial a source
as The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, edited by Michael J. Loux
and Dean W. Zimmerman. The introduction begins thus: Its detrac-
tors often characterize analytical philosophy as anti-metaphysical. After

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all, we are told, it was born at the hands of Moore and Russell, who
were reacting against the metaphysical systems of idealists like Bosan-
quet and Bradley (Loux and Zimmerman 2003, 1). These are hardly
household names. The discussion is immediately and entirely framed in
terms of the disciplinary concerns of philosophyand only twentieth-
century analytic philosophy at that. We find no reference to peoples
actual lives, to the metaphysical issues tied to the births and transfor-
mations and deaths we all endure, no acknowledgment that questions
of metaphysics involve some of the most intimate and transcendent
questions of our lives. Instead, metaphysics is a tale told in terms of
professionals: Moore and Russell, Bosanquet and Bradley, Quine and
Lewis.
The eight sections of the Handbook embody this Olympian
perspective:

Universals and Particulars

Existence and Identity
Modality and Possible Worlds
Time, Space-Time, and Persistence
Events, Causation, and Physics
Persons and the Nature of Mind
Freedom of the Will
Anti-Realism and Vagueness

Chapter titles are laden with jargon like Supervenience, Emergence,

Realization, Reduction and Compatiblism and Incompatiblism.
Again, we emphatically are not claiming that the matters addressed by
such essays are insignificant. But it takes an adept in philosophy to
extract the kernel of existential meaning from this disciplinary shell.
No wonder even the best students walk away confirmed in their preju-
dices concerning the irrelevance of philosophy to everyday life.
To ask a philosopher why these categories are important, or how
they tie into our lifeworld, is to brand yourself as not serious about
philosophy. Such high-toned dismissal would be laughable were it not
both dogmatic and self-destructive. Nor is this a problem only of con-
temporary analytic philosophy. You might think that Continental phi-
losophers, heirs to the tradition of existentialism and phenomenology,
would be different. But they practice their own form of disciplinary
pathology, often expressed in terms of hagiographical accounts of lead-
ing thinkers. Heidegger criticizes philosophy for the forgetfulness of
being, but neither he nor his followers apply the point to life within the
modern research university, for example that philosophy itself has
become, institutionally speaking, a regional ontologyphilosophers

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writing only for other philosophershaving forgotten to ask questions

about its own justification for existence other than as a self-referential
exercise among philosophers.
Why do philosophers begin with insider topics when issues laden
with metaphysics are in the news every day? The May 25, 2014, issue
of the Washington Post describes a patient taking heart pills that
include ingestible chips: the chips link up with her computer so that
she and her doctor can see that she has taken her medicine. The story
also describes soon-to-be-marketed nanosensors that can travel in the
bloodstream and will be able to spot the signs of a heart attack before
it occurs (Cha 2014). These are issues that could fall under Existence
and Identity, one of the sections of the Oxford Handbook. At stake
here are metaphysical questions about the nature of self and the bound-
ary between organism and machine. But Loux and Zimmerman miss
the chance to frame this section in terms of our increasingly cyborg-
like existence rather than solely in terms of scholastic debates.
The problem isnt merely that philosophers write primarily for other
philosophers. There is a dubious epistemic logic at work. The circle
draws ever tighter: over time, philosophers write for an increasingly
select number of specialists within one or another subdiscipline of phi-
losophy. Philosophers labor away on matters that even their colleagues,
let alone the proverbial layman, do not understand or care about.
Some do not see this as a problem at all but see it rather as a sign
of the maturation of the field. Scott Soames, for example, celebrates
the fact that the discipline itselfphilosophy as a wholehas become
an aggregate of related but semi-independent investigations, very much
like other academic disciplines . . . philosophy has become a highly
organised discipline, done by specialists primarily for other specialists
(Soames 2005). Soames suggests that specialization is not just a
response to professional imperatives or the institutional structure of the
academy across and beyond the twentieth century but that specializa-
tion may be inherent in the subject itself. The world is far too com-
plex for any single mind to comprehend; the task of philosophers is to
break off manageable pieces and describe them accurately. Philosophers
will then fit their pieces together into a synthesis that will illuminate
reality as we know it.
Soames presumes that at some point, once things are carved into
small enough chunks, well catalogue all there is to say about them.
But of course this is wrong. Debates go on ad infinitum no matter how
manageable the chunk of reality under consideration seems to be. Mat-
ters are never settled; there is always another interpretation to be
made. Which means that we never get around to the business of offer-
ing a meaningful illumination of reality. In the meantime, all of us are
faced with questions, public and private, which need answering, and to
which philosophers can contribute. As Richard Rorty (1979) once

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noted, a biologist studying the neurons of squids can tell a plausible

story about how his or her research might inform, say, medical science
and lead to some payoff for society. When philosophers ask questions
about how many sand grains constitute a heap, they dont have any
such narrative to fall back on. They have come to think it their birth-
right to pursue such questions ad infinitum without any societal
responsibility. Why? This passes over the fact that the vast majority of
philosophers work at public universities and therefore owe the public
some broader impact from their work beyond bromides concerning
critical thinking. For the health of our culture, and for the health of
philosophy itself, philosophers need to be able to account for the value
of their research. In an age increasingly focused on return on invest-
ment its not good enough to subscribe to what is in essence a trickle-
down theory of research impact, as if somehow somewhere down the
line some kind of social or cultural impact will just, well, happen.
In an interview that he gave shortly before his death Michel Fou-
cault spoke of his concern with what one could call the problems or,
more exactly, problematizationshow we decide what questions do or
do not get asked (in Rinella 2011, xi). By what trick of intellectual his-
tory have philosophers not asked questions about their disciplinary sta-
tus? Or developed robust accounts of the societal impact of their
research? Or considered how their institutional setting dictates the epis-
temic standards of their discourse? And so we seek to problematize a
series of questions that have not been philosophized.
We see this as both a moral and a practical imperative: philosophers
need to think about how their research can more directly connect to
the issues of our day. Unless professional philosophy embraces and
institutionalizes an engaged approach to philosophizing, working
alongside other disciplines and abroad in the world at large, it is likely
to become a casualty of our neoliberal times at all but the most prestig-
ious institutions.

2
The biggest impediment to philosophys greater relevance is its current
institutional housing. The early twentieth-century research university
disciplined philosophers, placing them in departments, where they
wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary (and now increasingly
subdisciplinary) peers. Oddly, this change was unremarked upon, or
was treated as simply part of the necessary professionalization of an
academic field of research. It continues to be passed over in silence
today. Like Molie`res Bourgeois Gentleman, who does not know that
he has been speaking prose, philosophers seem innocent of the fact
that they have been doing disciplinary philosophyor that one might

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have reasons to object to this situation. And so even when their subject
matter consists of something of real significance to the wider world,
philosophers discuss the topic in a way that precludes the active interest
of and involvement by nonphilosophers. They publish articles in
obscure academic journals full of prose that only their peers can under-
stand. Philosophers may have much to say to their fellow citizens, but
unlike Nietzsches Zarathustra (with some rare exceptions) they no lon-
ger come down from the mountaintop to say it.
Philosophers, of course, view themselves as critical thinkers par
excellence who have been trained to question everything. But they have
overlooked the institutional arrangements that govern their lives. The
department is tacitly assumed to be a neutral space from which
thought germinates; it is not itself an object of reflection. In our
ongoing review of the applied philosophy literature, we have found no
explorations of the effects that departmentalization might have on phil-
osophical theorizing, or speculations about where else philosophers
could be housed, or how, by being located elsewhere, they might
develop alternative accounts of the world or have come up with new
ways of philosophizing (Briggle, Frodeman, and Barr 2015).
Nonetheless, the epistemic implications of the current institutional
housing of philosophy are profound. For when philosophers leave their
disciplinary warrens, living and working elsewhere, their standards for
theorizing change as well. Outside the office the bad infinity of endless
theorizing is now governed by a new set of factorsmatters of time,
cost, and rhetorical appropriateness for a given audience. It is possible,
of course, to view such factors as impediments, sullying the purity of
the realm that philosophy should inhabit. The academic office is then
seen as the utopian space for thinking. But it is also possible, in a way
reminiscent of Nancy Cartwrights (1983) argument of how the laws of
physics lie, to see the office as setting up unreal conditions liable to
lead to philosophical error.
Philosophers once recognized that there is something problematic
about treating philosophy as simply one discipline alongside others. It
was once understood that, in addition to fine-grained analyses, philoso-
phy offered perspectives that undergirded, capped off, or synthesized
the work of other disciplines, such as physics and biology, and then
connected those insights to our larger concerns. Such work lost favor
in the twentieth centurydismissed as Weltanschauung philosophy by
analytic philosophers and as foundationalism by Continental philoso-
phers. But once we reopen this perspective, questions abound: if philos-
ophy is not, or not exclusively, a regional ontology, why are
philosophers housed within one region of the university? If philoso-
phers speak to different audiences with different priorities, why
wouldnt their standards for rigor and clarity reflect that?

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Now, to some extent the problems of isolation and irrelevance can

be ameliorated by a philosophy of approach: philosophy of science,
economics, ecology, and so on. This is in keeping with Socrates way of
philosophically analyzing beliefs that people had on subjects other than
philosophy itself. Taking the of approach has helped philosophers
like Michael Walzer to have an impact in the field of law and Baird
Callicott to be an influential voice in conservation biology. In this way,
philosophy can be both specialized and relevant to wider audiences.
That is, philosophers of art may not know or care much about philoso-
phy of economics, but that doesnt mean economists feel the same way.
Indeed, philosophers like Dan Hausman may be far more influential in
economics than in any branch of philosophy.
But the of approach is no guarantee of wider relevance to society or
other disciplines. Recall the key distinction between writing about a subject
and working with an audience. A philosopher can write about the subject of
economics, say, without ever earning the interest of economists. There is the
ever-present danger of disciplinary capture, where fellow philosophers of X
form a clique, launch a journal, and hold conferences where they speak only
to fellow philosophers of X and not to any actual practitioners of X. In our
estimation, this has happened within philosophy over and over again, in the
philosophy of science as well as the philosophy of technology and environ-
mental philosophy. Some of bioethics has taken this route too, but much of
it has not, because from the beginning bioethicists have not just been writing
about a subject but writing with and for physicians, nurses, patients, and pol-
icy makers. Indeed, bioethics was fortunate in a sense, because practitioners
of medicine actively reached out to philosophers like Daniel Callahan to
help them think through questions both practical and profound. The audi-
ence was built in: it needed philosophic help and was willing to listen.
Outside bioethics, the majority of philosophy, even applied philosophy,
suffers from disciplinary capture, where conversation is confined to discipli-
nary peers. We can say this with some confidence, on the basis of our
ongoing empirical research. In 2014 we were the recipients of a National Sci-
ence Foundation grant that funded us to do an analysis of the applied phi-
losophy literature to see if we could identify best practices for getting
philosophic insights into the hands of nonphilosophers. To date, with the
assistance of our graduate student Kelli Barr we have reviewed five journals
and some forty-five hundred articles. The journals (with the year of inception
of each journal in parentheses) are

Journal of Applied Philosophy (1984)

International Journal of Applied Philosophy (1982)
Metaphilosophy (1970)
Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly (1996)
Environmental Ethics (1979)

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We have searched for two things:

(a) accounts of success (or failure) in bringing academic philo-

sophic insights to nonphilosophic audiences, particularly to
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
researchers and policy makers; and
(b) the identification of methods, techniques, approaches, or pers-
pectives that have been developed by philosophers to facilitate
the transfer of useful insights to the STEM and policy
communities.

In the aggregate, we have found little sustained reflection on identi-

fying best practices for how applied philosophers can be of practical
use to the STEM disciplines or policy makers. Our research has
found that accounts of applied philosophys success in generating
broader impact, even under generous standards, are exceedingly rare,
constituting only about 1 percent of the literature in the journals sur-
veyed. Moreover, we have yet to find a single article that discusses
best practices for how to integrate philosophic insights into the
day-to-day activities of scientists, engineers, and policy makers. The
closest we have come to finding such a discussion has been a piece
from the policy literature (Fisher and Mahajan 2010).
There are different ways to interpret these facts. One could see
this situation as evidence that the majority of insights generated by
applied philosophers never reach those (nonphilosophic) stakeholders
who are actually struggling with the problems addressed by applied
philosophers (see Hale 2011). But it is also plausible that philo-
sophers have had an effect but have simply not developed the habit
of reporting back about their successes (and failures) to the philo-
sophic community. We are now in the process of contacting
philosophers who primarily publish in nonphilosophic venues to ask
why they have not written up accounts of their exploits for
philosophers.
In any case, we see the phenomenon of disciplinary capture as part
psychological, part epistemological, and part institutional. Psychologi-
cally the point can be put in terms of comfort zones, the desire to
occupy a domain small enough where one feels confident making
authoritative claims. Epistemologically it becomes a matter of theoreti-
cal rigor, as is the case with Soames. Institutionally it is reflected in the
standards of peer review, the process whereby academics establish a col-
lective identity and social credibility. For without that community of
reference, how can the quality of research be certified as good phil-
osophy? The need to survive, gain a job, and earn tenure drives many
philosophers away from other fields and back into their disciplinary or
subdisciplinary fold.

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If nondisciplinary peers are to be one of the intended audiences of

philosophic work, they also need to be involved in judging the quality
and value of research. Moreover, philosophers need to be rewarded (as
philosophers, in terms of research rather than only of service) for
articles published in places other than philosophy journals. Disciplinary
peer-reviewed scholarship can no longer be the sole standard for judg-
ing philosophic work. This highlights the need to institutionalize
rewards for the effects that such work has in circulation in the larger
world, as well as to train philosophers to write not just about different
subjects but for and with different audiences. By doing so we can
broaden the career paths for PhDs in philosophy so that they have job
prospects other than only talking to students or to other PhDs in
philosophy.

3
Philosophers have ignored their institutional placement, but for other
disciplines critical reflection on the structures of knowledge production
has become increasingly common. One example of such analysis is the
interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society studies (STS).
An influential book in the fieldThe New Production of Knowledge
(Gibbons et al. 1994)chronicles the shift in late twentieth-century sci-
ence from Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production. Mode 1 is
academic, investigator initiated, and discipline based. By contrast,
Mode 2 knowledge production is context driven, problem focused, and
inter- and transdisciplinary in nature. This framework offers another
way to sketch our point: we seek to promote the twenty-first-century
development of Mode 2 philosophy.
We are pluralists on this point: we believe that Mode 1, or discipli-
nary, scholarship should continue to have a central place in philosophy.
But Mode 1 philosophizing should be balanced by an equal focus
within the philosophical community on conducting work that is socially
engaged. We do mean equal: something like half of all positions in phi-
losophyor to put the point differently, some half of the one hundred
or so graduate programs in philosophyshould focus on Mode 2, or
dedisciplined, philosophy.
We recognize the (un)likelihood of this happening. Nonetheless, we
believe that this is simply to recognize a dawning reality: society is
demanding that academics demonstrate their broader relevance. Call it
the culture of accountability. This demand has so far largely skipped
over philosophy and the humanities, but there are abundant signs that
this omission is unlikely to remain the case for much longer (witness
the recent ministerial call for closing dozens of humanities programs at
Japanese universities). Philosophy needs to demonstrate its social bona

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36 ADAM BRIGGLE AND ROBERT FRODEMAN

fides by showing how it can make timely and effective contributions to

contemporary debates. We believe that such demonstration is best done
in a way that also shows that Mode 2 philosophizing is enriched by the
insights of Mode 1, or traditional, philosophy. Let the Harvards and
the NYUs of the world continue the pursuit of what has been viewed
as Recht philosophy. But at least some of the great public universities
of the country, the Michigans and Austins of the world, need to take
up their public responsibilities. (Indeed, this is already happening to
some degree at Arizona State and Michigan State.) This emphatically
does not mean that Mode 2 philosophers should tell the public what it
wants to hear. But it does mean that philosophers should address ques-
tions of public moment in a language that intelligent people can
understand.
But isnt this just another tiresome call for the philosopher to func-
tion as a public intellectual? No it isnt. The public intellectual deals
with events at the macro level, a role reminiscent of hoary tales of the
philosopher-king. We are pointing toward philosophy that operates at
the meso levelat the level of the project, where philosophers work
over the long term with scientists, engineers, and policy makers. In our
own experience this has meant a several-year commitment to work as
part of a team, becoming conversant with the details of a problem like
acid mine drainage or fracking or the intricacies of the ex ante review
process of grants at public science agencies. We have heard such an
approach dismissed as turning philosophy into a handmaiden of other
ends. It is a criticism that we fail to understandas if to philosophize
means always to rule.
Of course, Mode 1 philosophy is still the reigning orthodoxy; but lis-
ten closely and you can hear murmurs of a growing heterodoxy within
the ranks of philosophers, sometimes lumped under the title public
philosophy. We call our own version field philosophy (see Frodeman
2010; Briggle 2015). There are a number of similar approaches in such
areas as environmental justice, critical race theory, feminism, and bio-
ethics that we recognize as allies. We celebrate these diverse approaches
to Mode 2 philosophizing. But we do believe that the lack of thought
given to the institutional dimensions of philosophizing has limited the
effectiveness of this Mode 2 work. Institutional awareness, in our opin-
ion, is what distinguishes field philosophy. A new philosophical prac-
tice, where philosophers work in real time with a variety of audiences
and stakeholders, will lead to new theoretical forms of philosophy
once we break the stranglehold that disciplinary norms have upon the
profession.
It will take a community to institutionalize Mode 2 practices. As
things stand now, heterodox practitioners (however they self-identify)
exist on the margins and lead professional lives that run against the
grain. As the feminist public philosopher Linda Martn Alcoff notes,

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many Mode 2 philosophers try to walk a fine line between responsive-

ness to community needs and employment survival, pushing the boun-
daries of academic respectability even while trying to establish their
credentials in conventional ways (Alcoff 2002, 522). It is these
conventional ways that must change. We have to invent a philosophy
where responsiveness to community needs, rather than only to discipli-
nary interests and imperatives, is an integral part of ones employment
and is viewed as academically respectable.
In practice, this will require many changes, from revised promotion
and tenure criteria to alternative metrics for excellence and impact. As
these changes are implemented, it will be important to consider at what
point the chasm between philosophy and society has been reduced to a
manageable gap. After all, we dont want to eliminate the space
between philosophy and society altogether. Socrates was engaged but
was still an outsider. He certainly was no pundit looking to score the
most outrageous sound bite and rack up the most likes on Face-
book. We need a peoples philosophy that reserves every right to be
unpopular. And we deserve an institution of philosophy that could wel-
come the Kants and Spinozas among us when they make their appear-
ance. It is time to put the lie to Thoreaus opposition in chapter 1 of
Walden: There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
philosophers.

Department of Philosophy and

Religion
University of North Texas
1155 Union Circle #310920
Denton, TX 76203-5017
USA
adam.briggle@unt.edu
robert.frodeman@unt.edu

References
Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2002. Does the Public Intellectual Have Intel-
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Briggle, Adam. 2015. A Field Philosophers Guide to Fracking. New
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Briggle, Adam, Robert Frodeman, and Kelli Barr. 2015. Achieving
Escape Velocity: Breaking Free from the Impact Failure of Applied
Philosophy. London School of Economics Impact of Social Sciences
Blog, April 27.
Cartwright, Nancy 1983. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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38 ADAM BRIGGLE AND ROBERT FRODEMAN

Cha, A. E. 2014. Smart Pills with Chips, Cameras and Robotic Parts
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