Kristie Dotson's "How is this Paper Philosophy?"

Kristie Dotson published a paper this year in Comparative Philosophy (v3, n1), with the expressive title, "How is this Paper Philosophy?" Her paper challenges academic philosophy's focus on a narrow conception, and methods, of justification, and offers a call and argument for rethinking the meaning of philosophical praxis. Philosophy's focus on justification, she argues, leads to other problems that this blog and others have discussed before, such as practices of exclusion and a lack of diversity. Dotson's arguments have received an impressive range of responses, in particular a response from Graham Priest, which was published in the same journal and titled "In the Same Way this One is: Comments on Dotson" (v3, n2). To continue the conversation, this blog will feature a series of comments about Dotson's paper and her arguments against the traditional conception of justification and her argument for a new view of philosophical praxis.

Comments

[Carlos Alberto Sanchez]

Whose Burden?

I wish to address Kristie Dotson’s “strong statement” regarding the shouldering of “the burden of destabilizing [justifying] norms” within professional philosophy. After correctly observing that “[d]iverse practitioners may disproportionally shoulder [this burden]” (15), she writes:

Let me make the strong statement that shouldering this burden…is not a livable option for many would-be diverse practitioners of philosophy and the small numbers of under-represented populations within professional philosophy attest to this observation. (15)

I completely agree with Dotson on the first point, namely, that the burden of destabilizing norms may (and often does) fall on diverse practitioners. But I also think that her “strong statement” is too strong. I think that shouldering this burden is a livable option for those of us trying to find a place in professional philosophy—it may not be a preferred option, and most often it is a difficult option, but, and I think I’m making a strong statement here, the fact that it is a difficult option makes it livable.

I simply do not see the philosophical establishment doing what it takes to bring about the culture of praxis that “might provide a disciplinary culture that increases livable options” (16), a place where “the concept of periphery and mainstream would make little sense and value will be placed on identified points of contribution” (19). The burden of destabilizing norms and validating a culture of praxis falls squarely on us, the diverse practitioners of philosophy and those who value diversity in philosophy. And at the end of the day, that’s our task, our project, and our livelihood.

At a symposium sponsored by San Jose State University’s Center for Comparative Philosophy in April 2010, Dagfin Follesdal, Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Tieszen, Paul Livingston, and John Searle were asked to address the possibility of a constructive engagement between analytic and Continental approaches in philosophy. It was a memorable meeting, made even more so by Searle’s talk, in which he proceeded to enumerate the reasons why what he did was philosophy, and what a great number of us did was not (and by us, I mean those of us not actively engaged in “analytic” philosophy). Among the characteristics of the properly philosophical, which included clarity and elegance, Searle decreed that for a paper/project to count as philosophy it also needed to be profound. No one will disagree with the notion that the philosophical must be profound, but when asked to elaborate on what he meant by “profundity,” Searle, without missing a beat, responded, “I know it when I see it.” And no doubt, he probably does know it when he sees it. Nevertheless, because of the context of the talk, the comment struck me as alienating and dismissive. Whatever did not conform to this very privileged notion of profundy was not philosophy. With that comment, Searle gave voice to the “exceptionalism” which I believe Kristie Dotson has so eloquently described in her paper.

What was frustrating about Searle’s response was not that he was willing to keep the secret of profundity to himself; what was frustrating was that he presented profundity as a “justifying norm” to which some of us did not have access, but which nonetheless was used to judge our work as either philosophical or not. Of course, Searle will never read anything I write, so I don’t have to worry about his judgment. But it is clear that this is a “univocally relevant” norm that is both institutionalized in the profession and internalized by diverse practitioners such as myself, i.e., I now have to worry about whether or not what I do is profound—or whether I understand what profundity means, whether I have ever had access to this insight. So, while I believe that discussing issues relevant to my own life, e.g., issues related to the immigrant experience, issues of Hispanic identity, etc., is profound (as far as I can tell), I do fear that Searle and his ilk will not share this judgment. This is something to which Dotson points out: “In the case of exclusion via exceptionalism, justifying norms, themselves, are not the problem. The people applying them are the problem” (13). What makes matters worse, however, is that many times the people applying these norms are ourselves. But it is in the process of struggling with the application of these norms, with the fear and frustration that comes with knowing that what I do might not be profound enough, elegant enough, or useful enough, that I find it necessary to "destabilize".

Again, I doubt very much that professional philosophers in the American academy will themselves pick up the cross and bear the burden of destabilizing those norms that give rise to a sense of incongruence amongst diverse practitioners. The most they will do is accept that what we’re doing is valuable, even if they don’t accept it as philosophical or profound. Put differently, the dream of a culture of praxis is very real, if by that we mean with Dotson that the paradigm shift in contemporary philosophical praxis would “value investigations that contribute to old, new, and emerging discussions, problems and/or investigations” (17). But that it will still be regarded as “truly” philosophical is another matter.

The most enviable aspect of Kristie Dotson’s “How is this Paper Philosophy?” is that it clearly and intelligently articulates my current frustrations with professional philosophy—or, with my very specific place in it. She correctly characterizes me, and other like me, as “plagued” by “a sense of incongruence” and goes on to say that this sense of incongruence is rooted in a “failure to accept a justifying norm or a given set of justifying norms prevalent within professional philosophy contexts” (14). While I do believe that I suffer the sense of incongruence, I don’t think it has to do with my “failure” to accept the justifying norms prevalent in professional philosophy contexts. Rather, I think that my sense of incongruence is rooted in the fact that I accept those norms. It is in the process of accepting them that I am tossed about in seas of self-doubt and frustration, which ultimately leads to my conscious efforts at saying what I need to say in spite of those norms, or the people who enforce them. Dotson warns about this, urging diverse practitioners not to take up the burden of destabilizing the justifying norms. But, wrong as it may be, it is impossible to suffer a sense of incongruence and not to feel the need to destabilize the justifying norms. And to me this is a difficult, but livable, option, since internal to it is not only the burden of destabilizing norms, but also the burden of showing my face and telling my story in an effort to make it a livable option for those who would otherwise chose accounting over philosophy. This is the only possible way I see for creating “an environment where senses of incongruence become sites of exploration” (26).

[Kristie Dotson]

The paper currently under discussion, “How is this Paper Philosophy?,” is motivated by two experiences. First, it is a response to Anita Allen’s challenge, which I heard as an audience member at the 2nd Collegium of Black Women philosophers, that black women genuinely assess our career potential in professional philosophy. Second, it is an attempt to make sense of the deep relief I felt when my younger sister, Alexis Ford, decided not to pursue philosophy as a career option. These experiences converged to provoke the current paper under discussion.

As such, this paper occurred in stages. It started with Anita Allen’s call that the black women present at the Collegium take stock of their career potential, an event my younger sister attended. I immediately turned to consider my own ambivalent feelings about my own pursuit of a career in philosophy. I got nowhere fast via introspection. So I started reading reflections on philosophy and diversity, where I encountered Allen’s call again (in a book edited by George Yancy, who does great work on philosophy and diversity). In that work, I found a number of accounts of what I call senses of incongruence. I also looked to various kinds of apologies for “non-standard” philosophy, e.g. African American, Latin American, and/or Eastern philosophy. In these essays, I found articulations of exceptionalism in assessing what counts as “real” philosophy.

Though I could identify with these feelings of incongruence and concepts of exceptionalism in professional philosophy, neither fully helped me understand my career potential in professional philosophy. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Gayle Salamon’s Hypatia musing, “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy,” that a coherent picture began to form. Salamon identifies within professional philosophy a persistent demand for justification. These calls for justification amount to calls for one to affirm a conjunction between one’s projects and/or methodologies and some ideal of “real” philosophy and/or “real” philosophical engagement. I call the persistent demand for narratives of justification in professional philosophy a culture of justification. Salamon describes, in my estimation, one of the conditions for the possibility of incongruence and exceptionalism that lead to significant exclusions of diverse practitioners in professional philosophy.

Essentially, it is the relationship between demands for justification and exclusion that my paper sets out to describe. That is because, I believe, it is this link that will aid in responding to Anita Allen’s call. Ultimately, I claim that the environment of professional philosophy, particularly in the U.S., bears symptoms of a culture of justification, which creates a difficult working environment for many diverse practitioners. I agree with Allen’s assessment that professional philosophy is simply not an attractive setting for many diverse practitioners. In my paper, I advocate for a shift in disciplinary culture from a culture of justification to a culture of praxis as a means of addressing the downsides of the current culture of justification within professional philosophy

The paper proceeds in five parts. First, I briefly define the term, ‘culture of justification’. Second, I identify symptoms of a culture of justification present in the environment of professional philosophy. Third, I outline the kind of exceptionalism and senses of incongruence that such a culture amplifies, which serves to create a difficult professional culture for diverse practitioners. Fourth, I offer a beginning step towards an understanding of philosophical engagement that can avoid the pitfalls of an unchecked, culture of justification. Specifically, I advocate for a shift from a culture of justification to a culture of praxis. Fifth, and finally, I offer a comparative exercise where I show how two disparate positions on philosophical engagement, i.e. Graham Priest’s definition of philosophy as critique and Audre Lorde’s observations of the limitations of philosophical theorizing, are both manifestations of philosophical engagement according to an understanding of philosophy as a culture of praxis.

I genuinely look forward to reading the comments offered here on the paper. I’d hoped it would become a conversation piece. Thank you to everyone with SRGP for making this exchange possible.

[Bill E. Lawson]

Professor Dotson has taken up the challenge of Professor Allen and in the process presented all of us who are concerned with what it means to be an academically trained philosopher with the challenge to rethink how we think of philosophy and what it means to be a philosopher and do philosophy. Professor Dotson correctly notes that diverse practitioners of philosophy have often attempted to vindicate their presence in the discipline. The goal should be to rethink what is meant by philosophy. Professor Dotson thinks that there is a way to open philosophy to other voices. I agree with her here and while there is much to discuss in Professor Dotson’s article, I want to note that her essay gives us pause to think about, at least, three ways those persons working as an academic philosopher, and are members of the group of, and I like her coinage, ‘diverse practitioners of philosophy,’ have reasons to doubt the welcomeness of the academic discipline of philosophy. By this I mean that those persons who bring different cultural and intellectual framings to the discipline are not welcomed with regard or respect as full participants in the academic game.

My comments will address one of the three problem areas of being in the philosophy profession. Let me preface my remarks with a personal anecdote. I recently had the old, dark brown, wooden, high in height bookcases removed from my office. These bookcases blanketed every available wall space in my office except the window behind my desk. It made my office look like a cave with me at the far end from the entrance. This summer all of them were removed and the books placed on shelves that allow the books to be stored almost entirely on one side of the room. This left two walls empty. I felt I had to put some pictures or something on these walls to balance the room. What to put on these walls? During this period, I was thinking about what to write for this blog regarding Professor Dotson’s article and I had just completed Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do. Steele reminded me of Dotson’s article in that the spaces we find ourselves in, as profession philosophers, are often themselves unwelcoming. If you visit the floors that accommodate most philosophy departments there is often nothing that would indicate a friendly intellectual space except for someone who, as Professor Dotson hints, was not already predisposed to view diverse practitioners of philosophy as being beyond the academic pale. These spaces rarely appear welcoming to those persons with other philosophical intuitions. What to put on my office walls? I could, of course, put pictures of my family, neatly spaced on these walls. Some such pictures were on my desk and I liked having them there. I could have, of course, left the walls bare and the room would be symbolically out of balance, me the only African American philosopher in my department. As much as I liked this idea, it so happened that the department hired another African American philosopher (male) and for the first time in my academic career I was not the only “black” philosopher in the department. This is a fine point after three decades and six schools. What to put on my office walls?

At this point, one could reasonably ask: ” “Why be so concerned with what’s on the walls?” Put some pictures of your family, some landscapes, and a few philosophers and be done. You have written on John Locke and Frederick Douglass, just put up a nice 8x10 of each and some nice family shots and be done. It is at this point that Professor Dotson reminds us that in fact it is up to us, as much as we can, to find that space or make that space in which we feel comfortable. But as we know this will not always be easy?

In fact, Professor Dotson reminds us that there are, at least, three cites of “unwelcomeness” in the academy for ‘diverse practitioners of philosophy.’ There is the physical space in which these department’s are housed, the attitudes of the other philosophical practitioners, and dealing with what turns out to be the main focus of Professor Dotson’s article, a culture of justification, which creates a difficult working environment for many diverse practitioners.’ To deal with this third issue, Professor Dotson proposes what she calls a culture of praxis. Accordingly for Dotson, the first component of a culture of praxis is a value placed on seeking issues and circumstances pertinent to our living. In this regard almost every aspect of our lives in the academy is grist for the philosophical mill. This means thinking about how one dresses for work, what one researches and publishes, and what pictures one puts on one’s office wall will involve a level of philosophical contemplation. I did put pictures on my wall. There is a picture of the African American philosophers who participated in the 1989 conference I organized on the black underclass. There is a nice photo of a young Miles, a Joseph Holston print, the Great Day in Harlem photo, and a poster from a Jim Alexander’s photo exhibition showing a young black man standing down hooded Klan’s men. I also arranged my books like goods in a supermarket. The items you want people to buy are at eye level. Since I work mostly on African Americans, the books at eye level are mostly books about the black American experience. I nearly always have music playing in my office, Keith Jarrett, Miles, Trane, Monk, Rick Ross, Billy Harper, Funkadelics, and others. I like my office. Students of color stop by to chat about their work and seem feeling very comfortable in my office. I did have a white female student admit that when she first came to my office she felt out of place, like she did not belong. I wonder why. Let me note that nothing about the arrangement of my office is meant to make others uncomfortable, it is meant to make my workspace comfortable for me

Raising questions about what pictures I should put on my office wall may seem to some a very non-philosophical concern. But I take, as one of the aims of Professor Dotson’s essay is to be the point about being comfortable in one’s doing of philosophy. This means raising issues and concerns that are your issues and concerns. As diverse practitioners of philosophy, we must work to make ourselves comfortable in the profession.

Working in the academy as a philosopher is often very challenging for those persons who are ‘diverse practitioners of Philosophy.’ As Dotson retells the story of her sister, we who have students coming to our offices wanting to join the ranks of professional academic philosophers are often torn between our understanding of the need for diverse practitioners in philosophy and the realization of the unwelcoming attitude that swathes the academic philosophical profession. Raising these issues, as a philosophic concern will, as Professor Dotson knows well may mean that some will ask: “How is this paper Philosophy?”

[Nathan Nobis]

For convenience, Priest's reply is here:

http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/156/133

and Dotson's reply to Priest is here:

http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/157/134

[Ron Sundstrom]

The question, “how is this paper philosophy?,” emerges from the presumptions embedded in the practices of contemporary mainstream academic philosophy. Lawson’s comments directly address these presumptions What, however, counts as mainstream philosophy is too amorphous for easy definition. There are many, if you will, streams of various dimensions that exist and are represented in the many philosophy departments and conferences (not including other departments and disciplines) in the United States. These streams are the products of social networking and have systems for reproducing themselves and legitimizing scholarship. These processes are illustrated by Randall Collins’ _The Sociology of Philosophies_. Collin’s sketch of how academic social networks operate via interaction rituals and cultural capital is useful in understanding the lives, ranking, and legitimization of academics.

These social networks become inbred and progress beyond the arguing over technical distinctions and applications of recognized methods is stymied. Opportunity is hoarded within standard practices and is sparsely shared with those who bring in alternative perspectives and methods. Worse, these inbred methods get monopolized by individuals who cannot see beyond their own perspectives and mistake their subjective positions for the universal. Gayle Salamon’s “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy” (Hypatia 24:1, 2009: 225-30), illustrates this problem with a description of a scene at an APA interview in which she is called on to justify the inclusion of queer theory in her curriculum to a hypothetical Christian Evangelical student. Salamon’s critique though goes beyond that point, to question the centrality of justification as a method within philosophy. This is a point that goes to the heart of the problem of philosophy for those who are in the discipline, but who are foremost committed to addressing real problems of human communities, and especially those that suffer and resist oppression and domination. Justification is but one approach, accomplished through various methods, and does not come before the confronting of or amelioration of injustice. When academic justificatory practices take on a life of their own, when they become a way of life, it crowds out the demands of life, and therefore crowds out vital contributions like Salamon’s that aim at “increasing the livability of those lives outside the norm.”

Dotson extends the critique of narrow visions of justification in academic, and in particular Anglo-American, philosophy. Her analysis, and Graham Priest’s response to her, is insightful about the hazards and promises of contemporary philosophical practice Their critique of orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy is accurate, as is their judgment that the discipline would be improved by the generation of more ideas from scholars that engaged with a greater variety of approaches, texts, and topics. Dotson’s argument about the prevalent culture of justification in contemporary philosophy is particularly enlightening, especially in regards to how narrowly justification is understood and applied in the institution of academic philosophy. Along with Priest, and with Sanchez, given his comments above, I think that in some form and at various degrees, justification is part of the philosophical engagement, and is inseparable from theory committed to engaging people as they are and toward, as Salamon wrote, “increasing the livability of those lives outside of the norm.” Dotson, however, is correct to point out that her criticism is not aimed at justification as a part of philosophical engagement, but about how justification is narrowed and disciplined in institutionalized academic practice.

[Gayle Salamon]

The Burden of Showing One's Face

I'm delighted to be able to join this discussion of Kristie Dotson's provocative and important paper, in which she takes up Anita Allen's charge to "shift the burden to the discipline," and outlines the culture of justification that makes philosophy a less than welcoming environment for many practitioners. Dotson points to the ways in which diverse practitioners of philosophy are required to bear that burden and considers the kind of labor that would be required to change it, noting that "the burden of shifting justifying norms within a professional environment that manifests symptoms of a culture of justification involves sacrificing one's labor and energies toward providing a catalyst for change via numerous legitimating narratives." She and the commentators above also ask: who bears the responsibility for bearing this burden in the profession? Carlos Sanchez offers a number of different iterations of that burden in his response, and concludes by characterizing it as "the burden of showing my face." That started me thinking about what it means to show one's face in a professional sense or setting. That burden can sometimes be an active one, taking responsibility for the destabilization of constricting norms. It can also be a metaphorical matter; Bill Lawson is talking about the burden of deciding what "face" one should offer to the departmental hallway through the physical organization of one's office, and what familiar or uncomfortable metonymies or dissonances those office walls have for we who inhabit them, or for the students who visit them.

The burden of showing one's face can also articulated in a more passive sense. In his new book The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson opens with an image of a collage by Adrian Piper, who in 1987 became the first tenured African-American woman professor of philosophy.
He reads this piece, Self-Portrait 2002, as a kind of historical archive of the suppression of difference under the rubric of championing diversity, suggesting that it offers "a complex history of the ways in which technologies of power began to work with and through difference in order to manage its insurgent possibilities" (which is also an excellent summation of the work of Ferguson's book). That management is achieved through the mobilizing of visibility. The quashing of the radical potential of difference is not achieved by making it invisible, it is rather by mobilizing that difference in the service of power. In this collage Piper quotes from a letter she wrote to the president at Wellesley, enumerating the ways in which she felt unsupported in her academic life, a lack of support that seems to have chafed all the more not because she was made to feel invisible at her institution but rather that she was highly visible. Wellesley, she explains, used her visibility to enhance its multicultural status at the same time that it refused her the working conditions in which she could thrive in her professional life. This is a passive articulation of that burden, the burden of having one's face shown for the purpose of of representing diversity in a department or field or institution that is anything but.

Showing one's face in the profession is inflected by race, as Carlos Sanchez alludes to with his metaphor of the passport. And it is gendered, as Helene Cixous notes in "Castration or Decapitation", the essay in which she considers the relation between power and language and gender in philosophy. Cixous warns that "knowledge is the accomplice of power" and that "whoever stands in the place of knowledge is always getting a dividend of power," even as she ends that essay hopefully by suggesting that when women speak it will transform the landscape around them, it will necessarily "bring about a shift in the metalanguage" through which philosophy proceeds.

It seems to me that shifting the metalanguage is precisely what Dotson is after. She is interested not in offering a standard, as she points out, but a "standard for standards" in her call for "valuing multiple forms of discliplinary validation." But that shift in the metalanguage is not a guaranteed result of the making visible of the differential distribution of power within the profession. Sometimes that dividend of power does not insure that I succeed in changing the culture around me, but rather results in internal change, and sometimes in uncomfortable ways. Receiving that dividend of power can make me the sort of "incongruous subject" that Sanchez describes, in which I do not become an incongruous through rejecting those norms, but rather become an incongruous through accepting them, even as I am assumed to be a subject who does not measure up to them, a failure to measure up that is often apparent from the minute that I show my face. Sanchez relates the story of John Searle's comments about profundity in philosophy. Searle is able to assess how profound a philosophical work is by way of a kind of instant facial recognition: I know it when I see it. With this pronouncement, Searle offers a perfect layer cake of epistemology, perception, and standards. This Justice Potter test is meant not only to discern what is good philosophy and what is bad philosophy, but also seemingly extends to question of what is philosophy at all, as evident in the title of Dotson's paper. Dotson observes that this same scrutiny does not extend equally to all other disciplines. A bad short story collection, she points out, is still considered fiction, even if it is bad fiction. It does not have the genre designation withheld from it just because it is bad. Not so philosophy.

If what counts as philosophy is a matter of anxious gatekeeping, so too is the matter of what counts as diversity within it. As Dotson points out in her response to Priest: "what counts as diversity within professional philosophy is a complicated affair." Indeed, we need only think of that phrase "diverse practitioners." It is not that the practitioner herself is diverse, but that she represents in an embodied way the lack of diversity of the profession, a distinction that Wendy Brown has observed about the term "intersectional." Or if the practitioner is herself "diverse," she might be so in the sense that Sanchez describes in his discussion of incongruity, a self-division that becomes more profound the more we are successfully hailed by the norms of the profession. As to those norms: Sanchez says he disagrees with Dotson's statement about the importance of not shifting the burden to diverse practitioners themselves. He writes: "The burden of destabilizing norms and validating a culture of praxis falls squarely on us, the diverse practitioners of philosophy and those who value diversity in philosophy. And at the end of the day, that’s our task, our project, and our livelihood." This must be true. And yet. The risk of insisting that the burden of changing the exclusionary culture of philosophy falls squarely on the shoulders of those who value diversity within the profession runs the risk of exonerating those who do not. Such exoneration is not what Sanchez is suggesting, of course. But how ought we understand the responsibility of the profession writ large in regard to these issues?

To that last: I was puzzled by Graham Priest's dismissal of race and gender in his response to Dotson, on the basis of a lack of qualifications to address those issues. "I am not qualified to comment on the race/gender issue," he states. My question is: why not? If philosophy is the realm in which everything can be questioned and interrogated and taken up, what would exclude race and gender from consideration since the philosopher's wheelhouse is understood to include everything else? What kind of schema, to borrow from Sally Haslanger's "Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy" undergirds such a self-disqualification, and precisely what qualifications would be required in order to comment on "the race/gender issue," an issue that is in that formulation bifurcated but singular? If the answer is that the burden of seeing, addressing, and solving such problems belongs exclusively to those who feel and suffer them, then we begin to see something of the structure behind the dearth of diversity in the profession. If that burden is not understood to be a matter of shared concern, then have we not placed that burden, once again, entirely on those practitioners who have the fewest resources to take it up, as Dotson suggests? How would philosophy look different if we understood that burden to be a collective matter, if we understood race and gender to be of necessary concern to everyone in the profession?

[Kristie Dotson]

After reading the first set of responses, I feel extremely honored and humbled. I learned a great deal from reading and engaging the work of all the participants. And it is truly an honor to have this exchange with y'all. That said…let’s chat…

There is so much to discuss that I don’t know where to start! So I’ll start with the first response, i.e. Carlos Sanchez’s reply. Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, Prof. Sanchez!

My reply:

You know, it is becoming more and more clear to me that what counts as univocally relevant, justifying norms (in the way Sanchez so beautifully fleshes out) may follow from a relatively small portion of the professional philosophy population. That is to say, norms of the profession that we learn in graduate school represents the work of a very small contingent of working philosophers, but it does serve to institutionalize and, as Sanchez so rightly points out, create “internalized” norms in the profession at large. But I wonder, with Lawson, what the profession would look like if everyone “worked to make themselves comfortable,” in a way where they genuinely interrogate what it would mean for them to be comfortable given their work and concerns (all the way to the walls of one’s office, which would include, as Sanchez highlights, the destabilization of internalized justifying norms). The shift from making the profession comfortable with me to making myself comfortable in the profession has significant stakes, which include, as Sundstrom suggests, the demands of life and the increase of livable options.

[Kristie Dotson]

In saying that, I don’t believe Sanchez and I disagree on much. Surely, for many diverse practitioners in philosophy, internally and externally destabilizing justifying norms will figure into one’s praxis (even if we would all prefer otherwise). But I do warn against living indefinitely with the internalization of ill-fitting and inappropriate norms. I also urge the realization, along with Salamon, of how limiting it is to think that it is the sole burden of traditionally conceived diverse practitioners to shift justifying norms.

It bears noting, that professional philosophy may be a special case. If we look beyond understandings of “traditionally conceived diversity” to “diversity drawn according to senses of incongruence” (either internal or external), one might be surprised at the numbers of diverse practitioners in philosophy (i.e. who would actually qualify as diverse and, shockingly, who doesn’t). If all of these people take on the task of making themselves comfortable in philosophy, including working through ill-fitting internal justifying norms, then, I imagine, a recognition of the culture of praxis in professional philosophy is possible (which I would argue already exists, but is not fully appreciated.)

I’ve so much more to say, but I wonder if anyone else wants to weigh in here. I certainly think that Salamon leaves us with important questions about the need for making issues of diversity in philosophy collective concerns and the dangers of being the “face” of diversity, which is a concern I worried about quite a bit in writing this paper (that response is on the way!).

[Ron Sundstrom]

The majority of this discussion has so far taken up Dotson’s critique of the culture of justification. I’m curious however about the other part of her argument, which is a call for a culture of praxis. I think that exploring what that means and what it holds might help to address the question about what do about the justifying norms of our profession. One answer, and here I agree with Dotson, is to not get too involved in destabilizing them. Instead, diverse practitioners of philosophy should create new work and pursue the methods best suited to that work. And over time that might do some of the destabilizing that Sanchez wants to see. This doesn’t mean ceasing to critique philosophical method, but it might mean to put one’s energy in the positive construction of work that that is not dependent on the cultural capital or the interaction rituals of traditional philosophy institutions. It means that one should invest in the many groups that are doing alternative work in philosophy and in places that are separate from philosophy departments—Salamon addresses this strategy in her essay “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy.” What is left then is to explore the contemporary meaning of praxis within philosophy.

I am curious about the idea of praxis, and what constitutes it, in Dotson’s analysis. Priest, in his reply, puzzles over that word too and wonders why she chose it since what she is arguing for does not necessarily call for action. He cites, by way of comparison, the use of the term by the Yugoslavian Praxis group (Priest, 2012, p.5). That group was Marxist, and rebelling against the increasing authoritarianism evident in Marxist-Leninism as it was carried out in Yugoslavia (see Gajo Petrović’s “Why Praxis?,” Praxis No.1, 1965, and “Philosophy and Politics in Socialism,” in Marxist Humanism and Praxis, ed. Gerson S. Sher, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1978: 7-18). Dotson’s work is one of meta-philosophy, and not the history of philosophy or political theory, so not much rests on the relation of her use of the idea of praxis to its appearance in the history of political theory. Dotson, however, responds that she follows Black Feminist theorists in the use of that term, and what she and they mean by it go beyond action, and includes the idea that who one is and what context one is in affects one’s theoretical interests and approaches (Dotson, 2012b, p.12, fn #5). She claims that a culture of practice has at least two features:
 Value placed on seeking issues and circumstances pertinent to our living, where one maintains a healthy appreciation for the differing issues that will emerge as pertinent among different populations and
 Recognition and encouragement of multiple canons and multiple ways of understanding disciplinary validation. (Dotson, “How is this Paper Philosophy?”, 17)

But I too wonder where is the action in this praxis? Certainly her recommendations call for new and multiple ways of doing philosophy and of reaching out beyond disciplinary bounds. Another way of understanding the idea of praxis that my help here is Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of praxis as primarily communicative and concerned with forming life with others in the public sphere (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In that case praxis as applied to academic philosophy involves engaging plural voices and perspectives, and being open to and engaging discussions within the public sphere. This is what Dotson’s two features of praxis point to. What is more, praxis points toward movements in contemporary philosophy that seek to engage the world; to some extent this applies to so-called experimental philosophy, but even more to field philosophy, and it cues us to remember that this sort of social engagement and research is found in the history of American pragmatism, Marxist praxis philosophers, and critical social theory. The potential vitality in field philosophy lies in the promise of social engagement, and that is what made so powerful the instances of engaged, partisan scholarship within American pragmatism, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s or Jane Addams’s social research and activism, and the activity of the Yugoslavian Praxis group. It is precisely this sort of action that is required if we desire to expand the “livability of those lives outside of the norm.”