Philosophy in the Public Square

Since its early days, philosophy has found itself in a complicated and often fraught relationship with public life. In Plato's Apology, Plato has Socrates challenge the leaders of Athens to see that they do not know what they think they know and they accuse him of impiety and corrupting the youth. In defense, Socrates argues that he alone cares for the city and its youth. In response, the Athenians convict and execute him. Decades later, when Aristotle is in danger of being tried by the Athenians, he goes into exile saying, as the story goes, that he wanted to prevent Athens from sinning against philosophy twice. Aristotle himself becomes the tutor to the future emperor, Alexander the Great. Plato went to the court of Dion of Syracuse of advise him and Plato's Seventh Letter is addressed to him. Plato's Republic seems to show that the entire city needs to be reorganized to be run by the philosopher if the city is to be safe for philosophers. But perhaps the question is also how to make the city safe from philosophers. Hannah Arendt suggests in her article, Philosophy and Politics, that the reason philosophy and politics are at odds is that philosophy is the place for the concern with truth, while politics is the site of doxa, or appearances.  Plato, she argues, tries to bring order to the city by placing truth above doxa or opinion, but really, we are all still, as embodied beings within doxa, seeing only our point of view and building that position with the addition of the multiple points of view that a city brings.  For Arendt, the multiplicity of the city makes us better able to see what is since each of us by ourselves may only bring a part, our own view of how the world appears. So if even the philosopher sees only what appears to her, what then is the importance, relevance and possibility of bringing philosophy to the public square?

In the first half of the Spring semester 2014, the senior philosophy majors at Wabash will think through this question by reading the efforts of other philosophy bloggers and creating their own blogposts that bring philosophy into the public sphere. Stay tuned!