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March 15, 2003

Dear Professor Swartz,

Your essay certainly rang some bells for me. I finished my doctorate at Oxford in 1997, taught briefly at another UK university, then left academia. The phenomenon you describe is particularly pernicious given the battle young philosophy PhD's face in trying to build a career against the background of an immensely competitive academic job market. It's hard to maintain the confidence that one's own ideas are worth developing when opportunities to discuss them are so often the scene of brash confrontation, the objective of which seems generally to be the boosting of the critic's reputation for quickness of mind.

This kind of ethos encourages a very particular kind of philosophical temperament, in which raw mental muscle is rather more prominent than a desire for truth. The analogy with the courtroom is apt; a lawyerly disposition to seek victory comes to be far more important than it should be.

I remember once seeing the late John Rawls take questions after a lecture: he was honest enough to admit that he just didn't know how to respond to a particular objection, and promised to get back to the questioner once he'd had a chance to think about the matter. That's just what I feel one should do in this kind of circumstance; it would have felt like career suicide to try it in certain Oxford circles.

I was no Rawls, of course, and I also have some other doubts about whether I really wanted to be a professional philosopher. But it was also true that others among my peers, more talented than I, had similar feelings, and they too eventually left the profession.

Thanks for expressing concern about this issue in a public way: the promotion of this particular intellectual style ends up impoverishing a profession which one might reasonably have hoped would aim to protect calm, reflective discussion.

Yours,

Tom Runnacles
tom@trunnacl.org


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