I hold the view, borrowed from G. W. F. Hegel, the nineteenth-century’s primo philosopher of history, that philosophy plays an oversized role in shaping human events. So do earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, global warming periods, plagues and nasty fights over water and fertile fields. What philosophy helps to shape are the worldviews of people who live in cultures permeable to its practice. 

With that in mind, one of the reading collections I took with me for our week in California was the annual publication of the American Philosophical Association, the November 2023 issue of Proceedings and Addresses. It contains Presidential Addresses for each geographical division, prize-winning lectures, Memorial Minutes and professional news of other kinds. It seemed a good place to see what’s drawn attention within the profession from coast to coast, over the past year.

Three of the nine winning lectures were by men, six by women. Poor guys. Talent has obviously jumped the genders. (I’m kidding.)

Certain lectures, David Chalmers’ Eastern Division Presidential Address, Jonathan Schaffer’s Sanders Lecture, and Jennifer Nagel’s Sosa Prize Lecture, were about what we can know or what reality ultimately is. These are traditional topics and they were handled by each lecturer in a manner consistent with a physicalist worldview. That means, what’s real is whatever physics describes as the ultimate ingredient – that of which everything is composed, in the cosmos as well as the human scene. 

Chalmers’ view is that thinking does not require sensory input from our bodies. Setting aside the thinking involved in activities like riding a bicycle, AI can do the thinking just as well as the fleshly-embodied you or I can do it. Whew! Thinking without the human sweat. That’s a relief!

Schaffer aims at an explanatory system of the most encompassing kind: a metaphysical system. He wants one with enough reach to account for everything – from minds to mushrooms to money – but simple enough to print on the front of your T-shirt. So, unlike the logical positivists of Vienna in the 1930’s (for whom only sense data and logical relations were philosophically interesting), Schaffer sees no need to exclude the extra-physical chunks of experience. That said, it turns out that the only features of reality to appear on your T-shirt, ladies, will be the quantifiable ones. So the physicalism that inspired the Vienna positivists is still calling the shots, though perhaps more diplomatically.

Jennifer Nagel begins her Sosa Prize lecture with the recognizably Platonic problem of distinguishing real knowledge from “right opinion”— that is, from the guesses that merely happen to turn out right. Take facial recognition, for example. Can a machine replicate it or does it require some power that sets human beings apart from machines and alone deserves the title of knowledge? When we recognize faces, we do so despite changes of expression, angle, context and so forth. Is it possible to program facial recognition by AI? Well, yes, if millions of photo images are used to train the learning models. Eventually, by trial and error, the success rates will approach ours. Since neither we nor AI models get it right all the time, real knowledge is not housed in some ontological container separate from right opinion. Plato was wrong to idealize knowledge. Like the AI models, we too “learn from prediction errors … .”

Are people like machines? Somewhat like machines? Like machines provided you leave out a lot? If philosophy contributes to the shaping of worldviews within culture, what happens to people when their horizons are shaped in this way by philosophers? Let’s not be in any hurry to answer … .

Eleonore Stump gave one of the John Dewey lectures. Traditionally, those include an intellectual autobiography, where the speaker tells how she began, and how she came in time to her present concerns. In Stump’s case, developments she does not here recount what led her to convert to Catholicism, to work on Augustine, on the theology of Thomas Aquinas, on medieval logic, and the problem of human suffering. Apart from anecdotes I could recognize – recalling the headwinds for women in philosophy in her graduate school days and mine – the rest is a clear and cogent essay, though not particularly illustrative for the present era. It could have been written at any time. 

Now for a philosopher with concerns primarily social and political. Ann Gary gave another of the Dewey lectures. Her thinking evolved from a dissertation in what would later be called the field of cognitive psychology to “the 70’s, the decade in which we created academic feminist philosophy and its institutions.” She weathered and even flourished in and through “a crisis” in the feminist journal Hypatia, concerning leadership and inclusiveness. She took over as editor, “we built Hypatia back up … then a highly diverse team … took over in 2019 and pursued interesting new directions.” She omits details but I may be able to fill them in. I don’t know what happened at Hypatia but, in my limited experience of intra-feminist strife, the winner will be the one who can most assertively push through her claim to be the deepest-down-underneath-it-all underdog! 

Gary finishes with a plea to bring into the profession people from groups and “ways of life” previously excluded, quoting Mariana Ortega’s exhortation to “ignore the empty promises of justice and neutrality” in order better to understand “each other’s way of life … .” 

Anyway, I wish she would supply an example of a “way of life” that’s been hidden from philosophical view by the empty promise of justice and neutrality. Absent concrete illustrations, Gary is at risk of committing what might be called the fallacy of scattershot condemnation. 

There were more papers, but this sample suffices for our rapid overview. We were looking for philosophical indications for the future. On the surface, the picture looks somewhat discouraging. On the metaphysical/epistemological side, robots are almost as good as people. On the practical/societal side, the last shall be first, provided the last can get themselves authenticated as truly last by as much inverted rank-pulling as the academic scene will bear.

And yet … and yet … philosophy remains one of the antechambers where the next steps in humankind’s thought-world are prepared. So it might not all be as bleak as it looked at first. If metaphysics still counts only the measurable features of experience as ultimate – that sends a message to philosophers to seek an account of ultimacy that gives equivalent significance to whatever is at least as ultimate even if nonquantifiable. If social philosophy is scattering accusations from the safe perch of someone’s Incommensurable Otherness – that invites philosophers to disdain the game of moral one-upmanship and communicate their worldviews in a style that fosters philosophical friendship across differences. 

There is more to philosophy than the fashions of the hour.

There is still the future.