UC Santa Cruz

The present work examines five virtues that promise to be helpful for public philosophers as they seek to promote knowledge in non-academic or non-traditional spaces through teaching and dialogue. These five virtues, in order of discussion, are self-forgetfulness, graciousness, Murdochian charity, creativity, and courage. In particular, these virtues promise to be epistemically ameliorative, by which I mean they help public philosophers both promote norms of reasoning that are conducive to knowledge in others, but also in themselves. The ineliminable dialogue at philosophy’s core is a key theme in this work, as is reflected in appendix 1, which serves as a model both for myself and others who are interested in a public-facing philosophy in the spirit of Plato and Socrates. Appendix 2 examines the public philosopher’s epistemic life as it intersects with a challenging case in aesthetics. Appendices 3 and 4 serve as creative prose expressions of the virtues recommended here for public philosophers, in either professional or non-professional settings, while only the former (appendix 3) is non-fiction. Appendices 5 and 6 serve as meditations on writing – part of being a public philosopher involves writing in a way that earns attention from that public – and here again there is a split between non-fiction and fiction, appendix 5 being a non-fictional, faithful examination of the anxieties of Simone Weil, whereas appendix 6 is a fictional poem grounded in metaphor, written to distill the spirit of what I take to be Weil’s most exciting, provocative, and instructive work, Gravity and Grace.