[Tom Wesselmann, “Study for Mouth, 8”]
If I’m remembering accurately, T.M. Scanlon recounts a narrative through which a individual sitting subsequent to him on a airplane asks him what he does for a residing. Scanlon admits he’s a thinker, and the man passenger asks, “What are a few of your sayings?” Jonathan Wolff has an outdated column that mentions this story (he has apparently heard just a few totally different variations, so maybe he didn’t have Scanlon in thoughts), and he takes the purpose of telling it to be to “illustrate the deplorable ignorance of the form of individual” who would ask such a query. However I don’t assume the story was initially meant that manner. I recall a sure sort of ruefulness to it. A way that, a minimum of partially, it’s a pity that we don’t have one thing pithy and sensible and memorable and clever to say to nonexperts that might convey a few of our concepts, that we don’t reside as much as the popularly imagined superb of the thinker.
I feel philosophers ought to have sayings and be untroubled to share them with the general public. They’re good PR for philosophy, I feel, and on the very least they’re useful mnemonic gadgets.
Hilary Putnam cautions: “any philosophy that may be put in a nutshell belongs in a single.” Tremendous. Don’t put the entire philosophy within the nutshell. There might be specs and {qualifications} and exceptions and justifications ignored. Your fellow philosophers will tacitly perceive that. When you see your sayings as prompts for additional reflection, quite than as complete summarizations, it is possible for you to to present folks an concept to take with them and take into consideration, with out feeling as if you’re being philosophically careless.
