Why did a particular philosophical view emerge or flourish at a particular time? Why did another fall into disfavor? Why are philosophers today thinking and writing about the particular questions, problems, ideas, and figures they are?

[photo by Justin Weinberg]

The kind of explanation philosophers typically turn to in thinking about these questions are what we think of as philosophical explanations. That is, we look to the arguments and objections in the relevant literature, the evidence and examples philosophers made use of, the explanatory power of the relevant ideas, and so on.

We look for philosophical explanations for a few reasons. First, they’re obviously relevant. Second, they’re what we’re trained to focus on. Third, since we’re so trained, we’re better at finding those kinds of explanations than others, and so success and any pleasure taken in it reinforces the practice. And fourth, they tend to strike us as the right kind of explanation. Perhaps this is a form of charitable interpretation: philosophers’ beliefs should be justified, so we look for the kinds of things that justification involves, such as reasons. Perhaps it is a form of self-flattery: we want the members of the club we’re a part of to have been doing things right.

But (and I know I make use of this phrase a lot, in lots of ways): philosophers are people, too. And just as the thinking of ordinary people in all sorts of ordinary contexts is influenced by various social, economic, political, institutional (etc.) forces to which they’re subject, so, too, are philosophers.

And so philosophical explanations of the course of philosophy are going to be, at best, incomplete.

Historians of philosophy often take the broader social context in which philosophers ideas emerge into account, to varying degrees, but it seems that lately we’ve been seeing in increase in more robustly “externalist” explanations of philosophy, and an increased receptiveness to them. Some of them have been mentioned at Daily Nous before (e.g., here).

In a recent example of this kind of work, “Critical Realism and Technocracy – RW Sellars’ Radical Philosophy in its Context,” Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh) describes an “externalist explanation” as “one which takes, as explananda, contextual factors rather than considerations pertaining to the internal logic of the arguments.” She adds:

Externalist explanations come in many varieties. A historian of philosophy of science who considers the practical benefits conferred by a philosophical view, such as realism, on practicing scientists, can avail themselves of one kind of externalist explanation; a historian who focusses on the mesh between a certain theory and pedagogical practices within the institutions that popularized it, has another kind. Most well known are the externalist explanations in the history of science referring to the social and political context within which a scientific movement has risen to prominence. [notes omitted]

I’m curious about a few things here:

• Do others agree there has been an increase in both the production of and disciplinary receptiveness to externalist explanations in philosophy?
• What are some further examples of this kind of work produced by people associated with philosophy departments?
• Since some of the skills and knowledge needed to produce externalist explanations (in part because they’re inherently interdisciplinary) are distinct from those that philosophers are typically trained in, does the increase in such work represent the emergence of something we should as a profession recognize as a subfield or area of specialization?
• Is the increase in externalist explanation a way that philosophy is “catching up” with other humanities disciplines? And if so, what might come of that?

and, of course:

• What is a good externalist explanation for the increase of externalist explanations in philosophy?

Discussion welcome.

(Thanks to Eric Schliesser for bringing Chirimuuta’s article to my attention.)

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