According to Philosopher M.G. Piety, Anglo-American-Analytic-Academia (AAAA) is long due a transformation of form. That form has been christened flash philosophy. Whilst the institutionalisation of anything requires standardisation, specialisation and some procedure for quality-control, Piety argues that the institutionalisation of professional philosophy for AAAA has been mostly corrosive for the tradition’s development and public-relations [1]. Piety laments these issues in an interview with the Stoa:
“Think of your average article as something between 25 and 35 pages. That’s just not accessible to the average reader. But more than that, it’s not really going to draw in a lot of readers from among the community of professional philosophers - because the average philosophical article is so long that most philosophers don’t even read them. You work a long time getting an article into print: it takes you maybe a year to write the article, you send it off, it takes you maybe six months to a year to referee reports back, you have to make revisions to that article in response to the referee reports, you send that back, you get it published maybe. It’s at least two years probably all together, and then your thesis gets into print - your thirty-page long article - and half a dozen people read it. [AAAA Philosophy’s writing style is] really depressing, it’s difficult writing. We’ve got people sort of talking past each other and everyone is under pressure to publish. You’ve got volumes and volumes of work coming out but their so long and so dense. There’s a lot of repetition, there are a lot of people who are developing essentially the same insights, but they don’t know about it. So it retards the development of the discipline that articles have got this long. It also makes them completely inaccessible to the public.”
(See footnote for the full quote [2])
Whilst this over-internalising has stunted the disciplines growth and external public relations in contemporary discourse, Piety presents Flash Philosophy as a viable solution. Spawning from the literary genre of flash fiction, flash philosophy demands that philosophical ideas be sufficiently expressed as efficiently as possible. This new form constrains a philosophical thesis to as many as 5 pages, or approximately 2,500 words. Whilst this sounds somewhat radical, it is clear that Piety does not intend for flash philosophy to undermine or over-turn the AAAA tradition, but rather that this new form helps aid its development both professionally and publicly [3].
To assure the more conservative pedants of professional Philosophy, Piety and her research assistant Daniel Wiedinmyer will be officially initiating flash philosophy into academia with a forthcoming volume, which will showcase flash philosophy’s unheralded presence within AAAA by including flash-styled articles published by journals such as Mind, Analysis and The Philosophical Review. One iconic example offered by Piety and Wiedinmyer of flash philosophy’s presence in AAAA is Gettier’s’ seminal two-page article, ‘Is justified true belief knowledge?’ (1963), which the field of Epistemology still attempts to make a full recovery from. Gettier’s article is a compelling example of professional flash philosophy at its best because it demonstrates that length and density are neither a compromise to, nor measure of, academic rigour, impact and insight for AAAA. In the long-term, Pty and Wiedinmyer hope for established AAAA journals to endorse this new form of philosophical communication by including flash philosophy sections alongside traditional long-form articles.
Although Piety criticises Philosophy within the confines of contemporary AAAA research, Philosophy’s public relations thrives within the contemporary digital ecosystem. These mediums range from public-facing platforms such as The School of Life, The Institute of Art and Ideas and Psyche; or more academically inclined platforms such as The Daily Nous and Philosophy Now; to podcasts such as Philosophy Bites, The Partially Examined Life, Philosophize This! and Very Bad Wizards (a personal favourite of mine); as well as YouTube channels such as Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube , and Carneades.org. The sheer diversity of digital philosophy communications have collectively demonstrated that the virtues of entertainment, expressiveness, efficiency and expertise can peacefully co-exist in the communication of complex philosophical ideas. Piety’s demand is little more than a plea for AAAA to cohere with the virtues of the digital-era via flash philosophy [4].
footnotes:
[1] Piety’s criticism is levelled mostly at AAAA because Eastern and Continental traditions are more accepting of diverse forms of philosophizing, such as aphoristic (Laozi, Schopenhauer), poetic (Lucretius, Nietzsche, Heidegger) and ordinary language essay (such as essays of Montaigne, Cioran, and Byung-Chul Han) and letters (Seneca and Aurelius) forms. Of course, these examples are hardly exhaustive of either tradition but at least serve to demonstrate the variance of form – not to mention the vast diversity of writing-styles.
[2] "[AAAA Philosophy’s writing style is] really depressing, it’s difficult writing - I see this with colleagues who work on articles for years - they get barely any response to the articles, it’s just very frustrating. More than it just being difficult to get stuff into print, it retards the development of the discipline. We’ve got people sort of talking past each other and everyone is under pressure to publish. You’ve got volumes and volumes of work coming out but their so long and so dense. There’s a lot of repetition, there are a lot of people who are developing essentially the same insights, but they don’t know about it. Because again, the fields have got so specialised and the volume of publication so large that nobody can keep track of all of it. So it retards the development of the discipline that articles have got this long. It also makes them completely inaccessible to the public.” (Piety, The Stoa; 00:05:20)
[3] “What I’m very concerned that doesn’t happen with flash Philosophy is that professional philosophers view it as simple philosophy that’s aimed at non-professionals. I wanted them to appreciate that professional philosophers can write for one another.” (Piety, The Stoa; 00:54:38)
[4] For more information, you can visit Piety’s flash philosophy blog here, read her recent piece discussing flash philosophy in Philosophy Now here, or watch The Stoa interview here.