Something is happening in philosophy, something unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontained. “Starting around 2010,” writes Crispin Sartwell in the LA Review of Books, “there was a striking change, surprising to someone trained in the 1980s”: Some philosophy professors began to write a lot more personally; they tried to show how philosophical ideas had affected and might affect their own lives. Some started writing what came to be thought of as philosophical self-help.
Do you think the "Confessional Turn" originated with Peter Railton's 2015 APA Dewy lecture when he gave a powerful account of his own experience with depression? I think of it as an influential first entry in the recent turn to personal illness narratives in analytic philosophy.
I remember that event vividly, and I'm sure it played a role, but my sense is that work in this vein was already on the rise before 2015, at least as far back as Susan Brison's "Aftermath" in 2003. Jennifer Rosner's book, "If a Tree Falls" (about having a deaf child) came out in 2010; that made a strong impression on me. And my first foray in the area was "The Midlife Crisis," which was published in Philosophers' Imprint in 2014. I'd be curious to know what a systematic study of the recent history would reveal.
I am late to this post/conversation, but I am really enjoying it, and I wanted to mention Owen Flanagan's "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?", which as I understand it was given as a talk in 2008 to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, then published in 2011. I wasn't aware of Railton's talk and all of these examples are fascinating!
*All* people writing blogs and posting on social media are just more revealing of their personal lives than they used to be before these things became common. Personal photos, minutiae of daily lives, emotional problems, pet peeves, likes and dislikes...
Do you think the "Confessional Turn" originated with Peter Railton's 2015 APA Dewy lecture when he gave a powerful account of his own experience with depression? I think of it as an influential first entry in the recent turn to personal illness narratives in analytic philosophy.
I remember that event vividly, and I'm sure it played a role, but my sense is that work in this vein was already on the rise before 2015, at least as far back as Susan Brison's "Aftermath" in 2003. Jennifer Rosner's book, "If a Tree Falls" (about having a deaf child) came out in 2010; that made a strong impression on me. And my first foray in the area was "The Midlife Crisis," which was published in Philosophers' Imprint in 2014. I'd be curious to know what a systematic study of the recent history would reveal.
I am late to this post/conversation, but I am really enjoying it, and I wanted to mention Owen Flanagan's "What Is It Like to Be an Addict?", which as I understand it was given as a talk in 2008 to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, then published in 2011. I wasn't aware of Railton's talk and all of these examples are fascinating!
*All* people writing blogs and posting on social media are just more revealing of their personal lives than they used to be before these things became common. Personal photos, minutiae of daily lives, emotional problems, pet peeves, likes and dislikes...
I guess philosophers are no exception..