Thanks for the recommendation! I watched one of her political videos then found the one called “Why I Quit Academia” because I was curious (her YouTube channel describes her as an “ex-philosopher”). It sounds like she was educated in a Continental rather than analytic philosophy department, at least in grad school – and probably in undergrad, too, or she wouldn’t have chosen such a department for grad school. So she’s describing a flavor of bullshit that I tend to encounter from people in other humanities disciplines – mostly various literature departments (Comp Lit is usually the worst), but also History, Art History, etc. Analytic philosophy departments are their own brand of special.

She quotes Daniel Dennett, who’s definitely an analytic philosopher, as saying that most of academic philosophy involves discovering higher-order truths about Chmess: a variant of chess that nobody plays. He was probably talking about the kind of bullshit metaphysics that goes on in analytic departments: trying to discover the deep nature of things by analyzing our concepts of them, which mostly ends up being an explication of the worldview presupposed by a very specific upper-middle-class dialect of English. For the most part, analytic philosophers don’t claim to be advancing the cause of social justice when they do that kind of stuff… but now philosophy of race and gender have become very trendy in analytic departments. People tend not to be as aggressively Leftist, and you do actually find the occasional libertarian (Nozick, also cited in the video, was an analytic philosopher) or Christian monarchist (OK, maybe there’s just the one in my department). Importantly, analytic philosophers (like Contrapoints!) usually think there’s more than merely symbolic value in engaging directly with the opposition, and that you can change people’s minds with reasons… even if we acknowledge that most beliefs are formed non-rationally and only justified post hoc.

Analytic philosophers, unlike Continental philosophers, pride themselves on writing clearly and intelligibly and making explicit what they mean by key technical terms. It’s definitely possible to hide a lot of bullshit behind a facade of clarity, and to read a paper understanding every sentence perfectly but then come away wondering what the hell you were supposed to get out of it. But they can also write things that are accessible to a general audience without being dumbed-down. An internet acquaintance of mine, Kate Manne (a professor at Cornell), recently published a book called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny that has attracted some mainstream attention – including the ire of Jordan Peterson and his troll army, which must speak in its favor.

Now I’m mostly just rambling, but… I guess it seems like Contrapoints might have been better served by studying in an analytic department, since she seems to value clarity, accessibility, cross-ideology engagement, and humor.