Close Reading
Matt Yglesias wonders whether being made to read small amounts of material very, very carefully “is a fact about philosophy departments in general, or the Harvard philosophy department in particular”.
It’s a fact about analytic philosophy. Especially the M&E people. Every clause counts with them, because there’s no data, only argument. So there aren’t any casual arguments. A related phenomenon is that philosophy papers will often have only six or seven citations, which would be unheard of in many other fields.
Participating in seminars or reading groups with philosophers (and people from other disciplines) can therefore be an amusing experience, viz:
Philosopher: I’d like to focus on Marx’s claims about commodities in the first few sentences of Capital I.i. It seems to me that what Marx might or might not be doing here admits of four possible interpretations. Call them φ-1 to φ-4.Political Theorist: Wait a minute—- You mean you didn’t read the whole 50 pages? Or the Rawls assigned for this week (and every week)?
Sociologist: What? I thought we were supposed to read the first 15 chapters.
Economist (in the wrong room): Who is this we’re talking about?
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