General Remarks
Academic philosophy is generally healthy in most respects relevant to the work of the Commission.1 In almost every part of the subject, high scholarly standards are brought to bear, both in the vetting of manuscripts for publication and in the evaluation of individual scholars for appointment, tenure and promotion.2 Since philosophy is often focused on normative questions connected to public policy, much work in the field could be considered 鈥渁dvocacy.鈥� But as the main Report emphasizes, politically engaged scholarship of this sort is consistent with the highest scholarly standards so long as the empirical and philosophical bases for the philosopher鈥檚 normative conclusions are handled responsibly, as they generally are in contemporary moral and political philosophy. Moreover, even in areas of this sort, the culture of philosophy is generally open to the expression and defense of a range of viewpoints. Journals and academic presses routinely publish work that is critical of the prevailing liberal consensus, both from the left and from the right. It is certainly true that notably conservative positions (in the contemporary American sense) are underrepresented in academic philosophy relative to their representation in the wider world (Peters et al. 2020). But we see no reason to believe that this pattern is the result of pernicious censorship or gatekeeping.3
1 Which is not to say there are no issues. For reasons that remain poorly understood, women and certain demographic minorities are underrepresented in academic philosophy in the U.S., not only by comparison with other fields in the humanities but by comparison with adjacent fields like linguistics and cognitive science (Conklin et al.聽2019; Leslie et al.聽2015). With regard to scholarship in particular, an analysis of citation patterns across 13 academic fields, performed for the Commission by Gavin G. Cook, shows that philosophy exhibits an extraordinary level of citation inequality, in two complementary senses. From above, citations are unusually concentrated in a thin sliver of much-cited papers: in philosophy, roughly the top tenth of papers accounts for 80% of all citations, among the most concentrated distributions of the fields analyzed, whereas in the natural sciences it takes the top quarter to a third of papers to do so. From below, the median philosophy paper is not cited at all: for publication cohorts from 1960 through the 2000s, roughly 70鈥�80% of philosophy papers have no recorded citations, the highest band among the fields analyzed (alongside history and art) and several times the rates typical of the natural and behavioral sciences. (Standard bibliometric databases undercount citations made in books, so the absolute uncited rates overstate matters in book-oriented fields; the cross-field contrast is the robust signal.) This suggests that the research culture in philosophy is notably inefficient: either journals are publishing a great deal of bad work, or the good work they are publishing often has no impact. This is so to some extent in every field, but philosophy sits at the extreme.
2 Needless to say, philosophers disagree about what these standards ought to be. For a spirited internal critique of the standards applied within analytic philosophy, see Williamson 2006.
3 The most detailed study of ideology in academic philosophy (Peters et al. 2020) notes a reported willingness among a substantial minority of philosophers on the left to reject submitted manuscripts and grant applications that support conclusions associated with the right, and a similar reported tendency among philosophers on the right to dismiss work whose conclusions are associated with the left.聽 As the authors note, however, their study cannot discern the extent to which these self-reported tendencies make a difference to real patterns of publication and grant funding, nor the extent to which these biases reflect thoughtful judgment about the substance of the arguments as distinct from the sort of unreasoned bias that would be problematic by any standard.
Case (2015) notes a tendency of philosophers in ethics and social philosophy to presuppose a left-of-center audience in their choice of examples and political side remarks, both in their writing and in their teaching. This tendency may go some way to explaining the underrepresentation of political conservatives in academic philosophy, but it cannot be the whole story. Political conservatives are significantly underrepresented across the professoriat, including in the sciences; political donations from American scientists, for example, now run overwhelmingly to Democrats (Kaurov et al. 2022). But it is hard to believe that this general trend is attributable to liberal snark in the physics classroom.