Philosophical Embarrassment

Daniel Stoljar (Australian National University)

Philosophers are routinely embarrassed by philosophy, or at least write as if they are. According to Thomas Kelly, to take a recent example, “the historical track record of philosophers who offer very abstract and general theories of this or that phenomenon is dismal to the point of embarrassment.” But what should we make of this connection between philosophy and embarrassment?  Taking a clue from sociologist Erving Goffman, in this paper I treat embarrassment in general as revealing of social phenomena and then consider the case of philosophical embarrassment from that point of view.  As we will see, the project allows us to formulate and explore several hypotheses about the discipline of philosophy, why it might be rational to be embarrassed by it, and how this embarrassment might be managed or overcome.