The Art of Philosophical Name-Dropping

One of the books I was reading on holiday was A N Whitehead’s Process and Reality. It’s part of my catching-up-with-metaphysics reading program. There was a really neat quote I liked and wanted to use. It then struck me that quoting A N Whitehead (unless it’s the “western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato” quote which everyone knows) is one of those ways you scare people with the implied level of your erudition.

The first rule is: leave the Big Names alone. Say you're reading Aristotle, Plato, St Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Russell and that ilk, and you will just look like someone who hasn't got past the starting line. If anything, admit to never having got past the first fifty pages of e.g. The Critique of Pure Reason or the Prior Analytics. This makes it look like you don't need to try that hard.

The second rule is: you need to be careful with the attempt-to-impress-with-erudition. Dropping Whitehead’s name can mean you’re slightly cranky or working in a backwater. Hegel is a real danger zone. More people speak reasonably fluent Hegel than you might think. Very, very few people now speak Schelling or Fitche. Lots of people speak Sartre, quite a few speak Heidegger, and to judge by the availability of The Phenomenology of Perception in cheap paperback, quite a few speak Merleu-Ponty as well. Jaspers and Husserl are and will remain safely and impressively obscure.

Here are some simple but effective substitutions: instead of John Stuart Mill, mention William Whewell; Norwood Russell Hanson instead of Karl Popper; Henri Bergson instead of William James; Spinoza for Descartes; W V O Quine for A J Ayer and Michael Polyani for Paul Feyerabend.

Mention F H Bradley and someone may attempt to blow the dust off you. Mention Lucretius to anyone under sixty and they won’t know who you’re talking about, anyone over sixty may well have translated passages in Greek classes at school. Leave Nietzsche and Schopenhauer alone: they attract a fanatical following. Don’t go near Marx – he wrote a lot and you will be expected to know every line. Engels is okay – especially as you can plausibly restrict your reading plausibly to the classic Condition of the Working Class in England. People who name-drop J L Austin are Americans trying to look clever. Quite a few people speak fairly fluent Wittgenstein and he’s not much fun to read. If you really have read Charles Saunders Pierce, you will never need to prove yourself as a philosopher in any other way.

My personal bombs to drop? Michael Polyani and Gaston Bachelard. You can safely say that “everything interesting and true about post-modernism is in Polyani” and Bachelard is charming and interesting to read. The Poetics of Space is a classic – everybody’s heard of it, very few have read it.