Abstract

The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labour (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. In §i, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy’s relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of labour. I highlight that for Plato intellectual specialization is central not just to economic but also to political life; and yet, that the very dispersion of scientific expertise, and its esoteric nature, also generates non-trivial challenges to the recognition and political utilization of knowledge. From Plato we can infer that in imperfect circumstances, philosophy’s self-constitution is, in part, a response to these challenges in political epistemology. However, how philosophy is institutionalized differs through time. In §ii, I re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. I use recent work by Dorst (2023) to illustrate synthetic philosophy and to identify some of the processes that give rise to the need for it. In §§ii–iii, I contrast my account with the evolving ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy, in order to make more precise the version promoted here. I do so not just because Kitcher and I use the same term, ‘synthetic philosophy’, but because the temptations inherent in Kitcher’s approach should be resisted.