Ogodei_Khan posted:

A thing that is not often talked about is how some philosophy departments and schools of thought have changed form and adopted a more conservative and libertarian guise. It is partially a reaction to the very recent critiques of intuition by people like Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, the burst of sex scandals in older style philosophy departments and the creation of a blog that indirectly implicated a lot of people called what is like to be a woman in philosophy, has been leading to a reconservitization in older rationalist style views and not necessarily but sometimes political conservatism. Critiques of top down approaches in metaphilosophy, issues of empiricism versus rationalism, and issues of how to understand history and physics have created areas where it is more conservative. The creation of philosophy of information ( which is largely empirical) as well as the bleeding of affect theory because of the applications has lead to a lot of attempts to isolate those type of works or an attempt to hammer home older methods with older values. This sometimes amounts to a kinda of elitism that bleeds down and has adopted very conservative and libertarian guises. Some of the more older fashioned rationalist views also resonate with these views and mesh quite well.Further, demographically philosophy as a field is largely anglo, middle age or older and affluent, there views likewise are tending to mirror the politics of those groups in the US. Ethics and Philosophy of History being the exceptional fields with the most women. There are also not a lot of minorities either. Attempts are being made to correct this but there is an attempt to downplay it or outright fight it. An example of survey documenting some of the demographic trends in philosophy was done by philpapers and is soon to be published in the journal Philosophical Studies titled "What Do Philosophers Believe?" The other elephant in the room that is having a causal role in this conservatization is attempt to protect nepotism amongst certain schools and the reshaping of departments along the lines of that nepotism and along certain schools of thought. No one has studied that.