"New Work in Philosophy" Pitch for "Philosophy as a Normative Discipline"

I was invited by New Work in Philosophy to write a pitch for my newly published article "Philosophy as a Normative Discipline" (Philosophy, 2026). Here it is:

https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/philosophy-as-a-normative-discipline

Among all the philosophy jokes, this one is my favorite:

-        First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher there is an equal and opposite philosopher.

-        Second Law of Philosophy: They are both wrong.

Philosophers disagree on every philosophical issue, including on what philosophy is. In a recent paper published in Philosophy, I chimed in and offered my take (with which some philosophers are bound to disagree) on what philosophy is, which explains—among other things—why philosophers disagree on every philosophical issue, including on what philosophy is.

On the face of it, my account is bold and simple. In contrast to all the other fundamentally empirical disciplines of inquiry (e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, history, etc.), philosophy is unique in being the one and only fundamentally normative discipline of inquiry. All normative questions are philosophical questions, and all philosophical questions are normative questions. Philosophicality just is normativity.

But how is this plausible, you might wonder? Haven’t other disciplines been dealing with normative questions, and philosophy with empirical questions? My paper offers a two-handed explanation.

On the one hand, while it is true that empirical and normative inquiries are more often than not aggregated to, entangled with and/or embedded in each other, the same inquisitive question can be problematized in different ways depending on the context, and it is the specific problematization of an inquisitive question in a given context that picks out certain dimensions or aspects of the question as of immediate inquisitive relevance, while suspending the inquiries into other aggregated, entangled and/or embedded dimensions or aspects for the time being. Thus, for example, “are transwomen women?” is typically treated as a philosophical question nowadays because it is the embedded normative dimension that is typically problematized in the relevant debate, whereas “are platypuses mammals?” is typically treated as an empirical scientific question—unless and until we problematize the normative presumptions underneath, and ask a series of related questions ranging from why some taxonomical approach is preferable to others, to why we should believe in evolutionary theory (upon which the modern cladistic approach to biological classification is based) at all, and so on and so forth. In doing so, interestingly, we begin to travel from the realm of biology to the realm of philosophy of biology, which comports with my claim that all normative questions are philosophical questions.

On the other hand, how about all the ostensibly descriptive claims in metaphysics about the way the world is (vis-à-vis ought to be), such as whether numbers are real, whether fictional characters exist, whether God exists, whether there is grounding, and so on? Compare them with scientific claims about the way the world is, such as whether luminiferous aether exists, or whether schizophrenia is real. Empirical adjudication of the latter is in principle accessible, even if tentatively inaccessible in some cases (e.g. we couldn’t possibly adjudicate whether luminiferous aether exists before conditions for conducting the Michelson-Morley experiment were made available by other scientific and technological developments, along with the general acceptance by the scientific community of normatively entangled ontological and methodological commitments on which modern science is itself premised); by contrast, there is no non-trivial way to problematize the descriptive dimensions of metaphysical claims for meaningful empirical adjudication, and to suspend their entangled or embedded normative dimensions for the sake of such adjudication (e.g. it’s not as if those who insist that numbers don’t exist don’t know that we use numbers day in and day out; rather, what they insist is that we should conceptualize existence in a way that renders the category inapplicable to numbers). In other words, what makes all the ostensibly descriptive metaphysical questions philosophical questions is the fact that, deep down, they can only be meaningfully inquired into as normative questions, rather than as descriptive questions.

How does my normative account of philosophy fare vis-à-vis other meta-philosophical views already on the table? In my paper, I take Bernard Williams’s (2000) famous “philosophy as a humanistic discipline” view as my primary target. Williams sees philosophy (along with the discipline of history, among others) as part of the broader humanistic enterprise of sense-making, as opposed to the scientific enterprise of knowledge-seeking. Whereas the latter purports to offer “an absolute conception of the world as it is, independently of any local or peculiar perspective on it,” the former is necessarily contingent on local perspectives and should be content with making the best sense of a local “us.” Williams believes that understanding philosophy in this way grounds its unique intellectual authority in the era of modern science.

The problem, however, is that Williams cannot explain what distinguishes philosophy from history (which, according to him, is also part of the broader humanistic enterprise) in the grounding of its intellectual authority. In fact, as I detailed in my paper, lots of what Williams say about the intellectual authority of scientific disciplines applies to the discipline of history (including history of philosophy, if we zoom in on its “historical” part), though not to philosophy. The only plausible explanation is that philosophy is a uniquely normative discipline, whereas history is one of the fundamentally empirical disciplines.

Moreover, Williams’s “humanistic” account also cannot explain why philosophy has, throughout its history, been the “incubator” of various other new disciplines. Nor can it explain various other peculiarities of philosophy, such as the popular claim that philosophy is defined “neither by its subject matter, nor by its method, but by its spirit: unbridled criticism” (Priest 2006), or the fact that philosophers disagree on every philosophical issue, including on what philosophy is.

By contrast, my normative account provides simple and elegant solutions to those conundrums. Consider the “incubativity” of philosophy. When empirical adjudication of an ostensibly descriptive claim is inaccessible, sometimes the inaccessibility is in principle while other times it is only tentative. But we cannot always tell ex ante whether it is in principle or tentative, and, for theoretical and practical normative reasons, have to speculate on many of those claims until conditions for their empirical adjudication are ripe—which is why philosophers used to speculate on questions such as “is the world composed of water, fire, earth and air?” and are nowadays speculating on questions about the mental state or questions in cultural anthropology, and which is how new empirical disciplines grow and branch from philosophy all the time. (Indeed, it also means that my normative account of philosophy is compatible with the view—with which I disagree—that normativity does not genuinely exist and is at the end of the day reducible to something non-normative. On that view, philosophy will be exhausted after all potential empirical disciplines are incubated and branch out, and will cease to exist afterwards.) As to other peculiarities: philosophy cannot be defined by its subject matter because normative questions trickle down into all subject matters; philosophers disagree on every philosophical issue because unlike empirical inquiries, normative inquiries cannot rely on descriptive correspondence with the empirical world to anchor and adjudicate fundamental disputes; and so on.

The normative account of philosophy has significant implications for how we do philosophy, some of which I addressed in the paper (e.g. the disciplinary crucialness not only of history of philosophy, but also of comparative philosophy; the wrongs of the received hierarchy between so-called “hard” and “soft” philosophy within certain corners of contemporary academia; etc.) whereas others will be explored in my future work (e.g. philosophical pedagogy; the debate on AI-assisted philosophical thinking/writing; the nature of public philosophy; the future of metaphysics; etc.). Here, I would like to close with some remarks on the issue of boundary-policing, which the paper discussed in greater detail.

Whichever meta-philosophical account you subscribe to, drawing disciplinary boundaries around philosophy is unavoidable as a practical matter. The question is whether the boundaries drawn are reasonable or not. Kristie Dotson (2012) famously called out the fact that the philosophical credential of black feminist theories is all too often dismissed by mainstream philosophers. My normative account shows why this is problematic: racism and sexism are quintessential normative—and hence philosophical—issues to grapple with; the philosophical credential of black feminist theories is, therefore, impeccable.

By contrast, the fast-growing field of “experimental philosophy,” which also frequently encounters the question of “how is this philosophy?,” is indeed fundamentally empirical in nature, and it might appear at first glance that my normative account should discourage philosophers from partaking in experimental philosophy. But this is a misunderstanding, for the distinction between normative and non-normative inquiries should not be confused with their insulation from each other. Rather, given their aforementioned entanglement and embeddedness, the normative account of philosophy encourages interdisciplinarity to the greatest extent possible. In particular, philosophers are more than justified to partake in experimental philosophy, both because the participation of philosophers is needed for the healthy development of experimental philosophy, and because the empirical program of experimental philosophy is needed for the reflective progress of philosophy as a normative discipline.

Thank you for reading. Now it’s time to read my full paper and disagree with me. Joke’s on you (and me)!

References

Dotson, Kristie. 2012. ‘How Is This Paper Philosophy?’, Comparative Philosophy, 3.1, 3–29.

Lin, Yao. 2026. ‘Philosophy as a Normative Discipline,’ Philosophy, online first, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819126101430

Priest, Graham. 2006. ‘What Is Philosophy?’, Philosophy, 81.2, 189–206.

Williams, Bernard. 2000. ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, Philosophy 75.4, 477–496.