Doing Philosophy. An Inquiry into the Academic Lives of Philosophers

This research deals with a question that has not been convincingly answered in sociological studies: what do philosophers do? Sociologists have traditionally been interested in philosophy mainly as a means of justifying their own disciplinary knowledge rather than as a proper object of sociological inquiry. On the one hand, early sociologists claim that their domain is different from that of philosophers as it is a scientific discipline; on the other hand, new approaches amongst sociologists consider philosophy as an intellectual ally or foundation for the discipline. Except for a few authors such as Collins, Fuller and Geisler, only a handful of scholars have studied philosophy as a professional culture and discipline deploying sociological theory and concepts. In this document, I propose to begin to fill this gap through an exploratory sociological study of the practice and effects of mainstream professional philosophy in the UK. Therefore, my study addresses the formation, boundary-work, pedagogical effect, disciplinary tensions and neoliberal negotiations of professional contemporary philosophy in the UK. In this sense, this work tries to understand the complex social interactions amongst tradition, embodied subjectivities, organisations, knowledge pretensions, conflicts, policies and the heterogeneous materials that are mobilised by practitioners of philosophy to shape philosophy in its current institutionalised forms. Combining theoretical insights with an ethnographic approximation to this field, with in-depth interviews, historical research, reading of institutional documents and numerical data, I attempt to develop a realistic social description of philosophy as practised in the UK. As a result, I characterise the socio-educational situation of analytic philosophy as a culture, in consideration of the dreams and terrors of its practitioners and the enaction of social forces and socio-technical apparatuses