by Lisa Herzog on April 28, 2025
Here is a joke. A philosopher goes to a policy committee.
Got it? Okay, okay, it’s probably a bad joke.
It’s also outdated: these days, many philosophers do go to policy committees. The cliché is that a philosopher sits in the academic ivory tower, thinks long and hard about a problem, then writes a theory about it. Somehow, policymakers hear about it, and at some point, they invite the philosopher to a committee in which he or she expounds what the theory means for a concrete policy question, e.g. new legislation or regulation. If it goes well, some ideas from the theory influence actual policymaking, and thus so-called “real life.”
This cliché is too simplistic. But how does political philosophy relate to policy? And how should it do that, in today’s difficult political environment? These were some of the questions of a workshop that we held last week at the Blavatnik School in Oxford. It brought together a range of scholars whose work relates to the broad label we used, “policy-oriented political philosophy.” And if there is one conclusion that can be drawn, it is that “policy-oriented political philosophy” is alive and kicking, with an incredible range of projects that bring philosophy in dialogue with citizens and policymakers, thereby also changing the ways in which we theorize.
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by Miriam Ronzoni on April 28, 2025
I posted this on my (private) Facebook page a few weeks back, just to vent. Since it resonated with quite a few people, I am reposting it here.
I thought it was a platitude, but given the sea of self-congratulatory discourse about Europe (
here’s an example for those who read Italian, but there are plenty) we seem to be surrounded with, maybe it bears saying after all. So here you go.
Europe is not a worthy ideal because the region has had the best art, philosophy, and literature in the world, or because its history and its present constitute a beacon of civilisation, freedom, and rights. It is not the only part of the world that has distinguished itself for amazing creativity and innovation, and it has been on the wrong (very wrong) side of history for much longer than it has not. If Europe is worth championing as a political ideal, it is because, however imperfectly, it represents the quite opposite thought: that we can gather around an acknowledgment of our mistakes, a reckoning with our crimes, and create something better because of it, motivated by the desire not to repeat those mistakes and those crimes. In that, its founding values are unique, and maybe uniquely modest. De facto, that has only happened fairly superficially, very selectively, and often hypocritically – but it has been one central regulative ideal for the past 80 years, and one still worth supporting. If you go on and on about how great Europe is and always has been, you actually betray that very ideal.