This letter is addressed to non-academic philosophers who have been frustrated at how unwilling academic philosophers are to engage with their work. Say that you’ve emailed some academic philosophers or sent us your work in hard copy. It’s material you’ve put many, many hours of thought into, and you’re pretty confident that you’re onto something. You wait and… maybe get a dismissive email or (more likely) no response at all. Why?

Over the past decade, I’ve received dozens of emails and self-published books from non-academic philosophers offering their own philosophical views (and some of my colleagues get many more than me). I’ve almost never responded. But, especially as someone who works at a public university, I feel that I owe you some sort of explanation.

To start, I’ll just admit that, as you might have suspected, there is a certain amount of blatant elitism in academic philosophy. Academics are humans, after all, and humans are prone to looking down on each other, to drawing lines between in-groups and out-groups. If you’ve encountered that, then, on behalf of my fellow academics, I apologize. I also want you to know that it’s not the whole story, though. There are at least three other factors.

But before saying what those factors are, here’s why (despite ignoring their emails) I’m sympathetic to philosophers who aren’t lodged in the academy. One of my specialties is the history of European philosophy. Four philosophers whose work I especially like are Baruch Spinoza, Anne Conway, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer. All four had grand philosophical ambitions, writing about topics ranging from the basic nature of reality to the unity of different religions traditions to the essence of morality to the limits of science. Their work is rich, profound, and – in the opinion of many academics –well-worth extensive study.

Even so, if Spinoza, Conway, Kant, or Schopenhauer had lived in our times and sent their work to academic philosophers, I am almost certain they would be ignored, for three reasons.

1. Limited bandwidth. The first factor is pretty mundane: every academic I know is just barely managing their teaching and research obligations. Some of us have some sort of personal life, and some do not. I have a pretty cushy academic job, by most measures, and I end up with maybe 3 hours each month for reading anything that’s not connected to a class or graduate advising, a research project that I’m overdue on, refereeing for a journal, or the work of another academic to whom I’ve promised comments. When I find myself with that free reading time, I typically try to catch up with the most recent publications in my supposed area of expertise (the last time I really felt like I knew the literature in my sub-sub-field was in grad school).

Still, you might reasonably ask, for those of us who aren’t simply elitists, shouldn’t we devote at least some attention to what non-academics come up with? Is it really too much to ask that we spend 20 or 30 minutes seriously engaging with your work? This brings me to the second factor.

2. Collaborative specialists. As with all other academic disciplines, philosophy is now a collection of hyper-specialists who engage in broadly collaborative work – the days of single-authored grand theories are gone. For example, you might think that the meaning of the word “ought” wouldn’t be that hard to pin down… but there have been thousands of pages written in the past few decades exploring that question, and there are different schools of thought about how to even approach it. This isn’t because we only care about definitions or small points – many of us hope that each small point gets us closer to answering one of the big philosophical questions. But what we’re trained to do (and professionally incentivized to do) is wrestle with small issues, not tackle big ones. Even academics like me who study grand philosophical systems of the past just tackle small issues at a time. For example, one of the papers I’m most proud of is about what Kant thought “ought” (or, in German, “sollen”) meant… and that paper took me years to write.

3. False negatives. The third factor I’ll mention is that when academic philosophers read each other’s work, we lean overwhelmingly towards false negatives. Our most prestigious journals reject over 90% of their submissions, often based on just a quick skim by the journal editors. Every time I send off a paper to a journal, part of me hopes that I’ll get a response that says, “Brilliant! We’re going to publish it right away”… and most of the time what I get is instead a reject without comments. When I do get comments, they’re frequently frustrating and uncharitable. Most papers I’ve published were accepted only after months of revising needed to satisfy grumpy referees. I’m not complaining, however – our system isn’t perfect, but I don’t think it’s entirely unjustified. In retrospect, most of the papers I had rejected were rightly rejected – they had errors or problematic framings that I just couldn’t recognize until I had some distance from them. Another reason this is a decent system is that academics rely on journal prestige to decide what to read – many of us are fine with knowing that lots of good ideas get regularly rejected, if that’s the price of having journals where we can expect a certain baseline of quality (something like: small points made pretty well).

Taking those three factors together, what would happen if Spinoza’s main work, the Ethics, showed up in my mailbox today? Unless it was published by a prestigious publisher, I’d be unlikely to even open it, and would probably just set it on an office shelf. It would join the company of other books that I’d received from non-academic philosophers… as well as many books from academic philosophers that I’ve been meaning to read for years. If I did open it up, I probably wouldn’t know where to start, since Spinoza’s terminology (even in translation) is different from that of contemporary philosophy. If I wasn’t too busy, I might the flip through to see if the author had published anything in journals I knew. If not, I’d probably go back to answering emails about some administrative mistake I’d made in my class. In doing so, I’d be missing out on a philosophical masterpiece, one that (in our actual history) some historians of philosophy have devoted their careers to understanding.

Consider one case where a non-academic philosopher did manage to get prominent academics to engage with their work. Marc Sanders paid a number of high-profile philosophers thousands of dollars to read a philosophical work he wrote, entitled “Coming to Understanding”. You can read the whole story here, but the end result was disappointment on Sanders’ part – none of the academic philosophers ultimately took it seriously, even if a couple of them had nice things to say about it. From my perspective as a historian of certain philosophical systems, I don’t think this is a fluke. It took me years of study for me to start really grappling with the views of Spinoza, Conway, Kant, and Schopenhauer, all of whom came with the recommendations of people within the intellectual establishment, and all of whom I could approach through recent (small-point-focused) scholarship.

Okay, so what does that mean for you and your work?

Without knowing your situation, I can only offer tentative advice. But here’s a question that may help break down your options: do you really want to academic philosophers to engage with your thought?

If your answer is still “yes”, then the next question is whether you’re willing to enter academia yourself.

If you are so willing, know that the odds are very long. Entering academia takes a lot of time, and the admissions rates of most graduate programs is in the single percentages (even for applicants with undergraduate degrees in philosophy from prestigious colleges).

On the other hand, if you’re not willing to enter academia, here’s a 4-step plan for getting academics to still engage with you:

a. Find the right people within academy: spend some time online looking for younger, less famous ones who work on the specific topic you care most about (so you’ll likely have to set many topics aside). Read their work, then read articles or books they refer to most often. One excellent source for this is philpapers.org.

b. While reading, absorb the framework that’s being used to discuss the topic you’re interested in. Get used to the terminology, to what assumptions are considered acceptable in these discussions, and to what the main theories are that people have offered.

c. After, and only after you’ve absorbed all that, reach out to one or two of the people whose work you’ve been engaged with. Send a short (say, no more than 3 sentence), constructive question for them that speaks to the specific topic they’re thinking about, and that shows that you’ve spent real time reading their work. They might still be too busy and not respond, but your odds of starting a real dialogue are vastly better than if you hadn’t gone through these steps.

d. If all this works out, they might be able to offer you advice on how to work up one thought you’ve had for submission to a journal. Getting something published is a long, hard road, especially for people who don’t have a devoted academic mentor. And, to be honest, the majority of publications have very few readers… but if you do pull it off, then you’ll have developed the skills and the standing to get the attention of some academic philosophers. You’ll probably have had to significantly downsize your philosophical ambitions (just like many of us within academia have), but you’ll at least be able to join in the conversations.

If your answer to the question is “no” (that is, if you don’t really want academic philosophers to engage with your thought), then you’ve probably saved yourself a lot of grief.

But then what do you do with your work? If you haven’t already, self-publishing is an option. For example, if you agree to give them a share in any resulting profits, amazon.com publishes books for free. I know very little about that world. But there are so, so many philosophy books out there that I’m sure attracting readers will be difficult (put it this way: what would lead someone interested in philosophy to read your work, instead of that of Spinoza, Kant, Nagarjuna, Mencius, or Iris Murdoch?). So here’s my final suggestion: find another independent philosopher or two who seems to have similar views to you. Looking at self-published philosophy books online is one way to start, though you could also search on platforms like YouTube or Twitter. Once you’ve found someone, see if they’re willing to start an exchange. Unlike academic philosophers, they might have no reservations about doing ambitious systematic philosophy, and you might be able to help refine each other’s views. And you may be able to start growing a circle of similar-minded thinkers from there.

I’ll close with a final historical point. Almost all the grand systematic philosophers in the European tradition thought that their views, once understood, would stand as eternal truths for future generations. That has never happened. Never. By some measures, Immanuel Kant is the most influential systematic philosopher in the past 1000 years. He had all the key advantages: he’d spent his career inside the academy, had developed relations with other prominent philosophers, and just had vastly less competition than philosophers today (there were no self-published ebooks then). Even so, within a couple decades after his main publications in the 1780’s and 1790’s, Kant was being left behind – most other academic German philosophers were eager to find faults in his views and break new ground.

The philosophical urge in human psychology is restless. Any time a systematic philosophy becomes prominent, other philosophers will make a career of tearing it apart. But I don’t think that means systematic philosophy was or is pointless – Schopenhauer believed that some eternal truths need to be continually rediscovered because of standing distractions (such as rationalizing egoism). And if nothing else, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, engaging in abstract philosophy is one of the “few safe and harmless pleasures, which are bestowed on human race.” Speaking for myself, the main value I think my work has comes through teaching my students certain skills: by grappling with figures in the history of European philosophy myself, I’ve refined skills of critical reading and thinking that I’m able to pass on to students. Most of those students will then bring those skills to professions that are far from the academy or grand systematic philosophy.

I hope this has provided some perspective on why academic philosophers are not engaging with your work, and why even if we did, you’d almost certainly find our responses frustrating, even if your work is every bit as good as that of the great systematic philosophers of the past.