Expanding The Market for Philosophy
Article • 898 Words • Philosophy, IndieWeb/Meta-blogging, 2026 • 04/28/2026
My Pages This Post Links To:
Applying Celine Nguyen’s mission to expand the market for literature to philosophy by instilling philosophical thinking and encouraging reading philosophy in the general public.
There are 929 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 5 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-04-28 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
Much like Celine Nguyen’s mission to “expand the market for literature (and literary criticism)”, I am interested in expanding the market for philosophy. Why? Because I believe that it gives us the knowledge and tools to critically examine our lives. “The unexamined life is not worth living”, but also more importantly the unexamined life is much more difficult to live and cope with, in my opinion. If we are to understand what the good life is and how to live it, I think that philosophy is the best place to find it.
I use my knowledge from my Philosophy degree everyday. While I would absolutely encourage anyone to take Philosophy classes in university, majoring in Philosophy is not the solution for expanding the market for philosophy. If our goal is to increase the number of philosophically literate people, then people in or going to be in secondary education are still too small of a goal. We certainly need ways to target people earlier in the educational pipeline, but also people who are already outside it.
My proposal is a two-fold approach because I believe that there are two distinct but complementary prongs. There is philosophical thinking which can be applied to anything and then learning philosophy (the field), all done in public and outside of the ivory tower of academia. I know that these are not exactly new ideas, but I wanted to outline my own thoughts on this topic while also trying to articulate where I think my place in all of this is.
Learning and applying philosophical thinking
There is the work of doing philosophy which is fairly agnostic to object of thought; techniques that you could call “The Philosopher’s Toolkit”. I call this “philosophical thinking” and believe that it is something that can be gleaned from reading philosophical literature, but I think it is best imparted on its own to be applied anywhere. While I do state it in my post about philosophical thinking, I do think it bears repeating here that it is not logic that is the primary focus.
With degree programs in the humanities shrinking, partially as a result of decreasing investment, I think that if we could get this into elementary/middle/high education curriculum or something else that it would do good. While the thinking skills are a bit abstract, I do not think it is that high-level/requires that much pre-requisite knowledge.
From a practical standpoint this may need to start as an extracurricular program that is done at a summer camp or after-school program in order to demonstrate results before trying it to integrate into the public education system. Libraries could have a part to play in this or maybe a non-profit organization so that the philosophical education/outreach isn’t just concentrated in more affluent areas.
Reading Philosophy
Philosophy has the slightly undeserved reputation of navel gazing, of being unconnected to real life. There is a grain of truth in this, with some titles reading like: Could the grounds’s grounding the grounded ground the grounded? At the same time, philosophers are at the cutting edge of social thought like: Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? I don’t mean to pass judgement on the utility of either paper examples, there is a time and place for each of them; you just have to know what kind of topics appeal to you.
I would be remiss not to address all the barriers to reading philosophy:
- Where to start?
- Accessible Philosophy Books
- I would also recommend looking up syllabi online for Introduction to Philosophy/Ethics/etc to start, Epistemology/Metaphysics if you like the theory side a lot, and then Philosophy of {x} for whatever you might be interested in.
- How to access?
- PhilPapers, Academia.edu, ResearchGate will sometimes have free copies of papers.
- Sometimes you can email the authors of the paper and ask nicely and be sent a copy.
- Piracy 😱
- YouTube channels like Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, Academy of Ideas, Crash Course are all great resources as well.
- PhilPapers, Academia.edu, ResearchGate will sometimes have free copies of papers.
- How to contextualize?
- Philosophy, like most academic disciplines, is very referential and work is in constant conversation with previous work. I do not think that you have to have read the previous/cited works, but more often than not it does help to.
Meeting the culture where it is
One of my personal goals with this blog is to make philosophy more generally palatable. It is imperative to find and celebrate philosophically rich works. It is through people’s engagement with this content that they are able to be exposed to the importance and ubiquity philosophy is in daily life. In my own work I try to write cleanly and clearly in a way that shows you my thought process as I think my way through answering a particular question. I think I may try to apply some of C. Thi Nguyen’s Manifesto for Public Philosophy to my personal work even if it does apply more to academics.
My most popular article on this site is a list of philosophical concepts referenced in R.F. Kuang’s book Katabasis, hovering around 150+ search clicks a month, so I know the audience is there, if a bit small as of right now. I also want to write more posts like my essay on The Drama (2026) because I think that showing people how philosophy is relevant to their everyday lives/the art that they consume will naturally lead to them being curious about philosophy.