How to Escape Irrelevance: Performance Philosophy, Public Philosophy and Borderless Philosophy

Abstract

<em> Carlo Cellucci has rightly pointed out that contemporary professional academic philosophy has a serious problem of irrelevance. Performance philosophy and public philosophy are two recent attempts to solve that problem and radically transform professional academic philosophy into what I call real philosophy. Nevertheless, performance philosophy and public philosophy have some prima facie problems. My goal in this essay is to make some headway towards solving these two prima facie problems, first, by briefly describing ways of conceptually clarifying and purposively unifying performance philosophy and public philosophy individually; second, by briefly presenting a mediating theoretical and practical framework that could solve the incoherence problem and the two solitudes problem, and also directly and reciprocally connect performance philosophy and public philosophy: a framework I call borderless philosophy; and third and finally, against the backdrop of that mediating framework, in response to a possible objection to my argument, by briefly proposing a way in which performance philosophy, via borderless philosophy, could significantly enrich public philosophy. The upshot is that borderless philosophy, together with performance philosophy and public philosophy, collectively yield a fully adequate solution to the problem of irrelevance.</em>