I may be wrong about this: it's my impression that folk in nearly all sub-fields in professional philosophy feel not just not central, but marginalized. By this I do not just mean the way in which Kieren Healy has found that an extremely limited number of areas of specialization ultimately contribute to prestige/status within the PGR ecology (see, for example, here and here; [for my terminology see here)]. Rather, I mean the ways in which a lot of folk seem to feel that they are not quite taken seriously by others (which is why the fascination in some quarters with philosophical epistemic peers could be comical). For example, that they are in an asymmetrical position in which they are supposed to know the jargon and moves of other niches, but that their moves and jargon can be ignored or dismissed (with a few distinctions). I have blogged about examples of this situation in the past (e.g., aesthetics, feminism; continental philosophy). The list in the previous sentence includes fields that are known not to be central to analytical philosophy's self-conception.
But I first started to notice the phenomenon during my (pre-unsystematic systematicity) days as a polemical blogger at NewAPPS. That people do not respond warmly to criticism is human nature. But I was struck by how many of my purported 'targets' (which included folk that work in fields I closely identify with myself) revealed a more general anxiety about their standing in the eyes of fellow professional philosophers. In some cases (e.g., folk identified with Christian philosophy), I could recognize a kind of historical trajectory of marginalization that could explain a certain lack of generosity. But in other cases (e.g., formal philosophers, Wittgensteinians, metaphysicians, logicians etc.) I was initially really baffled by the private notes of plaintive anxiety I would receive.* Some of these folk belong to the inner 'core' of philosophy, I would say to myself. (Of course, there was once an anti-metaphysics bias in analytical philosophy...)
Yet, I recognize the phenomenon in myself. That outsiders pay little attention to early modernists is, I guess, one of the attractions of the field--it's a lovely place to be under-cover. (Some other time I'll blog again about the variety of distorting phenomena that follow from the fact that disciplinary hiring of historians favors those that recycle familiar views from recent philosophy.) But there are lots of debates within the philosophy of science (a large and well-entrenched field) that I am a kind of witness (and occasional contributor) to (e.g., over epistemic communities, inductive risk, epistemic virtue, etc. ) that for a while were (perhaps still are) systematically ignored by more mainstream epistemologists (who were discussing very similar issues with different jargon, etc.). (For nice evidence that epistemology and philosophy of science can be very separate islands of inquiry, recall this post--in it I am critical of Brian Weatherson, but I recently heard him recall the episode where he made a very similar point).** Rather than thinking, these arm-chair epistemologists are so out of the loop (they should read Lefevere and Schliesser!), I think damn my distinctions are not as crisp, or I have too much empirical details, I should have added a citations to Fricker, Sosa, etc. In situations like this, wheels get reinvented and some opportunistic philosopher will colonize the neighboring field with moves that are thought superior.
I am unsure how to explain the phenomenon (if it is real--there are real patterns of exclusion of women, racialized minorities, and sexual orientations, etc., some of these interact in complex ways with the phenomenon I am trying to characterize in this post). I know that it does not help that our high prestige generalists journals are fake at being genuinely generalist and for a long time were (are) no better than captured, factional outlets. They did marginalize the vast majority of other professional philosophers who didn't see their local heroes/exemplars discussed in their pages. (And as I noted once before that is also true of world famous analytical philosophers!) But that can't be the whole story. So, the following paragraph is speculative explanation, and I welcome alternatives.
It's clear we're a very status-conscious field (but I am not making a comparative claim--maybe this is endemic to academic fields, or human nature), and given that status is a scarce, positional good, lots of folk will feel its absence. Lots of philosophers have been socialized into mastering the dismissive gesture (I am confused, you're begging the question, etc). But I suspect the real story here is that we're also a very faddish field: because despite the religious adoption of the image of philosophy as Kuhnian normal science with bogus appeals to inferences to the best explanation and stylized score-keeping of costs and benefits, we're essentially philosophy, I mean, pre-paradigmatic (hah). With a small number of available jobs each year a lot of folk have legitimate concern that their sub-field could, with changing fashions, be wiped out in a generation, or two--a bit like the Dodo.
* I am ignoring the boys that feel like they are victims of changing mores on sexual harassment.
**In fact, this whole post is undoubtedly influenced by a conversation we recently had while we shared a bus-ride. So, you can credit him with any insights.