Productive Decontextualisation: Philosophical Conversations in the Pub

Anthropologists are often averse to the decontextualized approaches of moral and other forms of philosophy, arguing that they lack the thickness required to think well and carefully about issues of import. Based on fieldwork with a group of people who meet regularly in pubs to do philosophy, this article argues that decontextualization and abstraction can be useful in attempts to think well about big questions with others, but for oneself. Pub philosophers attempt in their weekly conversations to balance an attention to positioned knowledge with an effort to arrive at general ways of thinking about something. It is not only professional academics and philosophers who value thinking for its own sake, and not in order to find resolutions or conclusions to tricky questions.