Volume 1, Winter 2019
Diverse Approaches to Dialogue in Public and Precollege Philosophy
Barry Lam
Pages 89-99
The Use of Narrative in Public Philosophy
For the past two years on my podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, I have been experimenting with using storytelling to increase audience and engagement with contemporary academic philosophy. I offer this paper as a motivation and guide for philosophers interested in how to use storytelling to increase audience engagement in public-facing work. The key is to use the narrative structure to tie a philosophical issue to a character whose changes in fortune over time arise because of a conflict in philosophical ideas, the resolution of which requires the examination of those ideas.