“Even if you prefer the sexiness of radicalism or the glory of revolution: you need boring, work-a-day normal conservative philosophy.” Yesterday, J. Dmitri Gallow (Senior Research Fellow at Dianoia Institute of Philosophy) tweeted out a thread on the value of what he labels “conservative, normal philosophy.” Finding it interesting, I asked him to turn it into a brief blog post for Daily Nous, which he very kindly did. In Defense of Boring and Derivative Philosophy by J. Dmitri Gallow I often hear papers, talks, or projects dismissed as “boring” or “derivative”—contrasted with philosophy that’s “novel” or “insightful.” This dismissive attitude is usually directed at (a) work that’s conservative, rather than radical (in a sense I’ll explain below), and (b) work that’s normal, rather than revolutionary (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn). I think the dismissive attitude underestimates the value of normal conservative philosophy. Below, I’ll introduce these distinctions and defend normal conservative—and therefore, boring and derivative—philosophy. As I understand philosophy, it’s an attempt to answer the question “How should we think about X?” for values of X where the question isn’t answerable by empirical investigation or demonstrative proof. We’re often led to philosophy by puzzles in which our unreflective ways of thinking about X are contradictory. For instance, we’re inclined to say that losing a single hair won’t make you bald, but we’re also inclined to say that some people become bald by losing one hair at a time. Once we notice that these things can’t both be true at once, we’re driven to philosophise; we attempt to resolve the puzzle by revising some of our pre-theoretic ways of thinking about things. Some philosophy tries to resolve puzzles by doing as little damage as possible to our pre-theoretic, unreflective ways of thinking about X. Let’s call this kind of philosophy “conservative”. Other philosophy takes puzzles to reveal widespread systematic error in the ways we unreflectively think about X. Let’s call this philosophy “radical”. More generally, conservative philosophy defends views that hew closely to our ordinary thought and talk, whereas radical philosophy defends views that ascribe widespread and systematic error to our ordinary thought and talk. (Of course, the distinction between conservativism and radicalism isn’t hard and fast; philosophy can be more or less conservative, and it..