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David W. Concepción is professor of philosophy at Ball State University. He has received six university and two national teaching awards, as well as a national prize for his research on teaching. He is a past-president of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers [AAPT], past-chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Teaching, and editor-in-chief of AAPT Studies in Pedagogy. He teaches feminism, environmental ethics, and meta-ethics using inclusive pedagogy and many high impact practices.
“Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.”
-Robert Baden Powell
There are a few specific ways I have helped to engage others in the improvement of philosophy teaching. Many years ago, I was sitting in a “group” session at a Central American Philosophical Association [APA] meeting at 10pm grumpily wondering two things: Why are there no sessions on teaching on the “main” program? And why are teaching sessions always given the 7pm to 10pm time slot? In that era, the APA Committee on Teaching would sometimes organize one session. Occasionally, other APA committees and other societies or groups would offer “group” sessions on teaching. And the American Association of Philosophy Teachers [AAPT] would always have one or two sessions. I thought, we should put all of the teaching and learning sessions in the same room, throughout the clock for two days. Betsy Decyk and I brainstormed some of the details that night. Later the new chair of the APA Committee on Teaching, Alexandra Bradner, and I garnered approval and started planning. Finally, Russell Marcus and his considerable get-it-done energy joined us, and we brought the vision to fruition. In January of 2018 the inaugural “Teaching Hub” took place in Baltimore. Each of the three APA meetings now has an AAPT/APA Teaching Hub. Already, thousands of attendees have benefited from access to the fantastic work presented in the Hubs. And now some other philosophical organizations add “Hubs” about teaching to their national conferences.
Another gap I noticed was the absence of any national teaching awards in the discipline of philosophy. I think there are problems with awards, but the benefits of having at least one seemed to me to outweigh the burdens. I gathered the funds necessary to endow the prize from the APA, the AAPT, the Teaching Philosophy Association [TPA] (the non-profit behind the journal Teaching Philosophy), and a number of individuals donors (most significantly Terry Bynum and Arnold Wilson). In 2017 the inaugural APA/AAPT/TPA Prize for Excellence in Philosophy Teaching was awarded.
Another innovation is the AAPT’s Talking Teaching, an online meeting space for informal discussion about matters of concern to teachers of philosophy. I was motivated to create this because I knew so many great philosophy teachers who were the only “teaching nut” at their school. They didn’t have an easy, regular way to talk about teaching, so I thought we should give them one. At each Talking Teaching session a facilitator introduces a topic and guides a conversation. My first pre-pandemic attempt didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. But now Sarah Donovan makes a very successful version of Talking Teaching happen by finding facilitators, publicizing the events, and handling a variety of logistics. We have about eight informal discussions per academic semester. My hope is that Talking Teaching does not succumb to research-creep and inadvertently become a place for presentation on scholarship of teaching and learning [SoTL]. Instead, I prefer the idea of an international space for spit-balling potentially cooky ideas with sharp colleagues. We can do the SoTL in other venues.
I want as many students as possible to have as great of an experience in a philosophy class as possible.
When I was in graduate school a senior professor asked me: What mark do you want to make on the field of philosophy? I was surprised and stumped. I was too deep in the weeds of a dissertation and trying to become a better-than-incompetent teacher to think of legacy. I remember being surprised by the assumption that I would even have a career. As most philosophers of my age and older (and sadly a lot of younger folks too) will tell you, we had few ways to learn about teaching, and our “mentors” mostly discouraged us from putting energy into teaching.
Nevertheless, the question helped me realize that I get excited when I have an opportunity to be a positive force in the lives of the students I teach. But that is a mark on individuals, not the field. Additionally, I had been taught that the only way to make a mark on the field was through research, and I wasn’t interested in that. In the intervening years I’ve discovered that by supporting the students’ teachers, sometimes by teaching them how to teach, I can have a less direct but broader positive impact on the lives of philosophy students.
In 2006 Donna Engelmann was empowered to revamp the American Association of Philosophy Teachers teaching and learning seminar. I can’t describe how fortunate I was to be allowed to work with Donna and Stephen Bloch-Schulman on this task. The aim of these programs is to improve the teaching of philosophy by empowering philosophy teachers with dynamic principles, and guidance in how to use them, so that teachers make impactful pedagogical choices. The seminar centers on ideas well capsulated in L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Since 2008, just shy of 200 folks have gone through the multiday seminar. And just shy of 1000 have gone through one of the one-day versions of the program since their inception in 2011.
Stephen and I continue to lead some of these events. More importantly, we have trained, and continue to train, additional expert teachers to serve as facilitators of the seminar and workshops, including Sarah Donovan, Jerry Green, Melissa Jacquart, Mo Janzen, John Koolage, Alida Liberman, and Rebecca Scott, not to mention to original facilitators, Bill Anelli, Betsy Decyk, Emily Esch, Paul Green, and Andrew Mills (with apologies to the many I cannot mention here).
Umm, cliches? Just do it?
When someone mentions, or worse tries to enforce, a barrier to your innovation, consider their objections carefully and keep your empathy high, but also keep the pursuit of your goal dogged. I’ve had lots of ideas about things we could do to improve the teaching of philosophy in the United States and beyond. I haven’t pursued most of them because when I mention them to a colleague, the colleague gives a good reason for thinking the idea isn’t a good one. Most of my ideas have been bad ones. But every once in a while I do have a good idea and I need to overcome initial “no”s. I spent over five years on my first attempt to get a national teaching award established, and eventually had to go a different route than the one that I thought made the most sense because the “no”s were unrelenting. Thankfully, I had good empathy even though I was very frustrated, and the people who said no remain friends. In another case, I let my empathy wane. I burned a bridge or two in my failed attempt to get the Journal of the American Philosophical Association to take seriously the idea of publishing scholarly work about teaching philosophy. I regret how, but not that, I tried to get the journal to change.
Again, all I have are cliches. Once I gained the security of tenure, which I know so many people will never have, I was able to ask myself again the question the professor in my graduate program asked me. But I ask it in a different way: will you do something that might make someone think of you as a good ancestor? I’m positive I haven’t reached the good ancestor bar, but I do try to leave philosophy better than I found it with regard to teaching.
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Jason Swartwood is an instructor of philosophy at Saint Paul College in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work on the skills of practical ethics helps him engage community groups, professionals, and young people in moral reasoning that matters in their lives.
One of the things I love about philosophy is that it gives us tools we can use to engage more productively with questions that grip us all. So, I’m always on the lookout for ways I can spread the Good News about why philosophy is valuable. The projects I’m usually drawn to are ones that introduce people to reasoning strategies from philosophy (especially practical ethics) and show how they can improve thinking and discussion about important controversies or questions people face in their lives and careers. I’m a tiny fish in a huge pond, but I like to find ways I can use philosophy to make some ripples and splashes, however small.
Some examples:
• Philosophy with kids: I gave an invited talk about Socrates to my daughter’s first grade class. Her school follows a classical education model, so they were discussing ancient Greek philosophers in their history unit. (I nerded out on this so hard that I received copious eye rolls from my daughter.) I led the class in role-playing how Socrates might use his gadfly method to examine whether it’s wrong to keep primates in small urban zoos.
• Philosophy summer camp for high-schoolers: In 2019, I designed and led (with the help of fellow Saint Paul College philosophers Julie Haider and Ian Stoner) a summer philosophy camp for High School students, The Saint Paul Lyceum. The camp provided students with a skills-focused introduction to philosophy, in which we engaged in a variety of exercises, discussions, debates, and other activities on a variety of topics (the existence of God, personal identity, the nature of the good life, and a variety of applied moral issues, such as religious liberty and discrimination, racism, colonizing Mars, and reparations for slavery). I was able to get a grant to fund free tuition for students with financial need, and it was fun to give students who might otherwise not be exposed to philosophy a taste of the ways it can improve their thinking and discussion about tough and important topics.
• Applied Professional Ethics: I’ve also given lectures and workshops that introduce professionals outside of philosophy to some philosophical concepts and ethical reflection strategies relevant to their practice. For example, I’ve done invited lectures to a graduate psychology class and to clinical staff at a local mental health clinic on how reasoning strategies from philosophical practical ethics can facilitate ethical reflection in psychological practice. My friend and colleague Ian Stoner and I also gave an invited lecture/workshop about the philosophy of disability at a local mental health clinic specializing in autism spectrum disorder and related disabilities. Ian has done interesting research on well-being and disability, and we both teach models of disability in our health care ethics courses. So, we were excited to start a discussion with the clinical staff about models of disability, why they matter, and how they might apply to complex real-life cases.
• The Ethics of Youth Prisons: Most recently, I’ve been taking part in a discussion group with staff at the Legal Rights Center (LRC) about the ethics of youth prisons. Taiwana Shambley, a former student of mine who works at the LRC as organizer of the No Kids in MN Prisons campaign, had the idea that we should start a discussion group in which we applied the argument skills from Doing Practical Ethics (a skills-focused textbook Ian Stoner and I wrote) to the question of whether Minnesota should abolish youth prisons. Taiwana identified other interested staff at the LRC (including lawyers, social workers, investigators, restorative justice facilitators and advocates), and Taiwana and I came up with a schedule that paired topic readings with chapters of the book. At our meetings, we’ve been working together to identify and evaluate the best arguments for and against abolishing youth imprisonment in Minnesota. My goal has been to leverage everyone’s expertise so that everyone can work towards a well-reasoned position on the issue, with the (hopefully not too naïve) aspiration to illustrate how philosophical argument skills can usefully inform activism. Our meetings so far have been very productive (more on this below) and I’ve learned a lot.
As far as my goals, I take inspiration from Socrates’ injunction that critically scrutinizing beliefs and arguments (crucially, both our own and others’) is essential for acquiring knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. (Though Socrates didn’t seem to worry as much about when and how to be the gadfly, I worry about that quite a bit and wish I had more wisdom there. It’s easy to be the gadfly at the wrong times, in the wrong ways, and for the wrong reasons.)When it comes to my approach to specific moral controversies, I’m generally averse to the method of applying comprehensive moral theories. Suppose a child psychologist is grappling with whether to alert Child Protective Services (CPS) to a parent’s reportable verbal abuse, given that the parent is aware of the mistake and trying to change, and reporting them could lead to the whole family being deported. Telling the psychologist to decide whether to report to CPS by comparing the guidance of utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics (for instance) isn’t useful. Even if they did have the time and training to choose the most plausible theory and develop its reasoning on the dilemma, I don’t think moral theory is the best tool for generating well-reasoned guidance about particular moral issues. That’s why my work focuses on applying the strategies of practical ethics (described in our book)—analyzing, evaluating, and developing specific types of moral arguments such as arguments from analogy, arguments from principle, and moral inference to the best explanation. Examining these arguments helps people develop coherent and justified beliefs about what matters and what ought to be done in particular situations.
For me, a successful project is one that helps people see why philosophical skills are valuable tools for approaching questions they care about, and one where we get to apply those skills together. Ideally, I want to show people who are new to philosophy that philosophical reasoning strategies facilitate meaningful and productive reflection on their existing perspectives, commitments, and expertise.
The discussion group we’re having at the LRC (see above) is a great example of that. Since the group’s paid work is to advocate for an affirmative answer to our question (should youth prisons in Minnesota be abolished?), having a philosopher come in asking them to critically evaluate their own arguments and take opposing views seriously could have been a non-starter. But they’ve been so generous and just as invested as I have in getting to the bottom of things. So far, this has enabled us to identify and analyze some arguments against youth-prison abolition; given us tools to identify and evaluate principles about justifiable punishment that come up in discussions of the ethics of youth prisons; helped us identify potential weaknesses in some common abolition arguments; and put us on the trail of some additional arguments for abolition that might avoid those problems. I’m excited to see where future meetings take us!
As far as my goals, I take inspiration from Socrates’ injunction that critically scrutinizing beliefs and arguments (crucially, both our own and others’) is essential for acquiring knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. (Though Socrates didn’t seem to worry as much about when and how to be the gadfly, I worry about that quite a bit and wish I had more wisdom there. It’s easy to be the gadfly at the wrong times, in the wrong ways, and for the wrong reasons.)
When it comes to my approach to specific moral controversies, I’m generally averse to the method of applying comprehensive moral theories. Suppose a child psychologist is grappling with whether to alert Child Protective Services (CPS) to a parent’s reportable verbal abuse, given that the parent is aware of the mistake and trying to change, and reporting them could lead to the whole family being deported. Telling the psychologist to decide whether to report to CPS by comparing the guidance of utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics (for instance) isn’t useful. Even if they did have the time and training to choose the most plausible theory and develop its reasoning on the dilemma, I don’t think moral theory is the best tool for generating well-reasoned guidance about particular moral issues. That’s why my work focuses on applying the strategies of practical ethics (described in our book)—analyzing, evaluating, and developing specific types of moral arguments such as arguments from analogy, arguments from principle, and moral inference to the best explanation. Examining these arguments helps people develop coherent and justified beliefs about what matters and what ought to be done in particular situations.
One mistake that’s been particularly instructive is forgetting just how weird (and potentially threatening or off-putting) philosophical methods can seem to non-philosophers, especially when discussing things outside of the context of a course or classroom (where the norms, goals, and roles for everyone are often clearer). For example, when having discussions with people about topics they feel very passionate about, if I ask them to dive right into the arguments—seeking to find a justification for their views, or asking them to consider the best justification for views they’re currently opposed to—they sometimes feel like I’m asking them to give up or ignore their feelings or identity. Now I’ve learned to clarify at the beginning of a conversation that there is definitely value in processing feelings (being married to a psychologist has made it impossible for me to avoid recognizing that!), and feelings are certainly a part of moral reasoning (I like Jonathan Bennett’s explanation of that point). But if we’re going to get at the truth and come to a well-reasoned judgment on controversial issues, attending to our feelings isn’t enough. By clarifying at the outset the way philosophical methods aim to give us critical perspective on our feelings, I can avoid some misunderstandings. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to avoid all misunderstandings, but when managed well, misunderstandings can lead to fruitful discussion. Intentionally opening up space for discussions of method shows people they can bring those questions or reactions up later if they arise.
It likely sounds cheesy, but I think doing philosophy is (part of) a valuable way of life. I think differently about the world, I conceive and approach questions and problems differently than I used to, as a result of my philosophical training. The state of the world makes it easy to view the pursuit of knowledge and understanding about controversial questions (and productive thought and discussion in general) as quixotic or impossible. Philosophy has shown me there is a plausible path forward, even if it is one that’s at times emotionally, intellectually, and socially challenging. This is what I keep coming back to when that work gets tough.
My research on wisdom is part of what got me focused on practice-based methods for teaching moral reasoning skills, and I find that trying to introduce those skills to non-philosophical audiences concerned with real, practical problems helps me design my courses to teach skills that will be useful on the ground. For instance, discussing practical ethics with clinical psychologists has helped me identify some useful topics for class discussions and paper assignments. Conversely, my experience teaching skills in the classroom, along with my interdisciplinary research experience, has helped me anticipate questions professionals might have about philosophical methods. For instance, developing effective methods in the classroom for explaining the problems with simplistic cultural relativism and the limitations of professional ethics codes as tools for moral decision-making has been useful for discussing moral reasoning in psychological practice.
The hope that careful and rigorous thinking and discussion can have a positive impact, however small.
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Philosophers Fight Climate Change Series
This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time.
Ben Mylius is an Australian writer and lawyer, specializing in environmental political theory and jurisprudence. He is currently completing a PhD at Columbia, and is Founding Convenor of the Columbia Climate Imaginations Network, which builds community and momentum around storytelling and climate change.
I’m a writer and lawyer from Australia, and I’m currently completing my PhD in Environmental Political Theory at Columbia, in New York City. As part of my time at Columbia, I’ve been fortunate to be able to get a variety of projects and initiatives off the ground, to bring people together across disciplinary boundaries and practices to think creatively about how we imagine our futures under climate change. Most recently, I’ve served as the Founding Convenor of the new Columbia Climate Imaginations Network (CCIN), through Columbia’s newly-established Climate School.
Our goal is to provide a sort of “communal table” for students and others at Columbia and beyond to explore how stories are central to the ways we understand ourselves, our relationships to one another, and—crucially—how we identify our values and imagine the kinds of worlds we hope might come into being in the future. It’s still early days, but we’ve had great fun connecting students across departments and schools via informal art viewing and community-building sessions, collaborating on some art installation projects, and working with a set of faculty to consider how climate storytelling might find a bigger place at Columbia generally.
CCIN arose out of a set of insights from my experience in grad school, and in academia more generally. I think creativity and imagination are central to our ability to respond to the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate change—because so much of our attempts to make sense of and engage with these phenomena happens through stories (in all their forms). At the same time, we need a way to think together about making our stories ethical, and so to ask questions about our values and about the challenges and opportunities we face in working across difference. Many of the university communities I’ve been part of have missed this opportunity, I think, because they succumb to the wrong kinds of logics and incentives (competition, reductionism, etc.) So part of my hope is that we’ll be able to create a place that helps build trust and the ability of folks across a whole set of spectra to learn one another’s “languages” (disciplinary, cultural, practical, or otherwise) and work in solidarity with one another.
I’ve been inspired by the work of many colleagues, as well as by the American pragmatic tradition, which I take to hold that our goal as teachers is to nurture our students as whole human beings, giving them skills to pursue meaning and strengthen the communities in which they live; and to hold, further, that we advance this goal by bringing our students into an ongoing conversation about how our collective intellect, ethics, and imagination can help us respond to the world’s most pressing contemporary problems. This is especially important, and often challenging, in teaching political theory and law, both of which (at their best) draw from environmental philosophy. These fields involve an important tension. On the one hand, everyone understands that the work coming out of these domains plays a significant role in shaping the contours of our lives. On the other hand, that same work is often discussed in terms that are high-minded, abstract, and difficult to relate to lived experience. It is dangerously easy to present them in ways that make students feel intimidated, inadequate, and disempowered. For that reason I’ve found it crucial, again, to bring storytelling and personal experience—mine and that of my students—to my teaching work.
A highlight of my teaching experience was running a course I designed as an introduction to Environmental Political Theory. (You can find the syllabus here, along with many other terrific syllabi designed by others, in the International Society for Environmental Ethics’ syllabus library). We began by looking at the different ways that canonical thinkers have conceptualized “humans,” the different ways they’ve conceptualized “nature,” and—consequently—the different ways they’ve conceptualized the relationship between humans and nature and the role of humans in nature. We then began to explore how these answers informed both the questions that thinkers have subsequently asked, and the answers that they gave. What impact does defining humans as “part of nature” or “separate from nature” have on how we understand ourselves in the world: as masters or as stewards? Should the benefits of democracy and the Polis be limited to human beings, and if so, why? How should we approach the future, given that our capacity to intervene in natural systems is growing larger and larger, even as the consequences of mistakes is growing more and more dire? My goal was to act as a sort of tour guide, giving my students a map and a set of tools for navigating a landscape, so they can orient themselves and then explore paths (or create new paths) according to what matters to them.
Creativity, imagination, and stories have been a defining part of my life, and in my quest for a philosophical and ethical community that is communal in the true sense—a place of solidarity and love, where folks work together to nourish and support one another—I’ve found that using these things has been a way to stay connected to the things I think are most central to universities and cultural institutions in the context of our contemporary challenges. Three come to mind in particular. First, the ability to honor and learn from diverse experiences and perspectives. Second, the capacity to set up mentorships/relationships that emphasize a “whole person” approach to life and learning. And third, the ability to affirm that all of us come to universities and other educational institutions with a set of “big questions” about our own lives and about the world more generally. It is vital that we explore and do justice to these, I think, if we are to live in a fulfilled and sustainable way!
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Tyler Zimmer is assistant instructional professor and assistant director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His public philosophical work centers on gentrification, policing, sexual violence, and economic justice.
I’m a professional philosopher, but I also have a long-term commitment to social and political activism. In some ways these are really different roles—in my view, it’s neither desirable nor possible to try to reduce one to the other. But there are, of course, ways in which these distinct undertakings overlap and inform one another in my life. So, for example, I try to write about political and philosophical topics for nonacademic publications aimed at a broad audience. One example would be a piece on the discontents of toxic masculinity that I wrote for Slate a few years ago. The ideas for this piece came from nonacademic and philosophical sources: first, real public debates as well as problems thrown up in the course of my own life, and, second, important scholarship in feminist philosophy. At one point, the piece was among the most widely read on the website and I got a large volume of feedback from readers via comments, emails, and tweets. It should go without saying that my arguments would’ve reached a much smaller audience if I had only aimed to publish them in a peer-reviewed professional journal.
In addition to nonacademic writing on philosophical topics, I also participate in and try to contribute to educational programming put on by the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member, and Rampant Magazine, where I am part of the editorial collective. Because of this work, I sometimes find myself sitting on public panel discussions alongside a mixture of activists, organizers, and academics. I also take part in on-the-ground organizing work—e.g., knocking on doors in Chicago to pass a “lift the ban” ordinance so we can enact rent control. This inevitably leads to conversations that inform my own thinking about normative issues such as gentrification, which is one of the focuses of my academic writing. These conversations also force me to find creative ways to convey my ideas in as clear and direct a way as possible.
A little biographical information might help explain what motivates me. I’m primarily a political philosopher, and I first got interested in philosophy as an undergraduate at a moment when I was struggling to think through a number of “real world” problems that confronted me. Some of those problems had to do with the “war on terror,” global inequality, whether it is legitimate for one state to invade another, nationalism and its discontents, and so on. Others were more immediate: Is it unjust that workers at my university aren’t paid a living wage? If so, is it justifiable to pressure the administration to raise wages through acts of protest or civil disobedience? The more I thought about these questions, the more I was drawn into philosophy. But I didn’t simply retreat from the world and sequester myself in the philosophy section of the library—my philosophical work opened up all sorts of new ways of thinking about the problems with which I began. This dynamic interplay between real problems and philosophical theory continues to be a source of motivation for me. My work on gentrification, for instance, aims to respond to debates outside of philosophy about what gentrification is, whether it is unjust, and what (if anything) might be done about it. But the way that I respond to these ongoing debates is from the point of view of a political philosopher, which (I hope!) brings a fresh perspective and helpful set of conceptual tools to the table.
I have a certain allergy to academic conversations about social and political problems that are too rarefied to be comprehensible in any way to nonacademics. Of course, it’s legitimate for there to be some amount of jargon when specialists engage with one another in certain contexts, so long as the jargon is justified in terms of explanatory power or some other epistemic or practical payoff. But when the thing we’re talking about is, for example, racism or class inequality, then it strikes me as especially important to make the arguments in such a way that they are intelligible to people who aren’t versed in the current jargon. Civically engaged work forces me to find ways to talk about problems in a lucid, accessible manner. The political problems are what’s hard—we shouldn’t heap impenetrable language and jargon that take us even further from the difficulty of the problems themselves. I try to bring this same perspective to bear on my efforts to be clear and accessible in the classroom.
I’m a radical egalitarian—I think we should want to relate to one another as equals, as peers, as much as possible. That means we ought to reject forms of social organization that entrench domination and rigid hierarchy. This basic thought animates the way I approach all sorts of issues, including gentrification. There are many contemporary egalitarian theorists whose ideas have deeply influenced me, especially Charles Mills and Elizabeth Anderson. But the egalitarian current in political philosophy has (historically speaking) always taken its cue from oppositional social movements that aimed to abolish various forms of tyranny and domination, e.g. slavery, serfdom, colonialism, and so on. So even at the level of pure political theory there is, I think, always some link to practice and real-world social struggle. The figures from the history of philosophy that interest me most are those who give us ways of thinking about individual freedom and social equality as deeply intertwined—for example, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
The issues most connected to my work are gentrification, policing, sexual violence, and economic justice. The justice issues that I engage with almost always have to do with inequality in some form. So, I’m interested in gentrification as a form of inequality whereby those vulnerable to, say, displacement are subordinated by those in a position to push tenants out and repopulate entire neighborhoods. I’m also interested in policing and its connection to racial oppression, class inequality, and gentrification. For example, gentrifying neighborhoods are often policed in such a way as to make poor people of color feel unwelcome, the better to assuage the anxieties of wealthier (and often whiter) populations bent on a certain kind of conquest and return on investment. I’m also interested in the ways that common constructions of masculinity are damaging to women and nonbinary people, but also harmful to very men who strive to be “masculine” in this sense. Among other things, this work has obvious connections to activism aimed at stopping sexual violence and harassment.
This is a difficult question! I suppose I’d pick “Move on Up” by Curtis Mayfield. When your work focuses attention on injustice, it’s easy to get stuck oscillating between rage and resignation. “Move on Up” manages to be uplifting and energizing without losing sight of the obstacles in the way of liberation, without ceasing to be militant. Also, it’s just good music, which is surely one reason why the song has been sampled so heavily. And it’s impossible to hear it without also thinking of other emancipatory anthems like “People Get Ready” or “Keep On Pushing.”
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Daniel Munro is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He encourages students to explore philosophical themes using digital media.
In my recent “Minds and Machines” course, I offered students the option to design a creative “public philosophy project” instead of writing a traditional term paper. The course covered a range of topics, and students could choose to do projects on any of them—from foundational topics in philosophy of mind, to philosophical questions about the possibility of artificial intelligence, to the ethical and social dimensions of AI research. The aim was to produce a project that could engage a general, non-specialist audience in some philosophical theme(s) from the course.
Students submitted projects in a wide variety of media, including a computer game, an illustrated essay, an interview with a visual artist, and even a series of songs. One of my favourites was my student Muhammad Abdurrahman’s philosophical video review of the film Her, a film about a man who develops a romantic relationship with an AI program. Muhammad’s video uses philosophical theories about the mind and AI to come to a deeper understanding of the film’s themes. He convincingly demonstrates how abstract philosophical ideas can help us better understand popular works of fiction. It’s an especially interesting project in that the film itself is at times quite ambiguous and hard to interpret. Muhammad’s video reveals how philosophically rigorous theorizing can help us pin down what the film is trying to say.
For one thing, projects like this make philosophy more accessible and relatable to students with a diverse array of background knowledge and skills. Some of our students may never be totally comfortable writing academic papers, but they may find themselves better able to connect with philosophical topics through some other medium.
As Muhammad’s video demonstrates, projects like this also show students the power of using philosophical tools to analyze topics outside of their particular course context. They give students the chance to practice using philosophy to help them better understand their favourite works of art, current events, and the like.
I also hope that encouraging students to make their work accessible to a general audience is one way of encouraging them to develop a deeper grasp of course materials themselves. In order to explain complex ideas to nonspecialists, one must first have a good grasp of those ideas. Projects like this encourage students to develop this deeper understanding.
These projects can offer low-barrier ways for nonspecialist audiences to engage with philosophical ideas. They allow students to present these ideas in a medium that’s more accessible than an academic essay. And many students choose to relate philosophical ideas to topics that already interest the general public, such as popular films. While I don’t require it, I strongly encourage my students to make their projects public (by posting videos to YouTube, sharing their projects with friends and family on social media, granting me permission to share them, etc.). I hope that my students can inspire someone outside of the course to think philosophically, even if just for a moment.
Most assignments students produce in university are “disposable”: after students spend hours working on them, they’ll be viewed only by a TA or instructor and then “thrown away” by the student. Encouraging students to produce public-facing projects creates opportunities to broaden the impact of their work.
Projects of this sort can require more time and effort from students than writing a paper, since they involve designing a topic and the creative aspects of the project mostly from scratch. Students sometimes struggle with managing their time: Since they typically haven’t done a project like this before, it’s difficult for them to envision and map out the entire process in advance. To help mitigate this, I make sure to be very upfront with students about the extra time commitment they may face, while working with them to figure out the steps that will be necessary to implement their projects. I’m also quite flexible and forgiving when it comes to deadlines, since students may face roadblocks such as unexpected technical difficulties.
It can also be a bit tricky to figure out how to grade these projects fairly, since it’s difficult to apply a single set of grading standards across a diverse set of projects. Inevitably, this requires some degree of grading each project on its own terms, rather than by how it compares to the work of other students in the course. To help set expectations, I ask students to send me project proposals in advance. In response, I provide a list of elements I’ll be looking for in their finished projects. Some of these are common to all students—for example, the project must contain some original philosophical work, rather than just explaining ideas from course texts. Others are more individualized—for example, if a student is working in a more poetic medium like songwriting, I ask them to submit a writeup with a more straightforward explanation of the philosophical ideas they intend to express.
I give students a lot of freedom in how to design their projects, leaving things relatively open-ended. I therefore also try to work more closely with each student than I would for a traditional term paper. I really value these opportunities for closer student mentorship: I get to witness students’ intellectual curiosity blossom as they exercise a lot of creativity and explore a topic about which they’re personally passionate.
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Philosophers Fight Climate Change
This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time.
Evelyn Brister is professor and philosophy program director in the department of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is also president of the Public Philosophy Network.
Right now I’m President of the Public Philosophy Network, supporting public philosophers by planning conferences, panels, and events. About 130 public philosophers attended our virtual conference in October 2021. A group session at the February 2022 meeting of the Central APA will be on “How to Do Public Philosophy,” and we have a co-sponsored webinar with PLATO on “Public Philosophy, Education, and Social Justice,” also scheduled for February. Our next major event will be a workshop in June 2022 on how to initiate research that engages with policymakers, professionals, and communities.
One of the important ways that PPN supports public philosophers is by identifying how universities can do a better job developing talent for public philosophy and giving credit for engaged teaching and research. A PPN committee led by Nancy McHugh has organized volunteers to mentor public philosophers going through tenure or promotion review. A separate panel is available to write informed external reviews for tenure and promotion files.
Public philosophy is riding a wave right now. Universities are under pressure to demonstrate their relevance to social needs, and at the same time, philosophers are eager to do meaningful work that has a broader impact on society.
I do, but at this moment, I’m more focused on changing real-world practices than on doing theory. Other than leading PPN, I’ve been working on developing a strategic framework for collaborations between philosophers and policymakers or community groups.
Robert Frodeman and I recently edited a collection of essays, A Guide to Field Philosophy: Case Studies and Practical Strategies (Routledge, 2020). Our contributors all tell captivating stories and reflect on the lessons learned when collaborating with non-philosophers. Every story makes a similar point: that philosophy is broader and more relevant than your typical graduate training makes it out to be. And that philosophy can have real-world impact! All these “fieldwork” projects show how philosophical labor can result in something other than a publication in a philosophy journal.
The main goal of these essays is to show how to do fieldwork in concrete terms, so they are down-to-earth narratives, full of useful advice. It turns out that while we share a vision of how to work collaboratively, we all go through similar struggles to overcome the parts of our training that encourage individualistic and adversarial attitudes.
My most recent fieldwork project was with a group of conservation scientists, practitioners, and advocates to publish a statement of intent about the using genetic techniques to address the biodiversity crisis. In a series of meetings during 2020, this group, convened by Revive and Restore, discussed the conservation goals that translocation, gene editing, cloning, and other innovative strategies might achieve. Our team identified the need for shared, explicit best practices to guide community engagement and policy formation so that these techniques can be deployed ethically and effectively.
I’ve also collaborated with the American Chestnut Foundation and scientists at the SUNY-ESF American Chestnut Research & Restoration Project to evaluate ethical issues related to restoring the American chestnut to the eastern US. A genetically modified chestnut variety is currently under environmental evaluation by government agencies, and it could allow us to bring back an important species that’s been missing from our forests for about a century.
It’s tempting to quote the Lorax: “I speak for the trees.” But of course the trees are speaking quite clearly—we know they are under attack by pests for which they have no evolved defenses, that the decline in forest health is a growing problem around the world, and that it’s exacerbated by climate change. Protecting forests is an easy cause to get behind—everyone loves trees—but the details of particular problems are more complicated. Ethics, epistemology, and political theory are intertwined, and I think my work helps smooth out communication among conservation scientists, citizens, and practitioners. I engage with scientists, land managers, tree breeders, and environmentalists, but in this arena, we’re always learning from nature and aiming to serve nature’s ends.
As a philosopher, I sometimes play the role of mediator. I work hard to bring people back to the idea that we all want what’s best for the trees. Discussions continually come back to that shared value, and that keeps us focused on trying to be both ethical and effective. Environmentalists have been able to get by for decades with a hands-off approach to conservation, but the urgency of the current situation changes that. We have to decide when a hands-off approach is actually riskier than taking action because under the current burden, nature is collapsing, not rebounding. Clearly, we need to do something.
My work with environmental organizations and scientists merges my research interests with work I was doing in my personal life anyway. I’ve been active in environmental and outdoor recreation organizations since I was in college. During graduate school, I kept my environmental activities separate from my career. The environmentalists I worked with helped me bring the two parts of my life together by asking about ethical issues and encouraging me to bring students into our work.
I’ve learned that the skills we all develop from managing classrooms, organizing events, writing reports, and analyzing arguments are in high demand outside academia. What I learned about shared governance through university committees and administrative roles was extremely useful in working with local environmental groups. Teaching provided confidence in public speaking, something that is a struggle for many. And I found that just showing up and being willing to do whatever needed to be done got the ball rolling. My strategy is to get involved with a community first and then figure out how to contribute philosophically. That often works. Once you’re embedded, your philosophical training starts to become relevant—e.g., questions of ethics and values come up in just about every public issue.
The main requirement is to listen to the concerns that people have and then to translate them into our subject-specific concepts. We philosophers, whether we mean to or not, are constantly classifying, evaluating evidence and arguments, considering the big picture, and comparing practical realities with ideals. If anything, I find that I sometimes have to hold back on these tendencies and be patient with the slow speed of democratic processes.
Well, obviously, it’s a thrill to feel like you’re having an influence and making a concrete and lasting difference. I like talking about environmental values when I’m working on a restoration project, but I especially like planting trees at the same time. Both the conversations and the trees matter, but while the conversations are ephemeral, I can go back to visit the trees. They’ll be around longer than me.
It’s also wonderful that it’s never the same thing twice, so you can’t get bored. In fact, as soon as you think you understand an issue, something new comes up!
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Mylan Engel Jr. is Presidential Teaching Professor and Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He specializes in epistemology, ethics, and practical ethics, especially animal ethics, environmental ethics, global justice, and the philosophy of food.
My teaching motto is “Philosophy Matters!” I want my students to understand and appreciate the value of philosophy, its personal and practical significance, and the role it plays in helping us to live more authentic, meaningful lives. Moral problems, like global and local food insecurity, aren’t just abstract problems; they are practical problems with practical solutions. It’s important not just to present students with the problems, but also to empower them with real-world actions they can perform to help alleviate these problems.
The students in my “Philosophy of Food” course are expected to complete at least 21 hours of community-engaged service during the course of the semester. Service activities include:
• Volunteering at Feed My Starving Children
• Planting seeds in NIU’s greenhouse
• Working in NIU’s Communiversity Garden
• Preparing and sharing a vegan dish at the end-of-the-semester Sustainable Supper
In addition to the above activities, which we all perform together as a class, students are expected to identify a food-related issue/problem they are passionate about and spend at least 5 hours working on a project designed to address that problem. This one-minute NIU video of my students working in NIU’s Communiversity Garden includes short interviews with some of the students.
I also incorporate service-learning community-engagement activities in my “Animal Ethics” and “Environmental Ethics” courses.
Here are two:
At Feed My Starving Children, my students hand-pack rice, soy, dried vegetables, and a nutritionally complete blend of vitamins and minerals into bags, which are then sealed, boxed, placed on pallets, and shipped to the neediest children around the world. In their 1.5-hour shift, my students, along with a few other groups of volunteers, packed enough food to feed 83 children for a year!
The produce grown in the Communiversity Garden is donated to NIU’s Husky Food Pantry, which provides food and fresh produce to food-insecure NIU students. The first year my Philosophy of Food students volunteered in the garden, over 1,500 pounds of fresh produce was donated to the Husky Food Pantry.
They gain a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the practical significance of philosophy. They also gain a sense of empowerment. Students in my philosophy of food course learn about the dark realities of:
• absolute poverty and global hunger (viz., that 800 million people live on less than $1/day, and that over 17,000 children die from starvation and hunger-related disease each day);
• factory farming (viz., that each year in the U.S. over 10 billion farmed animals are forced to live miserable lives in massively overcrowded sheds, are mutilated without anesthesia, and are slaughtered inhumanely at a fraction of their natural lifespans); and
• the environmental impact of our current agricultural practices (viz., that our current animal-based agriculture is unsustainable and is one of the leading contributors to our current climate crisis).
My students react to these realities with deep sense of empathy, understanding, and concern for starving humans and farmed animals, along with fear for the future of the planet. This empathy and fear is often coupled with a sense of despair and impotence: “These things are awful, but what can I do?” The right kinds of community-engagement activities (e.g., growing food in NIU’s Communiversity Garden and packing food at Feed My Starving Children) can replace this despair with a sense of empowerment and awareness that their actions are helping to reduce hunger both in DeKalb and around the world.
They also gain a sense of community. There’s an old adage: “If you want to build a community, plant a garden.” I think this adage is true. When my students work in the garden, they genuinely have fun together and begin to feel a greater connection with each other and to the local community, and something pedagogically amazing happens. While they’re kneeling in the dirt weeding or planting, you can hear students (in slightly muffled voices) discussing the course material and the changes that they are making to live more sustainably. How cool is that!
My community partners depend on volunteer support for the successful completion of their missions. NIU’s Communiversity Garden is maintained by a volunteer network of students, faculty, staff, and local community members. My students play a vital role in prepping, planting, weeding, mulching, and tending to the garden throughout the spring semester. They also assist with harvesting and cleaning the produce that is donated to the Husky Food Pantry.
Feed My Starving Children depends entirely on volunteers to pack their nutritionally complete food packets for shipment to 60 countries around the world. I bus my entire class to one of the packing stations. Many of my students find that experience so rewarding that they bring their friends and volunteer again during the semester.
On the first day of class, I tell the students: “If I think a service-learning/community-engagement project is important enough to expect you to perform, it’s important enough for me to perform.” I do all of the same service work that I expect them to perform right alongside them.
I’ve served as Faculty Advisor of NIU’s Vegetarian Education Group [VEG] since 1996. VEG seeks to educate NIU students and the local community about the myriad benefits (to health, Earth, and animals) of vegan diets. As Faculty Advisor, I regularly serve as a liaison helping VEG bring leading experts to campus to speak. Past speakers include Prof. Tom Regan (twice), Carol J. Adams (twice), Prof. T. Colin Campbell (twice), Dr. Michael Klaper (twice), Brenda Davis, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Prof. Kathie Jenni, Prof. Peter Wenz, Howard Lyman, and many others. I have also regularly arranged for VEG members to conduct vegan cooking demos at the local food cooperative, which benefits the coop and its customers. In return, the coop often donates food to VEG for on-campus vegan cooking demos at NIU.
In 2005, when TAILS Humane Society opened a state-of-the-art no-kill animal shelter in DeKalb, a number of VEG students wanted to do something to raise funds for the shelter. VEG decided to sponsor an annual “Trails for TAILS” bike-a-thon (followed by a vegan cookout for all riders) to raise money for TAILS. VEG held the bike-a-thon for four consecutive years and raised over $20,000 for TAILS over that four-year period.
Check to see if your university has an Office of Student Engagement and Experiential Learning. If so, reach out to the staff there. They are extremely knowledgeable about the kinds of community-engagement activities being conducted at universities around the country and are an incredibly valuable resource.
I was fortunate to receive an NIU Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship that provided funding that helped me design my service-learning course on the Philosophy of Food. Michaela Holtz, who oversees the fellowship program, helped me in designing my course every step of the way. It wouldn’t be the success that it is without her help and expertise. Thanks, Michaela!
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
A delicious last supper sure beats a cumulative final exam!
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Tiffany Tsantsoulas is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield. She is on the governing board of the Public Philosophy Network.
I am drawn to projects that allow for collaboration with historically unrepresented communities in academic philosophy. For example, developing community materials on food ethics with Food PLUS Detroit or discussing philosophical literature with incarcerated women at Centre County Correctional Facility (CCCF). I’m not sure I know what “public philosophy” means, but I am a philosopher who wants to think with members of the public in ways that I hope will produce some form of public good.
It can be hard to do this kind of work as a graduate student or junior faculty member. Very often you are discouraged by well-intentioned mentors who do not want you to get distracted from more traditional priorities (dissertation, job market, making tenure). But I always knew that I wanted to do philosophy outside of the traditional confines of the university classroom. I was fortunate to find like-minded people in my Ph.D. program at Penn State like my advisor, Nancy Tuana, and Christopher P. Long, who both led me to get involved in organizations like the Public Philosophy Journal and Humanities Without Walls. During that same period I helped to start the Restorative Justice Initiative at Penn State in collaboration with Efraín Marimón and fellow graduate student Romy Opperman. We began in 2015 with a small prison education program in two correctional institutions. Under Dr. Marimón’s leadership it has since grown to include more facilities, outreach, and advocacy, and continues to work toward our initial goal of offering credentialed courses to incarcerated students interested in earning a degree.
Now I’m in my second year as a faculty member. I’m lucky to be surrounded by colleagues who have been active public philosophers in the region for years. Our Kegley Institute of Ethics (KIE), for instance, is a well-established bridge between CSUB and the community. Learning from my colleagues, like KIE director Michael Burroughs, I have come to realize the importance of tailoring public philosophy projects to the particular publics that you plan to engage. This cannot be done without collaboration and humility. I am deeply invested in breaking down barriers between the university and the community. As a faculty member at a public institution I believe I have a mandate to serve the public with my work.
Currently, I am developing new programming that can promote anti-racist and feminist issues here in Kern County. I’m collaborating with a couple undergraduate students to develop partnerships with local activist groups who work to promote feminist abolitionism. We’re planning a reading group and several public conversations. Our goal is to establish long-lasting connections between feminist and anti-racist scholars on campus and those who are working in our community. I know we have a lot to learn from each other.
I really enjoyed my time working on the Humanities Without Walls’ New Ethics of Food (Global Midwest) project. At the time I was a graduate assistant and cannot take much credit for the various deliverables the project produced, but I learned so much about what public scholarship can achieve from this interdisciplinary and collaborative team. For my part, I co-wrote three articles published in a special issue of the Public Philosophy Journal that focused on rethinking our ethical paradigms about food justice.
Yet the real reason this project was a success for me is that I was able to collaborate with Renee Wallace of Food PLUS Detroit. In addition to bringing her expertise to the group, she was interested in developing discussion materials on food ethics for a series of townhalls in Detroit. It was the first time that I saw tangible evidence that philosophical ideas could be useful to marginalized communities. Maybe that sounds a bit strange! But I genuinely hadn’t experienced this before. I’ll always remember when Renee told me that she was excited to use a framework I developed to present ideas about composting and food justice to the community. That’s the excitement I’m looking to recreate with my current work.
The first vision of philosophy I was exposed to was Socratic. I took to heart the idea that philosophy was something to be practiced in community with the public. Then I had a rather painful training in canonical academic philosophy that, while it fascinated me intellectually, seemed to pull me away from the social issues that really mattered to my life. In fact, I left the discipline for a couple of years after receiving my M.A.
When I began my Ph.D. something wonderful happened. I discovered feminist and critical race philosophers, like María Lugones and Angela Davis, whose philosophical work was inseparable from their engagements with the public and with contemporary social justice issues. I do not want to choose between my job and my ethical and political commitments, and I’ve now realized that there is a version of being a philosopher that necessitates the dissolution of this choice. I am also a better thinker when I can brainstorm with diverse interlocutors. Perhaps this is not the case for every scholar, but for me, public engagement helps rather than hinders my reasoning. I have no desire to be a gatekeeper for our discipline. The more the merrier!
I’m still figuring this one out. This work and my research are both motivated from the same place and in that sense inform one another. Yet integrating public philosophy into my research in meaningful ways is not something that I am practiced at. Because my research focuses on resistance practices in everyday life (which I approach from a feminist and critical phenomenological perspective), I know that it will happen.
I suppose that my hesitation is motivated by ethical concerns. I want to be able to collaborate in my research with members of the public in a way that is scholarly but also cognizant of power imbalances. I am in the learning stage at the moment. There is so much valuable feminist work that touches on this very concern, and I am navigating how best to proceed in my career and my community.
Doing public philosophy has undoubtedly made me a better teacher. While I was learning how to teach as a graduate student instructor, I was running writing and reading classes for incarcerated women at CCCF. To my surprise, I realized that many feminist pedagogical strategies that I was struggling to implement in the university classroom, like sharing authority and deemphasizing compliance, were easier to do within CCCF. Talk about irony! The big difference, of course, was that I was doing philosophy without any need for strict assessments or learning outcomes. This freedom allowed us to focus on critical thinking and the creative exploration of ideas in a more unfettered way.
Thinking with members of the public also forces you to learn how to explain complicated ideas without relying on jargon or discipline-specific analogies. It doesn’t mean staying away from complex arguments or concepts, only that you cannot be lazy or elitist in your communication of them. You need to make philosophy relevant, which means learning how to listen to others and incorporate their concerns and ideas. These “challenges” are beneficial because they force you to refine your own thinking and to ask yourself what you, in your role as a teacher, are doing for others.
I try to make my university courses as accessible as possible. I get my students invested in philosophy by showing them how they can use their own lived experience as a ground for philosophical analysis. I learned the value of this approach by working with diverse publics.
There is a certain predictability to student reactions to texts in the classroom. I’m not sure if this is because I always present the texts in ways that subtly elicit these reactions. In any case, I have not found this to be true outside of the traditional classroom. One especially memorable moment happened at CCCF with a group of incarcerated women. My co-teacher Shannon Frey suggested that we discuss the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway that day. There are various interpretations of this enigmatic short story but the most common is that the “girl” is being coerced by the “Man” into having an abortion.
When we finished reading it several of the students looked alarmed and mentioned that the “girl” was in danger and should run. As others were nodding in agreement, I asked why they thought she was in danger, assuming we would discuss the abortion interpretation. Instead, they told me it was because the “girl” was about to be the victim of sex trafficking. The group then collectively developed an analysis that supported this interpretation: they are waiting at a train station, they seem to be in a romantic relationship, he is trying to convince her to do something that will allegedly better both their lives, etc. These innocuous pieces came together to form a picture of a potential sex trafficking situation in their eyes.
It was a moment that showed me how important it is to leave space for varying perspectives in a discussion. I can’t always anticipate what my students will think or how their own life experiences might inform their reading of a text.
“I am deliberate / and afraid / of nothing” from Audre Lorde’s poem “New Year’s Day” in the collection From a Land Where Other People Live. It’s a frequently quoted piece of her poetry that has always stuck in my mind. It is so bare and direct. I think this passage, and the rest of the poem, is about facing change head on. I could never imagine writing these words myself. I have never felt like that in the face of big transitions, which I find very difficult to cope with. But it is a favorite of mine precisely because I am awestruck each time I read it. It inspires me to be brave.
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Philosophers Fight Climate Change Series
This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time.
Rebecca Millsop is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. She is co-founder of Philosophers for Sustainability, and she co-chairs the 2022 Eastern APA Teaching Hub.
What type(s) of public philosophy do you do?
Over the past several years, much of my work has focused on improving the profession of philosophy itself. In early 2019, I co-founded Philosophers for Sustainability with my friend and colleague Eugene Chislenko. Our goal has been to create a venue for philosophers to discover and create ways to fight the climate crisis doing what we are already doing as philosophers. I have been influenced by Robin Zheng’s Role-Ideal model of responsibility which claims that we should “push the boundaries of our social roles” to work towards structural change in the face of injustice. The work our organization does is focused on pushing the boundaries of our entire profession.
While working with us, philosophers often recognize for the first time that being a professional philosopher can involve an important kind of activism. We can introduce units on climate change into our courses, work with our departments to begin abiding by the recommendations made in the APA Good Practices Guide on Sustainability (written by our organization), advocate for changes within our professional organizations that discourage flying and problematic consumption, and engage with our colleagues in dialogue surrounding these issues to move them forward.
I am deeply invested in grounding this work in a genuinely supportive, caring, collaborative ethos. One of my main roles in the organization is facilitating our regular forum meetings where we discuss our current campaigns alongside other topics relevant to our work. I take the role of facilitator very seriously as it involves setting the tone, overseeing relationship-building among participants, and curating the overall vibe. My goal is for participants to leave feeling like they can be part of a real community of supportive colleagues—both listened to and able to listen to others in non-combative and meaningful ways. Further, I hope that this type of experience can become regularly expected in other aspects of the profession as well.
We recently launched the very exciting APA 2+1 Campaign. The idea started with Helen De Cruz, which she introduces in a recent blog post for the APA Blog Series Climate Matters (another example of one of our recent projects). We are working to move at least one of the three annual divisional meetings of the APA to an online format, with the in-person meeting(s) rotating between the three divisions. We launched the campaign in late August 2021 and have garnered support from 675 signatories as of October 2021. The APA has so far responded positively to our campaign; they sent out a survey in response shortly after the campaign went live.
Whether or not the campaign is ultimately successful in changing the formatting schedule of the APA divisional meetings will be determined in the near future. Regardless, the campaign has started this important conversation within the profession. Instead of thinking of the impact of professional philosophers as individuals, we can now address how one of our preeminent professional organizations is (or is not) addressing the climate crisis.
I think Philosophers for Sustainability is beneficial to the profession of philosophy in several ways. First, it creates a space where activism can coexist with our professional identities. Many philosophers who care about climate change haven’t been able to merge their personal and professional identities, especially those who do not specialize in environmental philosophy. Second, it provides a supportive, collaborative environment for members of the profession. Connecting with people while doing very meaningful, impactful work creates the possibility for healthy, productive relationships in the field. Finally, if members of the profession start pushing on their social role as philosophers, we can make big changes that have real, positive effects on the environment. This impact can go way beyond the boundaries of the profession!
Join Philosophers for Sustainability! Anyone can learn more about us through our website–https://www.philosophersforsustainability.com—and should feel free to email us at [email protected] with any questions. We are an international organization and we are always looking for new members to join and bring their ideas to the table.
One important motivation is simply that we really have to do everything we can to address the climate crisis. This has been true for a very long time and many people are just now waking up to the severity of the issue. This is one impactful way that I can use my already existing knowledge and skills to push for change. Fighting climate change as an individual is depressing and often feels completely useless. Fighting climate change as an organization is empowering and impactful.
The other motivation is that solidarity simply feels really good. I really enjoy spending time with my colleagues doing this work. Because we have put a lot of effort into creating a friendly, collaborative, and caring environment, we get along well. I consider my Philosophers for Sustainability colleagues my friends, even though I haven’t actually met most of them in person! I want to be involved in and foster these types of environments so that more philosophers are given the chance to feel a real sense of belonging and community. The ultimate goal is to make these types of relationships and environments the norm in our profession.
As a graduate student I worked on a project to create a database with information about philosophers from underrepresented backgrounds that could be used by departments and committees when inviting speakers or hiring new faculty. When I joined the project, the goal was to simply get together a nice spreadsheet that could be shared widely. I ended up teaching myself how to build and maintain websites in order to create a designated one for the project, which is now maintained by the APA: The UPDirectory.
At the time I was really struggling to find meaning in the profession and trying to decide if I wanted to put my effort into this type of career. Working on that project helped me connect with the profession in a meaningful way. I found genuine support from the senior faculty leading the project; they believed the work itself was important and understood how beneficial the project could be for the profession at large. I am grateful for that experience because it helped me see how creating tools for the profession can be a type of civic engagement.
This work has absolutely changed how I engage with people inside of philosophy! Instead of just talking philosophy, I am motivated to start up discussions surrounding the projects I am invested in with the hopes of finding other passionate, collaborative colleagues to join in. Now, when I am engaged with other philosophers, I am always at least a little in activist mode—How can I get this person to get involved and help push on the structural barriers in the way of climate justice (or racial justice or pedagogical justice)? That is exciting and certainly makes for many more interesting conversations.
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Timothy Stock is a professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Salisbury University, and he is currently a member of the governing board of the Public Philosophy Network.
I am most interested in doing public philosophy that engages as diverse a range of people as possible into the process of doing philosophy itself. Not simply finding new venues or forums for academics, but rather for the public to be the basis and subject of philosophical inquiry. REACH (“Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities”) is an example where a group of us are trying to forge a new path, what we’ve come to call philosophical enfranchisement. This focus on enfranchisement means an increased emphasis on “listening first” and trying to locate people where they are. It also means that philosophy is less about having the better argument, and more about understanding who is and is not included in a given field of inquiry.
Taken from the perspective of my home department (which in my role as chair is the focus of my public philosophy activity) this means identifying a range of social enterprises and activities to be enriched with voices (such as prisoners, school children, or religious leaders) who are not typically enfranchised in philosophy. It is also program-level initiatives such as our Eastern Correctional Institution book discussion program, Ethics Bowl, Philosophy in Schools, and REACH that can sustain grants or more ambitious multi-year projects. We’ve just revised our departmental reporting so that each of these levels of activity can anchor our teaching and research in a way that is of obvious civic interest to our campus leadership, our colleagues in other departments, and to the public at large.
One of the most interesting projects I have been a part of is the REACH initiative, which has been active since 2018. I received an NEH “Connections” planning grant in collaboration with my colleague Dr. Michéle Schlehofer in the SU Psychology Department, who specializes in community-based research. She and I conducted a year’s worth of activities, the centerpiece of which was creating an ethics network in the local community which served as the basis for conducting regular “listening sessions” or focus groups around ethics. This would be considered a descriptive ethics project in that we focused on clarifying and understanding the meaning of fundamental ethical concepts (justice, equity, etc.) as articulated by our community partners, and then we also sought to gain a sense of what community leaders would describe as the priority areas of ethical concern in the greater Salisbury region. We were able to take these sessions and convert them into a range of materials, including Ethics-Bowl–style cases that captured actual decisions that people in our community have had to make, as well as newsletters and a white paper on the ethics of using criminal background checks for housing applications. The cases that we generate out of these sessions provide the basis for classroom work: Perhaps predictably we had a lot of discussion of community health ethics and vaccinations in our sessions last year, and we’ve been able to discuss those cases in courses offered by the SU Biology department such as Immunology or in introductory courses to our STEM majors.
I suppose my core motivation is a love of philosophy, but perhaps also a sense that philosophy is needful in our communities right now. My sensibility about philosophy is very interdisciplinary and, for lack of a better term, “bottom up.” I think we must do a better job of enfranchising people beyond the protreptics we engage in in freshman classrooms. In this I have been tremendously inspired by colleagues like Claire Katz and Cristina Cammarano who work with children and young adults—this is serious work and should be normalized, because learning to communicate about concepts and ideals in the context of public philosophy improves the degree of clarity that we can have in regards to our own interests and questions.
It has taken me years to understand this, and perhaps I am only now just doing so fully. My abiding interest has been in existential and phenomenological philosophy. The opportunity to observe people in our REACH listening sessions with an eye to the way in which concepts are phenomenologically founded, and thinking of concepts such as responsibility for others and freedom (such as one would find in, say, Levinas or de Beauvoir) has led me to believe that philosophers can be particularly attentive to how the unfolding of a conversation itself is a kind of philosophical text. I have realized that the act of people describing or wrestling with fundamental concepts and their meaning can have tremendous drama, precisely because it allows us to understand when something is “at issue” for us personally, normatively, or politically. So I’m also interested in the possibilities of staging and translating philosophical conversations to different audiences. I’ve taught philosophy of religion and theology by reading through transcripts of interviews with religious practitioners with my students, or by tackling dramatic pieces such as Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning and its sensitivity to the tensions in Anglo-American style conservative intellectualism, or even Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother with its many deep dives into psychoanalytic theory. I’ve gone so far as to write a graphic novel script and writing for cartoons to get at some of these things as well. I suppose in all of this I’m staying true to or re-articulating what Kierkegaard called “experimentation” by which he meant exploring fully a possible viewpoint as an almost dramatically instantiated person or voice.
My teaching has been enriched by this to a tremendous degree. I have taught by having my students facilitate discussion on course readings with prisoners (as I do in my “Existentialism” classes) and have also staged public debates (as in my “Problem of God” class). The most current examples have been the ethics “drop in” sessions that I have done in a range of classes across campus, in the social sciences and physical sciences. There is something important that happens when you make a class responsible for articulating a present community concern. It cuts through the navel-gazing, for one, or the stereotypical dude in the back of class who needs to STFU. Disagreements matter more. Listening and understanding has a premium. And I find that you can get a lot more out of people than you think you can. About my community work, the prison group, or work with students with atypical preparation for philosophy, I get questions in the shape of: “How do you get these people to start doing rigorous philosophical work?” I think this question reveals unhelpful exclusivism and elitism about what philosophy actually refers to, which is very much already in the real world. What if it were professional philosophers who needed to bend their ears to hear others? This is what I take to be the point of work such as Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice and the subfield of literature it has generated, or Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness—that it takes work to listen to the conceptual gaps that are already implied by what we take philosophy to be “already,” before we have talked to anyone beyond the profession, or thought about whether that profession is accessible to all people, or before we have thought critically about how we frame philosophical dialogue in advance.
I have become a bit of an evangelist for thinking very seriously about departmental review criteria, whether that means tenure and promotion, or annual progress reviews, or even long-term assessments. All the activities of a philosophy department can be seriously enhanced by prioritizing public and community philosophy programming and initiatives. A lot of philosophers, and a lot of humanities scholars broadly, are wary of assessments, learning outcomes, etc., because they sound like the sort of thing we’d love to use as a punching bag in an epistemology class, and they are in no ways a real representation of learning or “philosophy” proper, any more than a treasure map should be taken to be an indication of distance or topography. But what public philosophy assessment and other review criteria allow you to do is to allow, say, a tenure candidate to frame their work critically in terms of identifying new constituencies for philosophy itself, whether that is accessing a more diverse student population or addressing an area of public debate that is underserved by philosophers at present.
I am fortunate to work at a university that has civic engagement as a primary goal and a central part of its mission, and a department that reflects that at all levels. And you can see that reflected in our community as well—the average person around town is pretty well aware of our department through our myriad activities, and you don’t get as much this glazed-over look of asking what it is we do with our time. By incorporating public philosophy into our self-assessment, we always have a working road map of how to access the community with the work we do—and even if it isn’t a real measure of what philosophical education “is” in every conceivable way, it sustains a conversation within the department to allow us to frame and re-frame what we do and its public justification. At a time when we are all getting tired of hearing about the perennial crisis in the humanities (which is really a reflection of a funding crisis and a crisis of confidence for which the decline of the humanities is merely a symptom), I feel that the best way forward is to continually ask ourselves how clearly we can represent our activities and interests such that what we do is understood and communicated.
I think that one of the most shocking encounters I have had in my adult life is realizing how many aspects of our political and civil society are completely isolated from any sort of review or revision. That could be the way that a hospital allocates resources, or what happens to prisoners decades after their conviction, or how that conviction happens in the first place. There is just a tremendous amount of what Jill Stauffer taught me to call “ethical loneliness”, that is, harms caused to individuals because they are a part of systems that cannot really be explained or accessed from the outside. Philosophers, I think, can be particularly good at re-opening foundational senses of what these institutions are for, what they think they know about what they do, or what they know but what they restrict from scrutiny in what Charles Mills calls “epistemological ignorance.” There is a great deal to be done in making sure public debates about what ought to happen are premised on knowing how decisions are made and by whom, understanding who is enfranchised within a given social world and who is not. So there is a justice in hearing people and finding ways that addressing the isolation and harm they have experienced can be transformed into institutional revision and repair.
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