I want to thank you all for attending the second undergraduate philosophy
conference at Dowling College.
It takes effort to submit a paper to a philosophy
conference, and then more effort to make travel arrangements, and if you are
coming from far, then also sorting out somewhere to stay. Then finding the conference location, getting
there on time, being nice to the conference hosts, giving your talk, and then
waiting until the end of the conference before getting out and relaxing. Of course, there are motivations: sometimes
going to a conference leads one to meet new people who one stays in contact
with, and it gives one an opportunity to try out one’s ideas in front of other
people who are interested in the same topic.
It’s also another line on the CV, and that can be helpful in showing to
others that one is serious about one’s career.
But as I explain to my students in my ethics class, getting something
out of an action does not make the action selfish. The act of sharing one’s ideas may sometimes be
egotistical, but more often it is an act of generosity. And for undergraduate students, it may take
a special risk of trying something relatively new. So I want to thank the students for their
participation. Their contributions here
today have been interesting and stimulating.
I also want to thank John Drummond for his excellent
talk.
I know well the work that it takes to put together a
successful conference, and all the credit this year goes to my colleague Robert
Berchman and our philosophy major alumnus Adam Kohler. Their hard work has paid off with the
excellence of the talks today. I thank
the Provost for supporting this conference, and of course we thank the GAETANO
MASSA CHAIR OF ITALIAN STUDIES for its sponsorship.
I am especially grateful to those who have attended the
conference. Students who were offered
extra credit to come of course may have been acting more out of selfish
reasons, but I would note that many students with that opportunity still don’t
come. Many of our students have not
attended any conferences, and so it takes some readiness to try something new
to come out on a Friday and listen to some talks. To my fellow faculty who have come today, I
thank you too. You are helping to
sustain the academic life of the college by giving up valuable time when most
of us have so little time available. A
college needs to come together to discuss academics if it is to be an academic
institution; maybe not all at the same time, but there at least needs to be
dialog between a good number of those in charge of the academics. Having the support and participation of
faculty for our undergraduate conference is a gauge of the health of our
college, so I am glad that there were faculty from other departments
participating today.
This week I sat through a jury selection process out at
the Riverhead Supreme Court. The two
attorneys in the civil case said that they were looking for jurors who could be
impartial judges of who was in the right, and then they proceeded to set out
some of the details of the dispute. They
proceeded to ask potential jurors whether they sympathized more with one side
than the other, and whether the would-be jurors had made their minds up about
the case on the basis of the slim amount of information already given. Although I was struck by the fact that some
potential jurors seemed to have a hard time expressing themselves at all, or of
grasping what the questions posed to them meant, I was more struck by the
incoherence of the lawyers’ position. Citizens
who had good experience in relevant matters were being disqualified from
serving precisely because they had relevant experience. The lawyers were looking for people with less
relevant experience, on the dubious assumption that having experience would
bias people toward one side. They were
not really looking for people who were unbiased, however; they were looking for
people who were not well informed and who they hoped they could more easily
influence. They had to frame their
search as ruling out bias, but not a single potential juror admitted any
bias. They did admit having experience
that might have influenced them in their judgment, and this was taken to be
problematic for one of the two sides. So
the trial started out not with a search for truth, but rather a search for
those who are less qualified to find truth.
Philosophers promote philosophy in general education
courses and for the general public as a way to improve critical thinking
skills, and they are right to do so. The
studies show that philosophy majors do well at critical thinking. It is not clear to what extent this is because
philosophy improved their skills, and to what extent people with good critical
thinking skills are attracted to study philosophy, but it is bound to be some
combination of the two.
However, there is the further issue of why anyone would pursue
graduate study and devote their life to philosophy. Here the answers go beyond the skills of the
discipline to the insights provided by philosophical thinking. As philosophers like to say, we uncover the underlying structure of thought,
the ultimate nature of reality, the intrinsic limits of knowledge, and
the like. Philosophers go deep; while most scientists (either
in the hard or soft sciences) are interested getting data, and are content to
use operationalized concepts adequate for their purposes, philosophers focus on
the big picture, they look at theoretical consistency, and subtleties in
meaning. So philosophy offers a profound
understanding of our lives and the world, or at least of our attempts to grasp
the nature of the world.
But even in describing the value of philosophy, I have
alluded to the fact that philosophers have profound disagreements with each
other, both about the nature of the universe, what sort of knowledge we can
have of it, and how to do philosophy.
Not only is it apparently impossible to come to a final resolution in
philosophical disputes, but those who are skeptical about the value of
philosophy suggest it is a discipline that does not even make any
progress. As students often complain, it
just keeps going in circles. Critics of
philosophy see it as a form of self-indulgence with no solid benefit beyond the
critical thinking skills.
These concerns can't be dismissed, precisely because the
dangers that the critics point out are real.
Even if we disagree with them, we need to take them seriously as a way
to keep ourselves self-critical and be aware of the need to advance
philosophy. Of course, when students
make the complaint that an article they are assigned just keeps on repeating
itself, they are normally wrong, and they have just failed to understand the
complexities of the argument, which is in fact carefully constructed and goes
through different issues systematically.
While much philosophical debate that goes on today can be seen as
echoing debates that has gone in earlier centuries, it is also conducted in new
terms, taking new scientific knowledge and other more recent philosophical
discussion on board. Taking that into
account, we can define progress in ways that make it indisputable that
philosophy does make progress.
Nevertheless, we can still wonder whether we are much
closer to ultimate truth beyond science than Plato and Aristotle were. My own opinion is that Aristotle made a vast
and demonstrable advance over Plato, but it is less clear whether we have advanced
much beyond Aristotle at least in our metaphysics. My own views are that there needs to be an
intimate connection between philosophy and other disciplines, especially the
sciences, and that such engagement of philosophers outside of their own
discipline will help to ensure that we don't end up just gazing at our own
navels. Much of my own work is focused
on making those connections between philosophy and other disciplines, and I am
broadly committed to interdisciplinary work.
But interdisciplinary work is dependent on work within
the discipline, philosophy cannot be completely interdisciplinary. There has to be a core of pure philosophy,
and in teaching philosophy, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, we
need to teach that core. We also need to
nurture work in that core, and bring new philosophers into it. Events such as this undergraduate conference
help to do that.
Even if it is hard to demonstrate that philosophy
delivers widespread agreement even among philosophers about what knowledge it
has established, we can point to the social
value of philosophy. All the
disciplines within Arts and Sciences have traditions of honesty and courage, in
the face of widespread condemnation. The
academy, at its best, stands for truth over ignorance, and highlights the value
of the difficult search for knowledge.
Within the academy, philosophy has the curious position of searching for
the most elusive knowledge. At the same
time, and maybe because of this, philosophy has the role of being the most
contrarian discipline, questioning everything and doubting the claims
supposedly established through empirical methods through the search for
problematic underlying assumptions. The
figure of Socrates is always an inspiration, being a pain in the neck by asking
difficult questions, pointing out problems with other people's answers, and
refusing to shut up.
So I would argue that analyzing the sophistry of lawyers
going through a jury selection process is a particularly philosophical
virtue. Further, pointing out the need
for more honesty and providing a model of how to achieve that is also a skill that
is distinctively within the province of philosophy. In encouraging students to take courses in
philosophy, to pursue minors in philosophy, ethics, and bioethics, and even to
major in philosophy, we are promoting more than critical thinking in a narrow
sense. We see the virtues of philosophical
debate in events like our undergraduate conference today. Those virtues include a determination to
search for difficult truths and a readiness to engage in debate and criticism,
even when the chances of finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
(i.e., some form of established truth) are very remote. The ability to transmit to students that desire
for a struggle for the truth is particular rewarding for those of us who teach
philosophy, and when I see it in students, I am filled with admiration for
them. So I am filled with admiration for
the students who have participated in this event today, and again, I want to
give them my heartfelt thanks.
