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Report from the Pacific APA

I chaired a session on practical reasoning at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association last month. The session was great. The presenter, Ting Cho Lau, was a very sharp graduate student from Notre Dame. His paper was entitled “Tough Choices, Reasons, and Practical Reasoning,” and his argument was that none of the dominant theories of why “tough choices” are tough either adequately explains the phenomenon of toughness or holds out much promise of providing agents with guidance for making such choices.

I won’t go into Lau’s specific criticisms of each of the dominant theories. What will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars is that Lau argues none of those theories adequately acknowledges that tough choices, such as what career to choose, often involve the shaping of a person’s identity and so among the many considerations that must be looked at is what kind of person it is possible for one to become. Not everyone can, for example, become a great opera star. Even those who are excellent singers by most standards may have to accept at some point that their talents will likely limit them to more minor roles. That kind of self-examination is very difficult and that does indeed go a long way to explaining why at least some tough choices are so tough.

Lau’s paper was clearly presented and well argued. It was also ambitious, though, in that he proposed not simply to give a more adequate account of why tough choices were tough, but also to provide agents with guidance for making them less tough. It seems to me, however, that knowing that a choice is so “tough” because it involves figuring out just who exactly one is and who one is capable of becoming isn’t necessarily going to make the choice any less difficult. It seems entirely possible, in fact, that it might make the choice even more difficult.

The situation is even more complex, I would argue, than Lau presented it as being because the issue is not simply that of determining what kind of person one is capable of becoming, but also of determining what kind of person one wants to become. Usually, we are pulled in various directions with respect to that issue. As difficult as it may be to acknowledge that we may want to become someone (a famous opera singer, for example) that we simply don’t have the talent to become, it is even harder, Kierkegaard would argue, to determine who we really want to become. We want to become good people, people pleasing to God (or, if we are not religious, at least pleasing to our neighbors, or to those in our culture more generally), and yet, and yet, we are also drawn toward decisions that would make us into quite another sort of person.

There is, as Kant would say, a corruption in the subjective determining ground of our will. Or, as Kierkegaard would put it, we are “double-minded.” Arguably, that is the real reason why at least some choices are so “tough.” It isn’t all that difficult, generally, to decide on a career, or on whom to marry. Many people, in fact, would describe these choices as having been made for them, in a sense, by inclinations that were so strong they didn’t really seem like choices. Other sorts of choice, however, are not so easy. Deciding, for example, whether to stick up for a colleague who is being bullied and harassed when doing so might expose one to the same treatment––now that can be difficult!

The session was great, though, and Lau’s paper is a work-in-progress that even in light of the above criticism is better than many a paper I’ve seen published in peer-reviewed journals. The commentator, Susan Vineberg, from Wayne State University was also excellent, and the session as a whole was exceptionally well run. I’m not tooting my own horn there. I was only one of three chairs for three separate papers and actually the weakest link in that chain in that I mistakenly assumed the respondent had the same length of time to present her remarks as had the presenter. Each presenter got twenty minutes and each respondent got ten, so even though the entire session was three hours long, it went by in a stimulating flash.

My favorite session, however, was one of two sessions put on by The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. The topic of the session was love and “attachment.” Each of the three speakers was good. The highlight of the session for me, however, was the last speaker, Monique Wonderly of Princeton. Her paper was entitled “Love, Caring, and the Value of Attachment.” Wonderly argued, in terms such as I had used in the speech I gave at my father’s memorial service, that “[a]ttachment figures help to shape our senses of self, imbue us with self-confidence, and can serve as a source of emotional regulation and support even in their absence.”

I am really happy to have discovered The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. I knew about its existence before, of course, but for some reason I had assumed it was more about sex than it was about love, or that when it treated love that it was only sexual, or romantic love. I was wrong. The session was wonderful and would have been of enormous interest to Kierkegaard scholars.

There was one session on Kierkegaard. It was sort of a stealth session because Kierkegaard was not mentioned in the title of the session. The title was simply “Political Theology Group.” All the papers were on Kierkegaard, though. Unfortunately, the session was not well run. There were four speakers and a respondent for a two-hour session! It wasn’t clear how much time had been allotted to each speaker or whether any of them ran over that time. There was no time for questions, however, none. Hence there was no discussion whatever and there really should have been because some of the presenters appeared to be laboring under the erroneous view that Kierkegaard was generally contemptuous of the plight of the poor and the downtrodden and that there really wasn’t much in Kierkegaard that would provide a foundation for a positive political philosophy. I won’t rehash that tired argument or my response to it here. Go back and look at the earlier posts on this blog relating to Daphne Hampson’s book and Peter Gordon’s review of it for my comments on that view. Actually, one kind reader of this blog sent me a long list of quotations from Kierkegaard’s works that support his concern for the poor and downtrodden. I am going to use that list in a future post––with proper attribution, of course.

Just as an aside, I should alert readers to the fact that there is going to be a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November the theme of which will be “Truth is Subjectivity: Kierkegaard and Political Theology. A Symposium in Honor of Robert Perkins.” I know some of the speakers already and I can tell you that it promises to be a very good session indeed. Bob Perkins, about whom I will write more later, deserves nothing less. He was a true giant in Kierkegaard scholarship and he will be sorely missed.

There were lots of other great sessions at the Pacific APA meeting, including Onora O’Neill’s Berggruen Prize lecture that included comments from Andrew Chignell of Princeton and Eric Watkins of U.C. San Diego. Yes, that’s right, Andrew Chignell appears to have moved already from Penn to Princeton. And I was so happy and excited to have him here in Philly. That guy is really smart, and, as I learned from that session, a fantastic speaker.

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Report on 2016 Eastern APA Meeting

APA Plenary Address '16The 2016 annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association took place on January 6-9 at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C. The Søren Kierkegaard Society sponsored a session around the middle of the first day. Unfortunately, there was a mistake in the scheduling of that session. It was given a two-hour slot when it should have been given a three-hour slot. There were four speakers scheduled to present in that session and there is no way four people can present papers in a two hour session, so the session was moved to a three-hour time slot later that afternoon.

Jeffrey Hanson, who bears a striking resemblance to Kierkegaard, chaired the session, so he dutifully stood outside the room where the session should originally have taken place and alerted people to its new time and place. It looked to be a great session. The speakers were: Antony Aumann of Northern Michigan University, Jerome Gellman of Ben-Gurion University, Birte Loschenkohl of the University of Chicago, and Anthony Rudd, of St. Olaf College. Aumann’s paper was entitled “On Kierkegaard, Art, and Autonomy.” Gellman’s paper was “Volition and the Leap of Faith.” Loschenkohl’s was “Exception, Suspension, and Resistance in Kierkegaard (and Schmitt).” And Rudd’s was “Was Kierkegaard a Divine Command Theorist? Should He Have Been?”

Sadly, I cannot report on that session because I was scheduled to chair a session on the philosophy of religion that afternoon during the same time as the rescheduled Kierkegaard session.

So why am I writing on this year’s APA session if I cannot report on the Kierkegaard papers? Good question. I’m writing because it was otherwise a fantastic meeting, the best I have ever attended, and much of what made it so great touches on things near and dear to Kierkegaard, and to many Kierkegaard scholars.

The first thing I liked about the meeting was that it was much smaller and hence more intimate and collegial than any of the earlier meetings I’ve attended. Just how small it was is apparent in the photo above of the plenary session in which the chair of the NEH spoke about two new NEH grant programs. (More about that below.)

Of course the reasons for low attendance at this year’s meeting are sad. Higher education is in trouble. Enrollments are down pretty much across the board, so there are not many new positions being advertised. Moreover, drops in enrollments mean there is less money to send hiring committees to the meeting to interview job candidates, as was standard practice in the past. Much interviewing is now done via Skype. The positive side of this was that the sometimes oppressive air of desperation generated by frantic job seekers (we’ve all been there) was conspicuously absent. My impression was that most attendees were established professionals and most of those people are understandably happier and less frantic than people on the job market.

The positive atmosphere of the meeting was enhanced even further by a pronounced focus on the responsibilities philosophers bear to the general public. This is the aspect of the meeting that I think will interest Kierkegaard scholars. Kierkegaard insisted that philosophy should be relevant to the life of the individual, that it should not be a purely abstract, or academic, activity.

The plenary address on Thursday was given by William “Bro” Adams, the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Adams spoke about two new grant programs the NEH has to encourage philosophers to reach out to the general public. The first is the Public Scholar Program. The is a grant program that gives support to individuals working on “well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad readership.” The second program is “The Humanities in the Public Square.” This program “supports scholarly forums, public discussions, and educational resources related to the themes of a new NEH initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square.”

The plenary address was not the only part of the meeting that emphasized the duty of philosophers to engage with the general public. There was a session on the first day, sponsored by the Society for Applied Philosophy, on “Current Ethical and Justice Issues in Higher Education” that included a panel of seven scholars. There was a session the next day, sponsored by the APA Committee on Public Philosophy, entitled “Philosophy for the Public: Reports from the Field and National Endowment for Humanities Grants.” Lynne Tirrell of UMass Boston spoke on “Philosophy in Public: Modes of Engagements and Topics of Choice.” Peter Fristedt and Mark Silver, both from the NEH, spoke on the aforementioned NEH grant programs and offered advice on how to apply for them. Michael Lynch of U of Connecticut spoke on “Writing Philosophy for the Public,” and Gaurev Vazirani of Yale talked about Yale’s new philosophy blog WiPhi in a paper entitled “WiPhi: Developing Online Public Philosophy.”

Cool, eh? If you’ve been reading this blog since its launch in 2010, you have been in the forefront of the philosophical movement to bring philosophy to the general public. If you are a Kierkegaard scholar, you may be surprised to learn that many non-scholars also read this blog. I know because they occasionally email me about how much they love Kierkegaard even though they are not themselves scholars. I have actually endeavored to make this blog interesting to a wider public with the “Once Upon a Time in Copenhagen” and other similar posts. If you haven’t read any of those posts, I encourage you to go back and check them out. Some of them are pretty fun.

Also, if you haven’t yet checked out my other blog The Life of the Mind, definitely do that. I write there on a variety of issues of general interest, such as the First Amendment, race, and even the practical value of philosophical study, and I often manage to work in a reference to Kierkegaard. That blog now has more than 4,000 subscribers. How is that for engaging with the public!

I’m not done yet, however, in describing the emphasis at this most recent APA meeting on what philosophy can contribute to general public. There were two sessions sponsored by the National Philosophical Counseling Association (not to be confused with the American Philosophical Practitioners’ Association, another organization dedicated to philosophical counseling). Philosophical counseling is, I think, one of the most important ways that philosophers can show the relevance of philosophy to the lives of people who are not themselves professional philosophers. Different philosophical counselors practice their craft in different ways, of course. The most productive approach, I believe, however, is to view philosophical counseling as a kind of individual philosophical tutoring with an emphasis on how the mere activity of reflecting on one’s life can actually improve the quality of it.

The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA) held a session entitled “The Obligations of Philosophers.” I particularly enjoyed Jackie Kegley’s paper. The title was, unfortunately, not listed in the conference program and I don’t now recall the title she gave it. It was very similar, however, to the title of her contribution to the volume Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism (Brill/Rodopi, 2015). I’d seen that volume in the Book Exhibit, but hadn’t bought it. I was so favorably impressed by Kegley’s talk, however, that I ran right back to the Book Exhibit after the session and bought what I believe was their only copy.

There were lots of other sessions, such as the one entitled “Philosophy and Happiness” (sponsored by the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society) whose titles clearly indicated the topics discussed would be of interest to a broader audience than just scholars. I’d never seen anything like it in all my years of attending the APA. I don’t mean to suggest that professional philosophy has been transformed overnight from a vicious adversarial discipline to a unified udaimonistic movement. Daily Nous reported that “play nice” was overheard by at least a few conference attendees, so there is still work to be done.

All-in-all, however, this year’s meeting was an uplifting experience and highlighted that the discipline is indeed moving in new and more positive directions that will benefit not only professionals, but humanity as a whole. That is certainly something Kierkegaard would applaud!