I’ve been invited to give a paper at an exciting Kierkegaard conference at the University of Southampton in the UK. The conference will take place from 5-6 of September 2024. It will be the “Launch Conference of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Scepticism and Conspiracy Theory.”
While ancient sceptics regarded scepticism about knowledge as a way of life, philosophers from Descartes to the present day have viewed it primarily as an intellectual problem that requires only a theoretical solution. The aim of this conference is to challenge this contention by focusing on the “existential” dimension of doubt — i.e., the way in which skeptical problems affect the whole person. For example, Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, has proposed that doubt and anxiety are intrinsically linked, and, hence, that doubt may not just be an epistemic vice (if it is one), but also a character failing that consists in a refusal to confront (and to try to overcome) certain forms of angst, such as, for instance, a refusal to face up to the radical contingency and fragility of the (human) world and to take refuge in a “scapegoating” scenario, where super-powerful, hidden agents are to blame: Descartes’ Evil Demon, on the one hand, or say, a “Deep State” controlling our actions on the other. The conference aims to explore these issues from a number of different philosophical perspectives (both Kierkegaardian and non-Kierkegaardian) and to bring together Kierkegaard scholars and epistemologists, working in both theoretical and applied areas of the subject.
This conference looks really exciting! Academic conferences are rarely so relevant to contemporary concerns as this one clearly is. This conference promises to demonstrate the importance of the study of the humanities, and in particular, of philosophy, to the project of navigating our way through the increasingly confusing morass of what is often referred to as the “information society.”
I plan to post updates on the conference with more detail. In the meantime, however, you can always check out the “Events” page of the Ethics of Doubt project!
I’ve been promoted to full “Professor.” I am no longer “Associate Professor M.G. Piety.” I am now, or will be as of 1 September, “Professor M.G. Piety.” According to my colleague Jacques Catudal, I am the first person to make full “Professor” in philosophy at Drexel in more than 18 years.
It has been a long journey, as they say. I decided to study philosophy when I was an undergraduate at Earlham College, a small Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana. I became hooked on philosophy as a result of taking a course on rationalism and empiricism with Len Clark. I didn’t particularly enjoy reading philosophy, and I hated writing philosophy papers. I loved talking about it, though. Talking about it was endlessly fascinating to me, so I switched my major from English to philosophy. I became hooked on Kierkegaard after taking a Kierkegaard seminar with Bob Horn. “Bob,” my friends at Earlham explained, “was God.” He was preternaturally wise and kind and a brilliant teacher who could draw the best out of his students while hardly seeming to do anything himself. I don’t actually remember Bob ever talking in any of the seminars I took with him, and yet he must have talked, of course.
I spent nearly every afternoon of my senior year at Earlham in Bob’s office talking to him about ideas. I worried sometimes that perhaps I should not be taking up so much of his time. He always seemed glad to see me, though, and never became impatient, even as the light began to fade and late afternoon gave way to early evening. I don’t remember him encouraging me to go to graduate school in philosophy (my guess is that he would have considered that unethical, given the state of the job market in philosophy). I do remember, however, that he was pleased when I announced that I had decided to do that.
Graduate school was enormously stimulating, but also exhausting and, for a woman, occasionally demoralizing. There has been much in the news in the last few years about how sexist is the academic discipline of philosophy. Well, it was at least as bad back then when I entered graduate school as it is now, and possibly even worse. Still, I persevered. I began publishing while still a student and was very fortunate to gain the support and mentorship of some important people in the area of Kierkegaard scholarship, including C. Stephen Evans, Robert Perkins and Sylvia Walsh Perkins, and Bruce H. Kirmmse, who was one of my references for a Fulbright scholarship I was awarded in 1990 to complete the work on my dissertation on Kierkegaard’s epistemology.
I lived in Denmark from 1990 until 1998. I received my Ph.D. from McGill University in 1995 but remained in Denmark to teach in Denmark’s International Study Program, then a division of the University of Copenhagen. I wasn’t even able to go back for my graduation, so I learned only a couple of years ago, when my husband bought me my own regalia as a gift, how gorgeous the McGill regalia are (see photo below).
I came to Drexel from Denmark in 1998 as a visiting professor. I liked Drexel. It was overshadowed by its neighbor, the University of Pennsylvania, but that seemed to me almost an advantage back then. That is, Drexel had carved out a unique niche for itself as a technical university, somewhat like MIT but smaller, that provided a first-class education in somewhat smaller range of degree programs than were offered by larger, more traditional institutions. The College of Arts and Sciences seemed to me, at that time, and to a certain extent, still today, as a real jewel, as Drexel’s “secret weapon,” so to speak, because while most large universities had class sizes ranging anywhere from 40 to several hundred students, most of the courses in the humanities at Drexel were capped at 25 students. Drexel also boasted some first-class scholars who were as committed to teaching as to scholarship. Drexel was providing its students with what was effectively the same quality of education in the humanities as is provided at small liberal-arts colleges, while at the same time giving them invaluable hands-on work experience through its co-op programs that few liberal-arts colleges could provide.
Drexel asked me to stay on for a second and then a third year, despite the fact that my beginning was less than auspicious in that at the end of that first fall term, I had mistakenly conflated the times of what should have been two separate exams and hence left my students sitting in a room waiting patiently for almost an hour for me to materialize and administer the exam. It was too late, of course, to do anything by the time I learned, via a phone call from one of the secretaries in the department, of the mistake. I was relieved when not only was the then chair of the department, Ray Brebach, not only not angry with me, but eager to see if I would be willing to stay on for another year. Ray has been one of my favorite colleagues ever since.
I received my tenure-track appointment in the spring of 2001. I liked my department. It was originally the Department of Humanities and Communications and included the disciplines of English, philosophy and communications. It was enormously stimulating to be in such a cross-disciplinary department. There were poets and novelists, as well as traditional literary scholars. I particularly liked being around the communications people, however, because many were engaged in politically significant media studies and that sort of work was reminiscent of the dinner-table discussions I remembered from childhood when my father was an editorial writer for one of the two newspapers in the town where I grew up. My association with the communications people led to the publication of an article I wrote together with my husband on the behavior of the mainstream media in the U.S. leading up to the second Iraq war.
Eventually, however, the communications people left our department and formed a new department together with the anthropologists and sociologists called the Department of Culture and Communications. So then we became the Department of English and Philosophy. I was sad to see the communications people go, but there were still plenty of creative writing people in the department who helped to make it a more stimulating environment than it would have been had it been comprised exclusively of traditional scholars. These people, including Miriam Kotzin and Don Riggs, both brilliantly talented poets, are some of my closest friends. Miriam has encouraged me to write for her outstanding online journal Per Contra, and Don, a talented caricaturist as well as poet, drew the picture of me that I occasionally use for my other blog.
It was an ordeal, however, to go up for tenure. Our department has a tradition of requiring monstrously comprehensive tenure and promotion binders into which must go almost everything one has done on the road to tenure or promotion. I think each one of my tenure binders was around 500 pages in length. It took me the entire summer of 2006 to put them together, a summer when I could have been writing material for publication. To add possible injury to the insult of having to devote so much time to the compilation of these binders was my fear that some of the reports of my “external reviewers” might not be so positive as they would haven been had I not become involved in a scandal in Denmark surrounding a controversial Danish biography of Kierkegaard. I lost several friends, including the aforementioned Bruce Kirmmse, as a result of my role in that controversy, friends whom I feared might well have been recruited to serve as external reviewers.
To this day I don’t know who all the reviewers were. Two were selected from a list I had provided my tenure committee, but the rest were selected by the committee itself. Whatever the reviewers said, however, it was not so negative as to override what subsequently became apparent was the high esteem in which my colleagues held me and my work. I was granted tenure in the spring of 2007 and I have fond memories to this day of the little reception provided by the dean for all faculty who where granted tenure that year. There was champagne and there were toasts and I was very, very happy.
I’d always been happy at Drexel, so I was surprised by the change that took place in me upon my becoming tenured. I felt, suddenly, that I had a home. I felt that people both liked and respected me. More even than that, however, I felt that I had found a community of high-minded people. People committed to principles of justice and fairness. I felt I had found a small community of the sort that Alasdair MacIntyre argues in After Virtue we must find if we are to live happy and fulfilling lives, the kind of community that is increasingly rare in contemporary society.
That all seems long ago now. Drexel has grown and changed. I am still fortunate, however, to have many brilliant, talented, and fair-minded colleagues. Thanks must go to my colleague Abioseh Porter, who chaired the department for most of the time I have been at Drexel and who was a staunch supporter of my development as “public intellectual” long before “public philosophy” enjoyed the vogue it does today. Thanks must also go to the members of my promotion committee, but especially to my colleague Richard Astro, who chaired the committee. I know from merely serving on tenure-review committees that no matter how uncontroversial the final decision is anticipated to be, there is an enormous amount of work required of the committee members, simply because of the level of detail required in the final report.
Thanks must also go to everyone who has supported me throughout my career. I set out, actually, to list each person individually, but then I realized that there are many, many more people than I would ever be able to list. I have been very fortunate.
A kind reader wrote to me yesterday to inquire why I had not posted anything to this blog in January. He said he enjoyed the blog and that he hoped I was not ill, or anything. I’ve not been ill (well, okay, I have been ill, for only for about a week). I’ve just been very busy. I’m teaching online this term and that actually takes more time than conventional teaching. I’ve also been finishing a book. It’s not a book on Kierkegaard. It’s a book on figure skating entitled Sequins and Scandals: Reflections on Figure Skating, Culture, and the Philosophy of Sport. So it is a philosophy of sport book, sort of. It’s actually a collection of many different pieces that I had published on skating over the years, as well as a few new pieces. It was mostly written already, but it did take some time to put together.
I am also finishing an article on Kierkegaard for a volume Oxford is doing on “theological epistemology” and I am editing the bibliography and writing an introduction to the forthcoming English translation of Martin Slotty’s book on Kierkegaard’s epistemology. Yes, I have been very busy. In between these projects, however, I have been doing a little Ebay shopping.
One of the things that was hardest for me about leaving Denmark was that it meant I could no longer spend my spare time haunting Danish junk stores looking for fine old paintings. That was how I used to relax when I lived in Copenhagen. Sometimes, when I had been working for many days without leaving the apartment (I can actually go a long time without seeing other people because I am kind of a recluse), I would just head out to one of the local junk stores. What most people outside Denmark don’t realize is that Danes suffer from an inferiority complex relative to the rest of Europe. Den danske mindreværdskompleks it’s called (literally “the Danish less-worth complex”). Legions of Danes appear to have taken up a serious study of painting since the turn of the century, but since relatively few of them became internationally famous, no one wants their paintings. Danes buy up these domestically produced works of art when the artists are young in the hope that these artists will become famous. But of course most of them never do, so when older Danes die, their heirs generally do not want these paintings, so they end up being carted off by the local junk dealer. Every junk store in Copenhagen is filthy with them, floor to ceiling. When I lived there I could often pick up a beautiful old painting from the first half of the century in a heavy guilt frame for under $100.
Over time, I gradually accumulated about fifty such paintings. Unfortunately, I could not take them all with me when I left Copenhagen. I still have plenty of paintings, so you should not feel sorry for me. I miss the trips to the junk stores though. Or did, until a couple of weeks ago when I discovered that there are some very nice Danish paintings available on Ebay! Yes, that’s right–Ebay. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any for under $100, but I’ve found some really beautiful ones in an Ebay store called Art-Gate from between $200-$500, which is really very good for an original oil painting in a beautiful old frame.
None of these paintings date from Kierkegaard’s time. They are mostly from the first half of the twentieth century. Many are stereotypical Danish landscapes, though, that will mean a lot to scholars who have spent time studying in Denmark. There are some nice interiors and still lifes as well, and all at very reasonable prices. In fact, Art-Gate invites people to make offers for the paintings, so you could easily end up paying even less than the official asking price. It’s not quite so much fun as combing through the junk stores yourself, but at least you won’t have to do the packing and shipping!
Piety on Kierkegaard 