Laurie Shrage is Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University in Miami, FL. She is a pragmatic pluralist, whose career in philosophy has mostly been a matter of happy accidents and luck. She moved quickly from the center of the profession (Philosophy of Language and Logic) to its margins, where she has found some sort of intellectual home.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
My childhood self: “what the heck is a philosopher?” My first exposure to philosophy was in college, in a course by Marjorie Grene on Sartre (1972). I had never encountered a woman who was so knowledgeable, and who inspired such fear and admiration in her students. The course had grad students in it. (I didn’t know what a grad student was either; my parents had not gone to college.) I was somewhat in awe of them too.
What are you working on right now?
Evidently philosophy was one of the last academic disciplines in the U.S. to hire men with Jewish backgrounds in the first half of the 20th century. When I was an undergrad and grad student in the 1970s, many of my professors were Jewish and some belonged to the first generation who were hired after WWII, when Americans confronted their own anti-Semitism. Yet I cannot remember any of them mentioning the barriers and discrimination that Jewish students of their generation had faced in philosophy (in particular, Marjorie Grene and Avrum Stroll, from whom I took multiple courses). So when, in the mid-1990s, I read David Hollinger’s Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and then his book on Morris Raphael Cohen, I was somewhat astonished. I emailed Prof. Hollinger for more information (email had only been around for a few years by that time) and he graciously wrote back. He said he was surprised at the “loss of historical memory” in our profession.
During the first decades of my career (from the early 1980s to the early 2000s), I watched our profession slowly become more diverse in terms of hiring women, African American, Latinx, Asian American, and lgbt philosophers. And I also saw that this made a difference to the content and methods of research and teaching in philosophy. So, I wondered, what difference, if any, did the somewhat more rapid entry of Jewish students and scholars from the 1940s to the 1960s make to philosophy in the U.S. (by the early 1960s, philosophers of Jewish ethnicity comprised roughly 10-20% of most Philosophy departments, and were “overrepresented” compared to their prevalence in the U.S. population—around 3%).
I am currently on sabbatical leave and am finally getting a chance to do some research on this. During the past few decades, I have made visits to various archives where the papers of some of the major figures of this first generation are located. I am now working my way through what I’ve collected, and will make some more visits to other archives as well this year.
Which books have changed your life? In what ways?
In college I read Small is Beautiful (1973) by E.F. Schumacher. I remember finding the ideas intriguing but that few around me were interested in the issues raised. I think this book is more relevant now. But what changed my life most was foreign movies, especially in the 70s when it was possible to find art houses showing French and Japanese independent films. These films showed me that there was a large and fascinating world out there, and I better find out more about it.
What technology do you wish the human race could discover/create/invent right now?
Carbon capture and storage on a massive scale.
When did you last sing to yourself, or to someone else?
I sing to my granddaughter all the time. She is the only person who seems to enjoy my singing, which I don’t expect to last once she turns two or three.
If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent, what would you most like it to be?
A talent for singing…
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
