The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.
The following is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Manuel Vargas which will be released in full next week.
Hey Manuel, thanks for agreeing to do this!
I think it is overdetermined that I have to say yes. I’m both a fan and frequent reader of your interviews and, well, maybe…determinism?
haha…great! Thanks! Let’s get started. As a kid, what did you do for fun?
As a kid, I was principally interested in eating at McDonalds, watching ThunderCats, and coming up with Dungeons and Dragons scenarios I would never play. I was a barely functioning readaholic. I would read literally anything in a pinch. I read tons of fiction (all sorts), but also things like outdated science textbooks, the backs of cereal boxes, random history books, some religious-y things, the newspaper, and if necessary, the dictionary. Lots of words there, it turns out.
Who didn’t love ThunderCats? What religious stuff were you reading?
At some point I read Andrew Greely’s The American Catholic, which was probably the root of my lurking interest in the sociology of religion (and really, the sociology of everything). But the main thing was The Bible, albeit in comic book form. We actually had several comic book versions of the Good Book. There are religious traditions according to which pictorial depictions of this sort are heresy, but I’d wager that the comic book form holds its own for effectiveness.
Did you read non-religious comics?
Absolutely. I made mine Marvel: X-Men, New Mutants, and the Simonson run on Thor.
Were you a philosophical kid?
Looking back, philosophy didn’t feel like much of a thing in the Vargas household. My father had a love of philosophy and theology, and would sometimes talk about it at the dinner table, but no more so than he would talk about, say, the legendary Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, or what life was like when he was growing up in a rural cattle-ranching family. I never felt called to pitch anything (apart from book projects) or to milk anything (besides bad jokes).
Inspirational teachers?
I did have the good fortune of having a high school teacher—George Mawson—who decided that American & British literature weren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. So after about 3 weeks of the state-mandated curriculum, he would then turn the class into a philosophy class. So, I got to read some Plato, Ortega y Gasset, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer in high school.
Did you consider doing anything other than philosophy?
When I wasn’t taking philosophy, I was taking philosophy in disguise. I took an intellectual history sequence in the history department and wrote only about philosophy. I took the political science departments political theory sequence, and wrote about political philosophy. At the time, it didn’t feel like it was possible to take too much philosophy.
When did you start thinking about grad school?
Somewhere along the way, Phil Clark and G.J. Mattey asked me if I had thought about going to graduate school in philosophy. I said I was pretty sure I couldn’t afford it, and anyway, I thought I was supposed to go to law school since that always seemed to impress people who asked me about my plans. They explained to me that I wouldn’t need to pay, at least not if I did it right. That sounded better than anything else I had going on, so I applied to a variety of graduate programs in philosophy.
Right. People forget what a jungle it was. So, what did you want to do with ethics at the time?
I wasn’t entirely sure. Either the history of ethics or metaethics seemed appealing.
Where did you apply? Where did you get in?
My heart was set on going to grad school at UC San Diego. Naturally, they rejected me. This was the start of a 25-year master plan to exact my revenge on them by getting hired there. Along the way, I got in to Notre Dame’s Ph.D. program, and they gave me a pretty sweet-at-that-time fellowship package.
During that admissions cycle, though, I had been wait-listed at Stanford. I didn’t actually know anything about Stanford, apart from the fact that it was supposed to be fancy. I remember the phone call from Fred Dretske when he assured me with understated confidence that I shouldn’t worry about being waitlisted. He told me that everyone who had ever been at my position on the wait list ended up getting an offer from Stanford. You can guess what happened. So off to South Bend I went.
Describe Notre Dame.
Three things stood out for me about Notre Dame. First, I had the invaluable and completely terrifying experience of taking a grad seminar from Peter van Inwagen on free will. This was the thing that got me thinking about free will in a serious way. Second, I walked away with a deep appreciation of Midwestern football culture. We don’t have anything remotely comparable in California. Third, I learned what winter can be. It took a while for me to piece together that my mood and philosophical work are solar-powered, and that I needed to get a sun lamp if I wasn’t going to be moody all the time. I was not my best self at that time. But things got better once some of those details got sorted out. It was a great experience, if a bit trying what with the poor tortillas per square mile problem they had.
What was the process of writing your dissertation like?
Well, there was a year of mostly wasting time, avoiding working, playing soccer, and having a good time. Then there was the year where I did almost nothing else besides work on the dissertation. That required a lot of forcing myself to stay in until I got work done, which was a tough bit of self-disciplining to learn. Eventually, though, I got the hang of grinding through large quantities of not-always-pleasant work. Those skills continue to serve me well, especially in dealing with the daily email load of academic life.
What did you do to unwind?
There was plenty of the usual sort of graduate student hanging with friends; I played some racquetball (ah, to have knees that could still do that); videos and video games. Sometimes I’d go see live music. At the time, San José was a hotspot for lots of great acts—Ozomatli, Orishas, Café Tacvba, ¡Cubanismo!, and so on came through.
When did you finish? What was the job market like?
I finished in spring 2001, and didn’t really go on the job market in a serious way until the fall of 2001. I think the general sense at the time was that we were in a down cycle when there weren’t a lot of jobs, although perhaps not like it is now. As it turned out, though, I got a good number of interviews, in no small part because most places looking at Latin American Phil or Phil Race tended to interview me. I had been hoping to get a job in a Ph.D.-granting institution, but no place like that made me an offer.
Advice?
Every job candidate is miserable in his or her own way. I’m not sure how much I can offer as a general lesson. The nature of the job market has changed significantly since I went on it as a junior candidate. I can, however, provide tips about how to survive small talk with competitor compatriots when standing outside a bleak hotel corridor waiting for the opportunity to sit on a hotel bed surrounded by dudes interviewing you.
Erotic (in a bad way). Were your mentors and colleagues supportive?
They were. I didn’t have much sense of whether folks on my committee thought my work was good, promising, crap, or something else. And, I think West Coast schools were, especially in that era (but still so now), at a disadvantage in the politicking that would sometimes go on on behalf of candidates being interviewed at the Eastern APA. However, in the sense of supporting my ambitions and trying to get me to do work that was good enough to make possible those ambitions, I felt very supported.
One of the things I think the profession doesn’t quite acknowledge is how important early career mentors are. There is a period of time when one is done with one’s Ph.D., maybe away from that institution, but not fully ensconced in a career. Mentoring, frequently by people not at your Ph.D. institution, can play a big role in aiding and directing the shift to full professionalization. I benefited immensely from the efforts of John Martin Fischer and Eduardo Mendieta, and later, from the amazingly congenial group of philosophers that make up the free will/moral responsibility universe. In particular, I owe a shout-out to Dan Speak who has always been a stalwart companion and friend while we learned to navigate the various stages of professional life.
It’s a tight-knit community of friendly people who seem to fundamentally disagree. The model of a healthy philosophical community, in my mind. Job market horror stories?
There were some strange episodes, of course. In one case, while being driven into campus for a short-list interview, I discovered I was there as a candidate for a metaphysics job, despite having applied for their ethics job. They had unilaterally decided to reclassify my application, and no one alerted me. I only learned of it when the driver made an off-handed remark about how they had filled the ethics job already.
In another case, I was grilled for 20 minutes about my supposed dissertation on personal identity, even though I kept telling them that I didn’t really have thoughts about personal identity, and that I worked on other things.
And, you don’t really work on free will unless at some interview you get someone sufficiently angry about your view that they start shouting at you.
hahaha yes!
Oh, I also learned that if I didn’t want people telling me that I looked like a drug lord or a hit-man, I either needed to cut my hair or not wear dark clothes.
How do you deal when you’re confronted with that stuff? Confront? Ignore? Advice?
Well, when you are an assistant professor, confronting people with more social power feels like a mistake. But no, I don’t really have any advice on this front. Now, though, I think my students would welcome being taught by someone who looks like a hit man. Maybe I just needed to age into the look a bit more
So, how did you get into Latinx philosophy? Even if you wanted to study this stuff, it seems relatively hard to find somebody to work with.
In grad school I got interested in the history of philosophy produced in Latin America, mainly because a grad advisor told me that there was no important philosophy that was written in Spanish, and that I couldn’t use Spanish for one of my foreign languages because it wasn’t one of the philosophical languages. None of that seemed right to me, so I set about trying to find out if I was mistaken. Along the way, I discovered that the community of scholars in the U.S. who worked on these things also tended to write about various issues concerning Latinxs. So, I picked up some things just from reading around in the secondary literature on Latin American philosophy.
What’s the difference between Latin American philosophy and Latinx philosophy? I mean, I understand the distinction perfectly. Asking for a friend.
Where Latin American philosophy is typically understood to pick out philosophy produced in Latin America, Latinx philosophy is best understood as philosophy substantively concerned with U.S. Latinxs, i.e., people in the U.S. of Latin American descent. So, as I think of it, Latin American philosophy is like European philosophy—philosophy from a region. Latinx philosophy is more like feminist philosophy in being animated by the particular significance and experiences of a group. Latinx is a term about which I’m mostly unhappy, but there are various reasons, some of which are pretty good, for its being in vogue as a replacement for ‘Latina/os’ ‘Latin@s’ and ‘Hispanics’.
Got it.
There is, I suppose, an autobiographical piece to this. When I was very young, my father taught Mexican philosophy at the local community college. (I didn’t actually learn this until I was an adult already working on Latin American philosophy.) Also, my godfather and close family friend was involved in starting Chicano Studies at the local college. So, I suppose I got interested in Latinx philosophy the way I got interested in tacos—it was a round a lot.
Differences between Latinx philosophy and ‘anglo’ philosophy? Similarities?
Most work in Latinx philosophy is part of the larger world of Anglophone philosophy, in the same way that, say, lots of feminist philosophy is. This isn’t to say that important chunks of Latinx philosophy haven’t understood themselves to be distinct from and reading different figures than other parts of the Anglophone philosophy world. Latina feminism, for example, is its own subfield with a distinctive set of figures shaping the landscape. However, a number of philosophers working on, for example, immigration ethics are shaped by the familiar figures and debates in Anglophone political philosophy. Other parts of the subfield are thinking about social kinds and issues in the philosophy of race, and their work tends to be shaped by pretty diverse influences. A lot of work tends to understand itself as fundamentally concerned with liberation of various sorts.
And Latin American philosophy?
The comparison with Latin American philosophy is more complicated. There is a roughly 500-year history spanning a continent and half, so generalizations are almost always going to be misleading in one or another way. Beyond analytic and continental philosophy, you have some autochthonous traditions (e.g., the philosophy of liberation), various strands of Marxism and Thomism, lots of history of philosophy, and so on. That said, I suppose it is fair to say that philosophy in Latin American tends to be relatively quick to bury its past, which means that every generation or so has to start over again, oftentimes by importing movements from elsewhere. There are exceptions, of course, but the net result is that the history of Latin American philosophy, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, reads like an alternative version of the history of philosophy that dominated Europe and the United States with interesting offshoots that are oftentimes ignored in the very places that have produced them.
High points in your career so far?
High points: getting my first job; winning the APA Book Award; getting my current job; being able to mostly afford my mortgage.
What do you do in your spare time nowadays?
“Spare” time typically involves sitting in SoCal traffic listening to podcasts and audiobooks.
What podcasts are you listening to nowadays?
Very Bad Wizards is a good way to keep up on conversations in moral psych; Barry Lam’s Hi-Phi Nation is really cool, too. I’m sure there are lots of other things I should be listening to, but I only listen when commuting and my commute isn’t that long any more.
Favorite episode of Hi-Phi?
I really liked the Soldier Philosophers two-parter.
Do you still read comics?
These days, I’m a fan of Saga, Uber, the Allred run on Silver Surfer, God Hates Astronauts, and most stuff that Ales Kot does.
Do you still play videogames?
When I do play, it is now usually with one of my kids. I tend to like most of the big RPG-style releases—the Elder Scrolls series, the Fallout series, the Mass Effect series (until it fell into an abyss of terrible), the Witcher games, but for cooperative gaming, things like Civilization are best. Curiously, the Aztecs seem to win every time when I play.
Best and worst parts of philosophy conferences?
Best parts of conferences: seeing friends and colleagues, and learning stuff.
Worst parts: I hate planes, airports, and hotels.
Thoughts on philosophy blogs? Philosophy and the internet in general?
Without being a panacea, the internet made a big difference for those of us not in elite universities—it enabled us to have pretty good access to the state of play in a lot of fields. I surely benefited from that, including the too-brief flowering of substantive philosophy blogs like the Garden of Forking Paths and its successor, Flickers of Freedom. More generally, I suspect that my two decades in the Bay Area, and the tech booms and busts I witnessed while there, probably have had an outsize if subtle influence on various background beliefs I have about the world.
Best philosopher you disagree with most?
The average four-year old. They’ve got the whole “why?” thing down pat, and they tend to have poor taste in food, entertainment, and theories about the world, so it is hard to know how to move them on any important issues.
Do you talk philosophy with your kids?
Sometimes. Their interest in talking philosophy varies a lot by kid, and by whether or not they are in the mood to run the risk of me holding forth for too long. Still, I suspect some degree of the philosophical mindset has leaked into the day-to-day of home life.
What music are you listening to nowadays?
I’m currently a big fan of Zoe Keating, Arvo Part, Deadmau5, YG, and Natalia Lafourcade.
Tomorrow—who knows?
Thanks man, it’s been fun!
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.
