by Sabrina D. MisirHiralall
James William Lincoln is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. His AOSs are Ethics, Epistemology, and Social Philosophy. His primary research is in moral perception and his secondary research is in the philosophy of community and the ethics of community building. Lincoln currently serves as national secretary for the Society of Philosophers in America(SOPHIA) and as Graduate Student Congress President at the UK. Outside of doing philosophy, his favorite activity is spending time with family, especially his two daughters.
What excites you about philosophy?
I’m consistently moved by the way philosophy facilitates a deeper engagement with each part of my life. Philosophy has enabled me to look deeply into things I deem most important and to honestly challenge myself to revise those beliefs or dispositions when appropriate. The thing that excites me most about philosophy is that it’s more than an academic discipline. It’s a way of life that takes self-reflection, belief-revision, clear reasoning, and honest dialogue to be important aspects of human flourishing. It’s a conception of how to live which, when practiced inclusively can, I believe, liberate people by emphasizing our shared humanity. Philosophy has been, for me, a path towards a more genuine form of living and for that I am very grateful.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
I’m currently in the revision stage of my dissertation. It is my favorite thing that I’ve written because I believe it helps make sense of my own moral development from childhood to present day. I have had moments of frustration but also felt a sense of therapeutic development and have experienced some transformative moments while writing the project. I’ve been researching moral perception as a means of making sense of our immediate encounters with value during morally germane situations. With this project, I’m hoping to provide a viable framework to make sense of times when one fails to appreciate or falsely encounters some moral feature(s) in a given situation. I am especially concerned with situations where sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression are the central issue. Why does the sexist fail to see a woman’s testimony regarding sexual assault as credible? Why do workers’ rights and needs get overlooked in favor of profit during management decisions? What motivates people to engage in brutality against marginalized populations? I argue that moral perceptions are best described as perceptual experiences rather than as exercises in judgment on the part of the subject. That is, we actually experience value, not just make judgments about value. As a result, this means that our experiences of the world are value laden and, as I also argue, that these experiences are shaped by our life’s experiences (especially through socialization). This is all very exciting to me because it opens new pathways for arguments regarding our obligations to seek out transformative experiences so that we may come to have morally reliable experiences of the world, ones which emphasize humanization and liberation over brutalization and domination.
What are you working on right now?
Aside from my dissertation work, I’m currently working on a piece which investigates the relationship between motivational internalism and integrity. I suspect that one possible consequence of the internalist position is that the morally praiseworthy agent is necessarily integrous. I’m also working on a piece entitled “Inclusivity as a way of Life” which explores how inclusivity can be conceived as a moral conception of how to live. The last side project I’m working on is an essay which claims that fellowship is a necessary component of successful dialogue, a piece I presented at the Eastern APA in 2018, entitled “Fellowship: An Epistemological Analysis”. I hope to submit it for publication in Civil American later this month. I also recently had a co-authored publication accepted at the Public Philosophy Journal entitled “Foundations for Communities of Philosophical Conversation”.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Up to this point, I take my very existence as a PhD candidate to be my greatest accomplishment, hopefully soon to be replaced when I defend my dissertation with “having received my PhD”. I take this to be my greatest accomplishment for a couple reasons. First, I really struggled with reading and written communication in my youth. I’m told that I had a communications delay as a child which resulted in receptive and expressive difficulties. I spent most of my public education in reading and speech development programs. I still feel like I struggle more than I should during two important philosophical activities: reading and writing. Second, and as a result of the first item, it took me three tries to be accepted into a PhD program in philosophy. I applied three times because I loved philosophy and it gave me the tools to work through my limitations. It helped me develop strategies that made me feel more at home in the world by overcoming my communication struggles. After my first round of rejections, I went back and got a second undergraduate degree in philosophy to make myself a better applicant for PhD programs (my first B.S. degree being in Mathematics). My second set of rejections did come with an acceptance to Boston University’s MA program in philosophy and so I felt like progress was being made. By my third time applying, I was accepted to two places for PhD study and was immensely thrilled. Since taking on philosophy as a full-time activity, I feel more myself than ever before. I am so very proud to be a PhD candidate at UK because, not only have I been able to pass my qualifying exams, I’ve also been able to complete graduate certificates in College Teaching, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Social Theory. As I look back on my childhood self, I just feel so grateful to have come so far.
What is your favorite book of all time? (Or top 3). Why? To whom would you recommend them?
I think my favorite books would have to be (#1) One-Dimensional Man, by Herbert Marcuse, (#2) Ethics for a new Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, and (#3) Living a Feminist Life, by Sara Ahmed. As a collection, I enjoy them because each presents a kind of diagnosis of the suffering that we see in the world. They also give three different perspectives on what we can do about that suffering. Marcuse calls for a revival of critical consciousness, the Dalai Lama calls on us to see the intimately interconnected nature of our world, and Ahmed helps us see that not fitting in to a broken system is ok (i.e., being a killjoy can be good) and that such activity is an affective project. I often recommend them to my colleagues but would recommend them to anyone interested in social critique, Buddhism, or feminism respectively.
What advice do you wish someone had given you?
I am a pretty private person and haven’t “put myself out there” very often. Like many of us in academia, I think I’ve been struggling with imposter syndrome and anxiety too. There is a recent study showing that graduate students are six times more likely to suffer from severe anxiety and depression. Given all this, I wish someone had told me that I wasn’t alone in feeling unworthy and struggling to put myself out there. Honestly, I wish someone would have encouraged me to put myself out there more. This has been my main motivation for completing this interview. I’ve been lucky to be more engaged with my colleagues, community, and friends this past couple of years and it’s been great. Especially in SOPHIA and in the Graduate Student Congress at UK.
Is there a question that you’d like to hear other philosophers answer?
The question I’d like to hear others answer, especially philosophers, is this: “Who do you most have to thank for being where you are today?” For me, I think it would have to be my undergraduate mentor, Dr. Hope K Fitz. Her mentorship in comparative philosophy both sparked my interest in the field as a career and motivates my cross-discipline methodology. In the deepest sense, her encouragement made me feel like the field of philosophy was something within my reach. It is also not lost on me that there a many other people to whom my life is dependent. I thereby expect there was more than one moment where someone spoke out in support of me and for that I owe them a great deal of thanks.
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 to nominate yourself or a friend.
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.
