I’ve started a podcast about philosophy called Generous Questions. Why is it called “Generous Questions”? Ha, great question, thanks for asking!
There are lots of really significant activities that we philosophers do incredibly well, but we don’t always realize quite where the value lies. Teaching philosophy offers a great example: There are loads of really inspiring philosophy teachers who can quite profoundly change their students’ lives, but when we talk about the transformative effect of studying (or learning) philosophy, we often put a lot of emphasis on the work that reflection and philosophical theorizing can do. I know I do this myself: I talk at open days to high school students about how the study of philosophy can be a kind of rebellious, liberating, ground-shaking pursuit—a chance to break free from the unreflective life. And I give lots of examples of how philosophical thought helps us question the world around us, and how it enables us to challenge received ideas and to build up new possibilities in their place.
Even though I think a lot of these claims are true and important, this account always seems to leave out some of the most significant stuff that we do when teaching philosophy—in particular, that we help other people to articulate their ideas by listening intently to them speaking and by asking them questions. While philosophy seems to put a lot of emphasis on the conclusions, ideas, and insights that emerge from this process, we often fail to notice or even downplay that it is a deeply humane thing just to listen to someone fully, to let someone speak entire thoughts, and to encourage them to follow those thoughts up with yet more speaking and thinking aloud. Some of these practices are so thoroughly baked into philosophy that sometimes we don’t remember how profoundly transformative they can be: We encourage students to speak their minds even though their minds are not yet made up, to speak in long sentences in an attempt to weave something substantial out of very abstract bits and pieces, and we give them our full attention and encourage others to listen and follow the flow of thoughts and to try to see the emerging tapestry for what it can be, even to help to weave it together, collectively.
You might not have recognized it at the time, but I hope that at some point in your philosophical career so far you’ve had the experience of witnessing a philosophy student change and grow in their own self-standing, their sense of what they’re permitted to do, as a result of the classes they’ve taken with you. I think that listening and asking questions in our philosophical manner is an act of generosity; it recognizes that the person we’re talking to has worth and standing. Philosophers can do this very well (I think other subjects and other inquiries can do it, too) in part because we train ourselves to want to hear entire thoughts all the way through to the end and to be given the space and time to have our own thoughts heard out. (Arrogant academics are the ones who think that everyone else should be listening and that they alone are the ones to whom questions should be directed.)
Something similar happens when we’re marking students’ essays: For a spell our entire attention is focused on trying to hold another person’s ideas in our minds for long enough that we can get a sense of where they’re coming from and what they were thinking. (It’s one of the reasons that marking work can be so exhausting—we invest a lot of energy in tolerantly, patiently, generously listening, in taking something and someone very seriously.) I’ve often thought that by far the most beneficent piece of feedback we can give, in conversation or on written work, is like the note in the margin that simply says “Say more here”: Unpack this thought, keep going, something is starting to happen, the floor is yours, you can do this, we want to see where this goes, I glimpsed the shape of your thoughts but I didn’t get the whole idea, I’d love to hear about it more.
The podcast “Generous Questions” does just this. I ask philosophers to tell me about what they’ve been thinking about, and I do what we do in philosophy a lot: I ask a bunch of questions to help me to understand what they’re thinking. I’m not an expert on any of their topics, I’m just interested in hearing about where they’re coming from and how their ideas are fitting together. I don’t think any of these conversations resolve or settle anything—they’re not debates, and no points are being scored or arguments demolished. There’s no point at which these podcast episodes try to “teach” a topic to the listener, to explain philosophical ideas from the ground up, like a recording of a lecture or a textbook—I’ve asked philosophers to explain things to me when I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve learned a lot along the way, for sure, and I hope that listening to these conversations will be informative for other people as well. But most of all, I enjoy listening to other people talk about their ideas, and seeing where a conversation might go, and what might come out of it, and that’s pretty much everything that happens in each episode.
The idea that in philosophy our listening to each other and asking questions is a meaningful activity in itself—that picking up the thread of someone’s thoughts and working with it is a kind of humane or even ethical engagement—was encouraged by long late-night conversations with my friends Bob Plant and Gerry Hough when I was working at the University of Aberdeen 10 years ago. We spent a lot of time talking together about our projects, our students, and our teaching, and we took time to notice the many practices (besides “the pursuit of truth”) that also deserve to count as substantial philosophical contributions. Bob’s done a lot of great work on Emmanuel Levinas, especially what Levinas might mean in his image of a “face-to-face” encounter with “the other,” and Bob’s approach has worked away at me over time. He argues that for Levinas such face-to-face encounters present challenges to prevalent ethical systems; it is a means by which we overthrow the “natural drive to self-prioritization” which shows up at the heart of most theories of moral justification.
It’s great that philosophers think and write about the importance—even the moral urgency—of letting people tell their own stories and frame their own narratives and histories. But it’s also important to me that I’m practicing this kind of engagement on a daily basis, and that we all recognize the gift of even tiny interactions with each other. I think many of us are genuinely curious about other people and what they’re thinking, and this podcast is a way of sharing and recognizing that curiosity—or at least eavesdropping on it.
To listen to the podcast, just go to generousquestions.co.uk and subscribe. You can also find it on Stitcher or TuneIn, find and rate it on iTunes (I think this is supposed to help the algorithms learn that other people might want to hear it as well), get in touch on Twitter, or reach out via email.
Joe Morrison
Joe Morrison (@DrJoeMorrison) a philosophy lecturer and also the subject lead for philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He has been the director of the British Philosophical Association since 2014. He writes about Quine, philosophy of science, and naturalism, and, more recently, about rave and electronic dance music.
