APA Member Interview: Phillip Barron

Phillip Barronis a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut, focusing on aesthetics and philosophy of language. He is also a poet. His first book of poems, What Comes from a Thing (Fourteen Hills Press, 2015), won the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Guillén Award for philosophical literature. Currently, he is a pre-doctoral fellow at Lewis & Clark Collegein Portland, OR, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative conceptions of personal identity.

What’s your favorite quote?

My work is caught in the tension between two historical quotations. The first is the infamous line from Book 10 of Plato’s Republic, “Let us also tell poetry that there is an ancient quarrel between it and philosophy,” which is often interpreted as depicting beauty and truth at odds with one another. The second comes from the Analects. Confucius, exasperated, tells his student, “If you do not read poetry, how will you have anything to say?”

Rather than frame these as a simple disagreement between Chinese and Greek philosophical orientations toward poetry, I see these statements as representative of a deeper, professional skepticism that poetry and philosophy are even compatible. In my work, I try to show that not only are poetry and philosophy reconcilable, often their exemplars demonstrate that each has strengths the other can draw on. A poem, for example Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superioror Robert Hass’ Meditation at Lagunitas, can capture the same contrast between spiritualism and materialism that scholars see in Plato and Aristotle. And philosophy, at its best, is creative, allegorical, and dare I say, poetic.

Poetry is also good at representing the world as we experience it, pluralistic and full of contradictions. In that way, poetry can help us work through so-called gappy and glutty statements, or statements that require alternative logics to evaluate.

What is your favorite sound in the world?

A wave rolling in to shore. Each time I stand on a continent’s edge, I end up thinking about how long the waves rolling toward me have been traveling, how many miles from here did the wind first grab hold of some water molecules and, because of friction, start to push them along, transferring energy to the ocean’s surface. How many days ago was the wave first formed? What other continent’s wind sent this gift of energy? Hearing a wave roll in is like listening to another place, to the past.

What are you working on right now?

My dissertation, which argues that narrative conceptions of personal identity are best thought of, not as theories in competition with psychological continuity theories or animalism, but as frameworks for recognizing that personal identity is multiply realizable.

I have also been working on a collection of poems on the problems of illusion and reality presented by Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. It’s a very strange painting, which gets weirder the longer I look at it. By focusing on the luxury goods depicted in the painting — for example a silver tray, red curtains, a clay pitcher —  and decolonial theories, the poems read the painting as representing Spain’s exploitation of the Americas and its indigenous communities whose coerced and enslaved labor produced those luxury goods.

What’s your poison?  (Favorite drink.)

Whisky, uisce beath, water of life. I had the opportunity to spend time in Scotland last summer, through the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, where I learned a lot about Scotch. My favorite discovery over there was Bunnahabhain, an Islay whisky that is not as smoky as some of the other, more famouswhiskies produced on the island. In St. Andrews, I couldn’t help but be amused by an ongoing local debate about whether adding ice or drops of cold water “opens up flavors” in whisky or just ruins what should be enjoyed neat.

What common philosophical dilemma do you think has a clear answer? 

I raced mountain bikes until a vertigo-induced accident knocked me off the trails. Of course, as a philosopher, I reflected on the accident, framing it as a mind-body problem. Was the world spinning? Was my body telling my mind (incorrectly) that the world was spinning? Did I only experience the world spinning? What seemed like distinct questions were collapsed by vertigo. They all amount to the same thing, seen through the lens of phenomenology. What does it matter if the world was not reallyspinning and it only feltlike it was? I am not something other than my body. For me, the world spun. And reflecting on that accident gave lie to the mind-body distinction.

What are you reading right now?  Would you recommend it? 

In August, when this interview was conducted, I was reading and recommend When My Brother Was an Aztecby Natalie Diaz. Diaz is a poet with philosophical interests. She gave the Arthur Danto Memorial Lecture at the October meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Now, I am reading Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy. It’s a beautifully written book on phenomenology of sound. Nancy observes that much of the language that we use in the service of philosophical understanding involves visual metaphors — e.g. “I see what you mean,” or simply the word idea, which derives from the Greek word idein, meaning “to see,” —  and he challenges philosophers to consider what it would mean to listen instead.

I recently finished and recommend Alienation and Freedom by Frantz Fanon. This is a new collection (published in 2018) of previously unavailable writing, including his dissertation, medical publications, short political writings, correspondence, and even two plays. Fanon was a capacious thinker, and throughout this new volume you can trace the development of the philosophical positions that ended up in his more familiar books.