The Women in Philosophy series is pleased to announce that Julinna Oxley is coming onboard the APA Blog team as the Associate Editor of the Women in Philosophy series. Julinna edited one post already for Women’s History Month. In this post, the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott interviews Julinna about her ideas for the series.
AMT: Hi, Julinna. Welcome to the Women in Philosophy series! I’m excited that you’ve agreed to take on this role. Could you tell us more about yourself?
JO: I’ve been teaching at Coastal Carolina University, which is just outside of Myrtle Beach SC, since I finished my Ph.D. in 2006. I’m now a full Professor, and get to teach courses in ethics and political philosophy every semester. I adore what I do, and am grateful for the opportunities I have to teach students and transform their ways of thinking. I’m divorced and have two children, age 8 and 10. They are my world.
AMT: Where did you grow up?
JO: I’m originally from Oklahoma City, but was raised in northeast Georgia in a small town outside of Athens, GA. My dad was a theology and Greek scholar who also studied philosophy. He taught at Emmanuel College for over thirty years. I undoubtedly got my interest in philosophy from him. As a child, I was fascinated with the titles on the spines of his books in his office such as, “Does God Exist?” Even though it was a religious household, I was encouraged to ask questions and we would often discuss philosophical issues. I would later learn he had copies of most of the world’s religion’s holy texts and philosophy books. I tried to read many of them as a teenager, but in retrospect, I didn’t understand much.
AMT: So you grew up in a college town outside of Athens, Georgia and now you teach in a college town outside of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I appreciate that symmetry.
JO: Yes. As a transplant in a small southern town, I never really fit in. Other kids called me a Yankee when I first started school there, because I didn’t have a southern drawl and pronounced certain words differently. But the small town surrounding the college where my dad taught was full of professors, so we were our own unusual bubble in a rural area. In some ways, my life now is similar—I work at a university with people who are politically liberal, but live in one of the most conservative areas of the United States. It provides a lot of opportunity for dialogue (on the good days) and outrage (on the bad days). I started a non-profit activist group several years ago, and in August 2019 we had a vigil for the people whose lives were lost in the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton shootings. As we were gathered together in a circle with candles, a truck of four young white men drove around and yelled out the windows, “Don’t take our guns away! You’re not getting our guns! White power!” So yes, it’s not the typical college town. But things like that help me remember that I’m here for a purpose.
AMT: What kinds of philosophical questions interest you?
JO: My interests have changed a lot since I began thinking about philosophy as a teenager. Questions about metaphysics and epistemology dominated my philosophical interests for the first 6-7 years of studying philosophy. My dad was a Wittgenstein scholar, so philosophy of language also interested me from an early age. I was bookish as a child, and had set myself the goal of reading all the classics, and knew I would only do that (and understand them) if I had courses in them. So I spent some time in high school reading philosophy and English literature, and when I got to college, I double majored in both. I’m grateful to have had the time and resources to study both continental and analytic philosophy – in total, I spent 13 ½ years in college and graduate school.
AMT: For some of our readers that might sound like a long time, but in fact it is pretty normal in philosophy. What did you spend that time doing?
JO: My interests changed a lot over those years, so I went to different institutions to learn new things. Though I no longer study most of the topics I took courses in as an undergraduate and early graduate student (existentialism, Continental philosophy, history of philosophy etc.), those years were hugely transformative for me. I felt like I found solutions to the philosophical problems I’d been wrestling with, and after reading everything written about these topics, I settled on views that I could live with. Studying epistemology helped a lot. I had a senior seminar in contemporary epistemology, and on my own, wrote my final paper on feminist epistemology so that my professor could learn something about it, at his request. Although epistemology has long been an interest for me, I write about it now in the context of philosophy of emotions.
At this stage in my life, I am mostly interested in questions about ethics and political philosophy, especially those structural problems that are a result of racial or gender oppression. I approach these philosophical problems from two points of view: a political solution (contractual in nature), and a personal solution that involves becoming attuned to oppression, treating others with respect, and learning from those who are oppressed. Although I was trained by Jerry Gaus in ideal political theory—where we theorize regarding the nature of justice from the ideal point of view, in the tradition of John Rawls—I now approach political problems from a nonideal point of view, which means that I don’t just theorize an ideal state ex nihilo. I am far more interested in correcting the longstanding injustices that exist these days by proposing solutions to the existing circumstances.
AMT: I appreciate how your story of coming to ethics and political philosophy puts the lie to the stereotypical story that metaphysics and epistemology (sometimes abbreviated as M&E) are difficult and the reason that women do ethics and political philosophy is that they can’t hack M&E. But you found ethics and political philosophy more challenging than M&E.
JO: Yes, I believe so. In my view, ethics and political philosophy still require and make use of metaphysics and epistemology (or at least must make assumptions about these areas), and so it helped to have fixed views about those things so I could maneuver in Ethics. For example, we make assumptions about correctness of beliefs and the standards of belief, when creating a theory of what the state should do or is justified in doing. Justification in epistemology works the same way as justification in political theory. So views about what is epistemically relevant are extremely critical to doing political theory. Though Jerry Gaus and I disagree on many matters of political theory, we agree on the core view that matters of political theory are ultimately matters of epistemology. And that our emotions are relevant to our belief-formation. So by the time I came to contemporary ethics and political philosophy at Tulane, I felt like I had something unique to offer in terms of my approach to these issues.
AMT: Is that where you got the idea for your book, The Moral Dimensions of Empathy?
JO: Yes, definitely. My mother is a psychologist, and introduced me to Jean Piaget, Carl Rogers, and the field of social psychology. We once attended a meeting of the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology together in New Orleans where I presented a paper, and it was a blast. My work is pretty interdisciplinary—I care a lot about the real world and how actual people think and change. Her influence on my thinking about morality and political theory is evident in my book, where I discuss the role of emotion in belief-formation, how we understand others, and how we envision other people when we theorize about how to treat them and how to live with them.
In recent years, I’ve evolved and become more of a social activist. I’ve become far more convinced of the importance of working with others to solve collective action problems, as no one can change large scale structural problems alone. I am an optimist at heart, and my natural inclination is to make something good come out of a bad situation. That too is evident in my writing and my philosophical outlook. I believe Philosophy can and should make a difference in people’s lives, in big things and small. That conviction motivated me to write Experiential Learning in Philosophy, which my friend Ramona Ilea co-edited with me. It was a labor of love and shows how we can make philosophy more applied in the real world.
AMT: What are some ideas that you have for the series? What would you like to see the series do in the future?
JO: I love public philosophy and am a big fan of philosophizing about everyday things and current events. Stuff like camping, hip hop, television and movies, sports, fandom, religious practice, politics, all those seem like great topics for women in philosophy to talk about. The philosophers that many people look to on many of these topics are men, but women have a vital contribution to make about all of them. I’d love to see the series do some good philosophy of everyday life, popular culture, current events, and things that generally make people happy (or irritated!).
AMT: You’ve spent some considerable time in the philosophy blogosphere. I knew you as a gracious but insistent voice for truth and justice on blogs before I knew you personally. What is your sense of the blogosphere right now for philosophy? What could the series be doing to help improve the blogosphere?
JO: About a decade ago, I had more time to put into reading blogs, writing comments, and engaging with people’s ideas online. But over time, this got harder, it was less rewarding, and frankly, I just had less time for it once I had children. Many women philosophers are in this boat, I believe. I recently put together a panel on “Women in Online Philosophy” (for the APA’s Committee on the Status of Women), and the one thing that our panelists seemed to agree on was that doing philosophy online is hard, takes time, is not always rewarding, and requires periods of engagement and then disengagement. My hope is that the Women in Philosophy blog will become a place to hear some new ideas and to have a fun discussion. I think of blogposts as an editorial or opinion piece that you would read in the New York Times: short, thoughtful, intelligent, and punchy.
AMT: Now that you’re on board, who have you dreamed of blogging for the Women in Philosophy series?
JO: Oohh, good question, there are so many options! I’d say my dream blogger would be someone that has something important to say about the world we live in, drawing on feminist philosophy in some way. There are a lot of women philosophers who could do this. I especially am interested in finding thinkers who like to use philosophical tools to solve social problems and/or bring about gender justice. Said dream blogger would also love doing public philosophy! Even if the person doesn’t have experience doing it, it’s a great opportunity to learn how to talk to non-specialists about their ideas.
AMT: If you were going to write a post for the Women in Philosophy series, what would it be about?
JO: I’d love to write some feminist reflections about the pandemic, but my days are full now that I have two children at home that I “home school.” What I’m doing is more like life education, rather than learning new things. They miss their school, teachers, and friends. So do I. If and when life gets back to normal, I would like to write a blogpost about Frozen II. (I watch a lot of Disney movies now that I have kids.) The plot was interesting, but I haven’t seen a lot of philosophical discussion of its central theme: white ignorance and the whitewashing of history.
AMT: Oh interesting, I just taught José Medina’s chapter on “Active Ignorance, Epistemic Others, and Epistemic Friction,” in my Philosophy of Race course. I think that discussion of whiteness as functioning through and relying on ignorance of how racism works is an important one. I haven’t seen the movie, but I would also like to see more philosophical and feminist analysis of pop culture. I agree with you that the Women in Philosophy series should be a place for people to put feminist philosophy to work to think about contemporary issues. I bet there is someone out there would could do that pandemic post for us.
If that person is you, hit us up! The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
