This is an excerpt from an interview with Margaret Baxley. In this interview, Anne Margaret Baxley talks about growing up Methodist in Macon, Georgia, being a devil’s advocate, Camp Seafarer, stealing her mother’s car, developing an early interest in the Stoics, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, boarding school, deciding to study philosophy at Wellesley, working with Owen Flanagan, Adrian Piper, and Ruth Anna Putnam, developing an intense interest in Kant, Anita Hill, Rodney King, going to UCSD for grad school, surfers, eliminative materialism, the Churchlands, the Kitchers, her buddy Elizabeth Buffalo, the thing-in-itself, tequila and Tijuana, autocracy and virtue, working with Henry Allison and David Brink on her dissertation, teaching responsibilities and the pressure to publish in grad school, hotel room interviews and weird campus visits, landing a job at Virginia Tech, a sociopathic colleague, becoming friends with Marjorie Grene, Appalachian music, moving on to Washington University St. Louis, her approach to graduate mentorship, studying the relationship between morality, virtue and happiness, free-will, Bernard Williams, exciting and disconcerting trends in philosophy, The Stranger, The Big Lebowski, Baby Beluga, Ozark, Westworld, election night 2016, election 2020, and her last meal…
How do you define philosophy?
Rational inquiry as a guide for uncovering theoretical knowledge about the world and practical wisdom about how to live.
What would your teenage self make of your current self?
How did you get so lucky?
How do you explain what you do to non-philosophers?
The choices seem to be to reduce it to an empty sound bite or to confuse people. I start by saying that I’m a philosopher and teach at a university. If they follow up by asking what exactly I study, I say that my areas of focus are the history of philosophy and ethics. If they’re interested in further specifics about the content of my teaching and research, I say that because my main interests are in moral theory, I’m concerned with issues concerning the nature of morality, moral motivation and reasons for action, the requirements for moral character and virtue, what it means to be a good person and why it matters, and how all of that relates to happiness. Nine times out of ten, when that paired down, basic account seems to register with someone, their response is usually something along the lines of, “Right! That sounds familiar – I studied psychology one semester in college.”
Ha! Do you feel like your work in philosophy has practical applications? Why should people study it?
Given that my own work is primarily focused on Kant studies and theoretical ethics, it’s not practical in any straightforward or obvious sense. Still, I do think it has broader practical value insofar as people are always better off in life if they’re able to gain clarity about what has value or meaning and why, and if they’re able to use theoretical and practical reason to govern their thought and action. People should study philosophy because it’s the best chance we have for overcoming the multitude of powerful obstacles to thinking and living well.
How do you see the future of philosophy? Exciting trends?
Things that I find exciting and that give me hope are:
–The excellent comparative work being done in the history of philosophy.
–The uncovering of neglected voices of women scholars in modern philosophy especially.
–The explosion of first-rate, rigorous Nietzsche scholarship over the past twenty or so years.
–The burgeoning high-quality contemporary work in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race and their move from the margins.
The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher? You can get early access to interviews and support the project here.
Clifford Sosis
Cliff Sosis is a philosopher at Coastal Carolina University. He created, and in his spare time he runs What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? in-depth autobiographical interviews with philosophers. In Sosis's words, "Interviews you can’t find anywhere else. In the interviews, you get a sense of what makes living, breathing philosophers tick. How one becomes a philosopher. The interviews show how our theories shape our lives and how our experiences influence our theories. They reveal what philosophers have in common, if anything, and what our goals are. Overall, the interviews give you a fuller picture of how the people who do philosophy work, and a better idea of how philosophy works. This stuff isn't discussed as often as it should be, I think, and these stories are extremely interesting and moving!" He has a Patreon page here and tweets @CliffordSosis.
