The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.
The following is an edited excerpt from an interview withBryan Van Norden.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview, Bryan Van Norden, James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College, and Chair Professor in Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University, discusses his genealogy in remarkable detail, developing an interest in philosophy and Chinese culture in Latrobe Pennsylvania, the Gourman Report, how his parents responded to his decision to go to grad school for philosophy, going to Stanford to work with Nivison and learning Nivison wasn’t working on philosophy, the distinction between PHILOSOPHY of language, philosophy OF language, and philosophy of LANGUAGE, the 1991 job market, Kant’s racist revision of the history of philosophy, his first gig, encountering a charlatan, being unemployed, working at Vassar, the challenges of teaching at an R1, improving teaching evaluations, paying the bills with poker money, poker and akrasia, what East Asian philosophy has to teach Western Philosophy, the Confucian conception of family, Buddhist metaphysics, virtue lust, what’s wrong with physicalism, threatening responses to his political writing, how philosophy informs his life, the common curriculum at Yale-NUS, why philosophy is not dead, attempting to synthesize Thomistic Aristotelianism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Huayan Buddhism, 1984, Casablanca, The Room, Rick and Morty, and his last meal
How did you get into Chinese philosophy? Were you contemplating grad school?
Since I was studying both philosophy and Chinese, I became curious about Chinese philosophy. I was told by a philosophy professor that there is no such thing as Chinese philosophy. I didn’t know much about Chinese philosophy at that point, honestly. Back then it was almost impossible to learn anything about it. The only secondary book I was able to find was Creel’s Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung. Creel describes the philosophy of Mozi as “enlightened self-interest,” and even as an undergraduate I knew that was a conflation of ethical egoism with consequentialism. However, what little I read taught me that Chinese philosophy at least existed. I also thought, somewhat naively, that it would be easy to get a job teaching Chinese philosophy since so few people did it. Consequently, I went to the library and found the Gourman Report, a now-defunct guide to graduate programs. I checked to see which of the top-ten graduate programs in philosophy had someone who taught Chinese philosophy. There were only two at the time: the University of Michigan (where Donald Munro was) and Stanford University (where David S. Nivison was). I got accepted to both and ended up going to Stanford.
What did your parents make of your decision to go into philosophy?
I think my family was ambivalent about my decision to pursue philosophy as a career. My father once remarked ruefully, “If any of my other kids had said that they wanted to study philosophy, I would have said, ‘Not with my money!’” However, I think part of him was happy with my choice. He once said that if he could have done anything in life he would have become an English professor. I asked him why he didn’t get a PhD in English instead of an MBA. He said that he didn’t know, but I think that the real reason was that he thought PhDs were for people born rich, not people like him.
What was Nivison like?
Nivison followed an interesting professional trajectory, and one that would be impossible to replicate today (unfortunately). He was an undergraduate studying Greek and Latin at Harvard when World War II broke out. He was drafted and assigned to learn Japanese to become a code breaker. After the war he returned to Harvard, but changed his major to Chinese and went on to earn a PhD. He then went to Stanford, where he spent the rest of his academic career. His first major work was The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng, an intellectual biography of a figure who has been compared to Hegel, because of his view that history moves through a non-linear pattern, and to Vico, because of his historical hermeneutics.
Nivison struck up a friendship with Patrick Suppes, a professor of philosophy. One day, a book on Suppes’ desk caught Nivison’s eye, and he asked permission to borrow it. The book was Methods of Logic by W. V. O. Quine, one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century. Nivison was so intrigued by what he read that he asked to teach formal logic in the Philosophy Department. In the current academic environment of specialization that would be unthinkable, but Suppes agreed, and thus began Nivison’s association with the Philosophy Department at Stanford. Donald Davidson, a former student of Quine’s and another seminal 20th century philosopher, was then at Stanford, and Nivison became one of Davidson’s interlocutors. Some of Davidson’s most influential work was on the problem of weakness of will, or akrasia. This is the problem of how it is possible to know what the right thing is to do yet not do it. Some philosophers in the West, like Socrates, denied that weakness of the will is even possible, but others, like Aristotle, offer subtle accounts of the relationship between moral knowledge and motivation that explain how it could occur. Nivison realized that Chinese philosophers had wrestled with the same problem. The great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) argued that belief is a matter of degree, so someone with shallow knowledge could know, to a certain extent, what is right without doing it. One of Zhu Xi’s most incisive critics was Wang Yangming (1472-1529), whose doctrine of the “unity of knowing and acting” is a version of the view that akrasia is impossible.
You can get full access to the interview and help 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.
