Aaron Bentley grew up in a very small town in California. Growing up there, he had no exposure to philosophy. He then attended UC Davis intending to pursue a degree in microbiology, but after taking an introductory philosophy course, became interested in philosophy. He then attended the wonderful San Francisco State University Master’s Program and am now in his final year in the graduate program at The Graduate Center, CUNY where he is completing a dissertation on social and political ontology. In addition, from September of 2018 until February of this year, he worked as a policy research and development fellow in the New York State Senate.
What are you working on right now?
At the moment, I’m finishing up a dissertation which discusses the role of political consciousness in political theory and in real world political organizing and action, focusing especially on the role that class consciousness is supposed to play in revolutionary politics. While quite a lot has been said about how ideology and false consciousness are used as tools to maintain the status quo, little had been said, in political philosophy and political theory at least, about what class consciousness is supposed to be apart from the absence of false consciousness. Very little is said about how it is supposed to develop, or how it is supposed to help with the revolutionary efforts of actual political organizers and political actors. What has been said tends to be a little to historically determinist for my taste, so I wanted to explore the possibility of developing a theory of class consciousness that still gives it a central role in revolutionary politics, but also allows for agency on the part of political actors. There is also the additional challenge of showing how this consciousness talk fits into a generally historically materialist picture of social development. Luckily, there has been a lot of progress made on understanding shared and group agency in the last few decades, by philosophers like Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, and social scientists, like Michael Tomasello which provides a nice starting point from which to better understand political consciousness and political agency.
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
I think that there is a lot more work that has to be done to understand the implications of what I would call socializing, historicizing, and politicizing metaphysics or at least analytic metaphysics as it is often practiced today. While the subject matter of metaphysics has been expanding to include social topics, such as race or gender or institutions, I think the methods employed in metaphysics, kinds of questions that are asked and the kinds of answers that are considered acceptable, haven’t quite caught up. I feel like people working in other central philosophical disciplines like ethics and epistemology have been better about this.
As an example, one question that interests me is how to understand the application of categories, definitions, judgements, etc… across time and place. We’ve seen this question asked in ethics (Were people acting in ways we now consider immoral acting immorally in their own time?) but a parallel problem emerges for social categories as well (what does it mean to ask whether or not people living in ancient Rome were gay, black, transgender, etc…?). When we ask these kinds of questions, it starts to show how our thinking about categorization and category identity had developed in the context of work on more traditional subjects in metaphysics that are more permanent features of reality and less politically relevant. There has been some push in this direction, especially by people like Sally Haslanger and her work on ameliorative metaphysics, Amie Thomasson and her work on ordinary objects, and some the growing literature on things like conceptual engineering, but I think in general this is all still in a very nascent topic and there is a lot more to explore.
What do you like to do outside work?
Reading and cooking are my two biggest time sinks outside of philosophy. I’ve been doing both as long as I can remember. Even when life is busy I make sure I take the time to cook a nice meal and read something that isn’t (just) for work almost every day.
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
Between philosophy and my own interests in fiction. I always have a longer ‘to read’ list than I could ever realistically get to. Right now, for work I’m reading Women and the American Labor Movement and Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981 both of which are by Philip Foner, and The Will To Change: Men Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks. On the fiction side, I’ve been reading a lot of speculative fiction. I just finished Waiting on a Bright Moon by Neon Yang and am hoping to start either Who Fears Death by Nnendi Okora for or Universal Harvester by John Darnielle soon.
What cause or charity do you care about most?
I think its best, if you are going to be donating, to do so in a way that creates real and lasting change rather than just putting a band aide on the harm done by problematic institutions. The best way I know of to do this is to support people trying to build alternative social systems and institutions and educate others on how to do so.
A couple of really good examples of this are Cooperation Jackson which supports the development of and coordination between sustainable worker cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi and beyond. I am also a big fan of Black Socialists USA, an organization that supports various dual power projects like Cooperation Jackson primarily through developing and disseminating educational resources about dual power systems through social media as well as more traditional platforms
On a less obviously political level, I think Direct Relief is one of the best apolitical charities out there. They provide direct monetary and material assistance to people that are facing immediate threat from disaster, whether it be environmental, medical, or otherwise. They check all the boxes in terms of respectability and honesty, too.
What’s your top tip or advice for APA members reading this?
It’s more of a request than a tip I think, but I would just hope that we all try to use the more or less limited resources we are have as academics to keep pushing to make things better than they are. Academic training and work certainly aren’t the most financially lucrative carriers in the world, for most of us anyway, but we do have a lot of reach with our students and do, in general have more social status and power than the average person and can make a difference. I think it’s important to remember that and use it as best we can.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
