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 with Adrian Moore.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview, Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, talks about growing up lower middle class and Congregationalist, being interested in drawing, astronomy, and football, specifically Manchester City, The Little Grey Men, The Brothers Karamazov, Pink Floyd, Descartes, attending King’s College, lectures with Bernard Williams, discos and coffee, relationships, the appeal of Kant and Wittgenstein, time, mathematics, working with Strawson and Dummett in grad school at Balliol College, the Thatcher academic job market, being a Junior Dean, returning to King’s College, working on infinity, the process of producing a philosophy radio program for BBC, Hamlet, his writing routine, returning to St Hugh’s, Points of View, administrative work, the Oxford tutorial system, the evolution of metaphysics, specialization in philosophy, the future and nature of philosophy, co-editing MIND, Beethoven, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Love and Death, and his last meal…
Where did you apply to college?
I applied to study philosophy at King’s College Cambridge. I was very fortunate to be accepted. This was a great time to be studying philosophy at Cambridge. The two professors were Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams: I attended lectures by both of them. I also attended lectures by Casimir Lewyand Hugh Mellor. And I had one-to-one supervisions with Ross Harrison, Chris Hookway, Jennifer Hornsby, Nick Jardine, Jonathan Lear, Tim Smiley, and Michael Tanner. Every one of these people did a huge amount to inspire me. I suppose Bernard Williams’ lectures were especially gripping.
What was the plan?
There was no plan. I certainly didn’t expect to become an academic. I was just keen to pursue philosophy for its own sake, and then to take it from there. My vague memory is that, when I started at university, I viewed both teaching and social work as possibilities.
What did your parents make of your decision to go into philosophy?
They were extremely supportive. They were delighted that I had been academically successful, but I think they were just as delighted that I had found something that I could pursue which meant so much to me. Neither of them had had any formal contact with philosophy — although my mother did attend classes in philosophy run by the Workers’ Educational Association while she was pregnant with me! But they were both always very keen to hear about my studies. They often took the attitude, wrongly in my view, that most of it was utterly beyond them, but this didn’t stop them from being keen to grasp as much as they could.
What was your first philosophy class like?
The mainstay of the Cambridge teaching system was then, as it still is, what is called the supervision. A supervision is a weekly meeting between a tutor and one, two, or three undergraduates, in which there is discussion of a topic based on an essay written by the undergraduate or by one of the undergraduates. The tutor for my first ever supervision was Ross Harrison, and I was one of two undergraduates in attendance. The topic was Descartes’ method of doubt, the very topic which, as I’ve already said, provided the eureka moment that first got me hooked onto philosophy. The University also laid on lectures. These were non-compulsory, but very helpful. The first of these that I attended was by Jimmy Altham, and it was on the objectivity of moral thinking. The third component of my early philosophical education took the form of logic classes. These were attended by just five undergraduates if my memory serves me correctly, and they were run by Chris Hookway. I was enthralled by it all.
What were classes with Bernard Williams like?
As an undergraduate I had no opportunity to be supervised by Bernard: he only supervised graduate students. But I did attend his lectures, as I have already mentioned. And I found them riveting. He lectured without notes, and he was just the virtuoso that you might expect. Each lecture was a dazzling display — erudite, witty, very funny, and totally absorbing. The other main contact that I had with him was through weekly ‘at homes’ that he held: he was in his college rooms at a certain time each week, and anyone could turn up. Once the group had assembled, there would be a two-hour impromptu discussion of some philosophical question that someone proposed on the spot. These events were mostly attended by graduate students, although there were always a few keen undergraduates in attendance (such as me!), and occasionally other members of the Faculty too. The group typically comprised about twenty-five people, and the discussions were always superb. Bernard himself steered them, of course, and he always had plenty of brilliant and insightful points to make. But they were discussions, not lectures: there was plenty of scope for other people to contribute as well.
I remember one hilarious incident. I think it was in my second year. The grandmother of an undergraduate friend of mine was visiting Cambridge with her ‘boyfriend’, and my friend asked me if I would take this elderly couple along to one of Bernard’s ‘at homes’. I wasn’t sure that they were entitled to attend, but I meekly agreed, and I sat with them at the back of the room, embarrassed by the fact that everyone could see that they were with me. My embarrassment was compounded when Bernard began by doing what he always began by doing, namely asking, ‘What shall we discuss this week?’, and—quick as a flash—the boyfriend asked, slightly aggressively, ‘What is philosophy?’ In fact there ensued one of our best ever discussions, a very wide-ranging exploration of the nature of philosophy, its aims, its methods, its relation to its own history, and so on. And, to my relief, neither my friend’s grandmother nor her boyfriend said a further word. When we emerged, I turned to them and asked, ‘What did you think of that?’ The boyfriend said he was disappointed. I asked, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I asked what philosophy is, and no-one seemed to know.’ I tried to explain that the point wasn’t really to arrive at a definitive answer, but to explore the issues and to reflect on what was relevant to the question. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. That explains it. I couldn’t believe that this guy was a world-famous professional philosopher and still didn’t know what it was that he was paid to do.’
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.
