Book Spotlight: Ask a Philosopher

Ian Olasov is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and the founder of Brooklyn Public Philosophers, a philosophy event series for a general audience. His book Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions is out now with St. Martin’s Press.

What is your work about?

The book is based on the series of Ask a Philosopher booths that I’ve been organizing around New York City for the past few years, and which I’ve written about for the APA Blog in the past (here, here, and here). It collects the best questions we’ve gotten at the booth, my attempts to answer them, and little stories about the funny, affecting, or thought-provoking encounters that make each booth memorable. The questions run the whole gamut – why anything exists at all, our knowledge of the external world, love, death, gentrification, objectivity, baby Hitler, what makes simplicity a theoretical virtue, the priority of thought over language, political economy, so-bad-it’s-good art, keeping fish as pets, whether ketchup is a smoothie.

People ask me every now and again what they should read if they want to get into philosophy, but I’ve never been super satisfied with the answers I’ve given – they were all a bit austere, narrow, or dated. So I tried to write a book I could recommend enthusiastically.

How does it fit in with your larger research project?

My research research is on applied philosophy of language, social epistemology, and public philosophy itself, but I’m a dilettante generalist at heart. So it was really fun and rewarding (if challenging!) to be able write about so many different topics.

How is your work relevant to everyday life?

Well, all of the questions in the book came from ordinary people who stopped to chat in the middle of (what else?) their everyday lives. So in a way the relevance is obvious.

But in a way, the relevance isn’t obvious at all. I think we sometimes expect that the problems that preoccupy non-philosophers are all about decisions they have to make routinely, or are otherwise already circulating in the public sphere. We might think of everyday life just as the process of navigating these things – making a thousand little choices about what to eat or wear or watch, scrolling through the op-ed pages and the posts that social media engineers think we want to see.

But it’s important that this is false. A lot of the problems that people bring to the booth don’t have any bearing on any kind of routine decision, or aren’t (taken to be) appropriate to bring up in other contexts – the existence of God, the justification of our mathematical beliefs, the deep unity of all things, free will, and so on. Everyday life is a lot more theoretical than we sometimes take it to be! One of the most useful things we can do as public philosophers is to provide spaces where people can work through those problems, in their heads or with one another.

What effect do you hope your work will have?

I hope that people reading the book get a sense of what philosophy is all about – the huge breadth of questions and ideas philosophers work with, the joy and intimacy of reasoning with other people about what matters to you, that it’s not just trying to figure out what Kant thought. I hope the book helps people make some headway on the problems they care about, and discover some new problems along the way.

And I hope that other philosophers set up more Ask a Philosopher booths! It’s a fun, relatively easy way for people who are interested in public philosophy to get their hands dirty. There are lots of ways of doing public philosophy, but they often require the right institutional connections or getting past some editorial gatekeepers, which can be difficult and frustrating. One nice thing about the booth is that if you want to do it, you can do it, without really needing anyone else’s permission or support. Anyone interested can find a little how-to here.

What’s next for you?  

Finishing the dissertation and (fingers crossed!) getting a job in the field. I have another couple of book projects on the horizon. I’m co-editing a collection of papers, which is under contract and which I’m extremely excited about, but which I can’t talk about in detail yet. I also have a proposal for an introduction to public philosophy (for philosophers and philosophy students) that I’ll shop around once I’ve got the PhD in hand.

Ian Olasov

Ian Olasov is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center and the founder of Brooklyn Public Philosophers.

H. L. Schmidt

H. L. Schmidt currently holds the Becker Fellowship. She has worked as an editor or writer at multiple publications, including Qu, City Magazine, and The Verve. Schmidt is SOPHIA’s Chapter Development Officer and is a doctoral student in the University of Kentucky’s Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation Ph.D. program in Philosophical and Cultural Inquiry, where she focuses on how we develop, communicate, and sustain a personal moral code. She founded the Roanoke chapter of SOPHIA, has presented at a number of conferences, including Philosophy of the City’s 2019 Conference where she presented her research on the role of the public library in a just city.  She is part of the leadership of the Philosophers for Sustainability group, where she co-leads the Social Media & Outreach team. At the APA Blog, she edits the Research beat, conducts interviews for the Recent Book Spotlight, and oversees the Diversity & Inclusion beat, which features the Women in Philosophy and Black Issues series. She hosted the Civic Connections podcast featuring conversations with local public policy officials about justice and public affairs.  She holds a Master’s in the Humanities from Hollins University where she studied ethics and public policy under Lawrence C. Becker and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her interests include practical ethics, public policy, existentialism, and utilitarianism. You can follow her on Twitter @theheidifeed.