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 Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, talks about being a Nigerian immigrant in Cincinnati, high school violence, hoarding Pop-Tarts, 9/11, the Nigerian Civil War, issues with authority, Indiana University, the death of his mom, music, politics and the invisible lever pullers, going to UCLA, working with A.J. Julius, how his work in social and political philosophy is informed by German Transcendentalism, transformational justice, antagonistic security, getting a gig at Georgetown, George Floyd, Rodney King, and the political half-life of protests, bargaining for the common good, Amílcar Cabral, the Affordable Care Act, Trump, Biden, tempeh, and what question he would ask an omniscient being…
What are your core ideas?
I’d say I have a few core ideas and recurring themes. One that I don’t talk explicitly about are narratives – since I am not quite sure what they are yet, I’m more comfortable talking about politics as processes. Essentially, political power accumulates across massive timescales, much larger than the ones folks usually uses when evaluating the institutional arrangements that history makes possible. It’s hard to study colonialism without this kind of thought in mind, and hard to relate it to other discussions in political philosophy without getting this thought on the table. Another core idea is about materialism and security (working on a piece for Aeon that discusses this at length), which was a big theme in my dissertation and something I hope to come back to working on. I’m trying out a way of understanding political institutions and even social divisions as divisions in the production and distribution of security.
Interesting! Related to current events?
That relates to how I think about police brutality: I think that police exist to secure things for elites by way of distributing precarity to non-elites (what I think of as an “antagonistic security” mode of production). Ultimately, I’m an abolitionist – I don’t think the police really should exist as such. But that’s because of the way I’ve just described their functional role. That’s the thing, at bottom, that has to change – we shouldn’t have a society that’s based on securing those who are already safest in this cannibalistic of a fashion. But we should have collective ways of keeping each other safe, which is a thing violence interruptors and folks that think about transformative justice have thought a lot about. We’ll need to wrench the power over the resources that police have from elites to get that done. What that means, to me, is community control over police.
But that’s not just true about police: land, housing, so many aspects of our society are set up to make security for some in this antagonistic way. Community control is a broader ethos against that sort of thing, I think the right positive statement of the ethos for which “abolitionism” is maybe a negative statement. There’s a great article in The Nation that describes the broader perspective and political pattern that community control over police fits into.
How do you choose what to focus on philosophically? How do history and cultural studies influence your work?
I’ve never really stopped asking the questions that got me into philosophy in the first place – why are these places and people poor and disempowered, and those other ones rich and empowered? I focus on whatever helps me answer those questions, or the related ones that I’ve developed over the years. As such I don’t track disciplinary boundaries super closely. It was obvious to me early on in my graduate program that I’d need a lot of history and cultural studies to answer those questions, and so those are the things I read primarily.
What was your first publication on? Proud of it?
It was “Beware of Schools Bearing Gifts: Miseducation and Trojan Horse Propaganda” – about Carter G. Woodson on education. He’s always struck me as a practical, grounded thinker and so I think it was a good place to start for me, as that’s something I aspire to. He was a historian and his political views on education systems come from a sort of long term, large scale view of how civilizations and the peoples within them rise and fall, advance and are set back. I think that kind of background, big-picture thinking is something historians are well trained to do and is another aspiration of mine.
Did you teach?
We did TA ships but rarely taught our own courses.
What was the job market like when you finished?
Honestly there’s little informative I can say about the job market because I experienced such a bizarro world version of it. In the political atmosphere that came after Trump was elected I think there was an upswing in philosophy of race and social justice relevant hiring lines. I didn’t find out about this because I was paying attention – I just happened to be at a philosophy conference with Ellie Anderson, who mentioned that there was hiring happening in my area and encouraged me to look into it. I was a fourth year at this time and had just started thinking about really getting into my dissertation, I wasn’t thinking about the job market seriously at all, at least in the short term. I put out a handful of applications after following her advice, just figuring that it couldn’t hurt and that I’d learn something for when I was really on the market, and got intensely fortunate to get interviewed and then offered a job by Georgetown.
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.
