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 John Doris.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview, John Doris, Peter L. Dyson Professor of Ethics in Organizations and Life at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy, at Cornell University, talks about growing up a faculty brat, the Grateful Dead, working at the Ithaca Journal, buckets of Rolling Rock ponies, a couple years at Hobart before returning to Cornell, working with Terry Irwin and Gail Fine, the end of the Cold War and the fear of nuclear Armageddon, University of Michigan, Sturgeon, Boyd, faith in philosophical progress, Harman, Stich, Railton, interdisciplinary naturalism, grad student assessment, working with Darwall, Gibbard, and the psychologist Richard Nisbett on his dissertation which would later become Lack of Character, Okinawan Karate, alt-country, his first job at UC Santa Cruz, redwoods, Dave Chalmers, coyotes, Alva Noë, working with eco-warrior Doug Peacock, the Moral Psychology Research Group, leaving Santa Cruz for the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at WashU, the laws of graduate education, returning to Cornell, the Walking Dead, the Trump phenomenon, the pandemic, a priorists, marriage, why he stands during talks, and his last meal…
What was the market like when you finished? Get any good advice? Any disastrous experiences? Where’d you land your first gig?
D’Arms and Jacobson finished well before I did, so I had a bit less philosophy collegiality on the home stretch, but I eventually got a dissertation fellowship at Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, which boosted my confidence a lot, and got me back to being fully engaged in academic life. The Institute was then in the Rackham Building, probably the most beautiful building on campus, and I shared an office with a couple of other grads. There were very supportive faculty fellows there too: notably for me, the psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth, the political theorist Don Herzog, and the scholar-provocateur Bill Miller.
It was a wonderful year at the Institute, and I finally finished. The job market, while maybe not as bad as it is now, was plenty bad, and it took me 2 years to land a permanent job that made sense, fit-wise. In those days, convention interviews were still the norm, and I endured my share of unpleasantness. Since my character skepticism was not to everybody’s taste, folks got pretty testy, and some of my interviews consisted of me being lectured by aggrieved a priorists and moralists. And of course there was the awfulness not associated with philosophical: interviewers falling asleep as I tried to answer questions, being interviewed in a hotel bedroom while the department chair lay on the bed in his stocking feet, etc.
I take considerable satisfaction in the fact that long time critics of the system, like myself and Jamie Dreier, ended up on the right side of history, and convention interviews seem now to be pretty much dead (at least for the moment). Admittedly, this probably has more to do with the emergence of Skype than any of the (good) arguments the critics made, but I’ll take it. I still think short Skype (or Zoom!) interviews are of little projective value, but since they don’t impose economic burdens on already economically vulnerable graduate students, I’m OK with that. Still lots of wickedness on campus visits, but the death of convention interviews, it seems to me, is a way in which our little world has improved.
Anyway, I survived, and ended up in paradise for my first job, at the surpassingly beautiful UC Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz seems like a magical place. Please describe for people who have never been. What did you do in your spare time at Santa Cruz? With whom did you discuss philosophy most while at Santa Cruz?
As one of my teachers, Walter Todd Sensei, said to me, Santa Cruz is like living in a postcard. We used to joke that if Santa Cruz is home, it’s hard to figure out where to vacation because there aren’t many places nicer. The University is set in the redwood forests overlooking the town itself, which sits on the north edge of Monterey Bay, and the result is absolutely stunning.
While, I’ve been shamefully politically inert, since leaving Santa Cruz, back then I did quite a bit of what I call “activist teaching” in a course I used to teach regularly on “Wilderness Studies.” I invited the great eco-warrior/naturalist Doug Peacock to give some lectures at Santa Cruz when I taught there, and we became friends, and he’s been a big influence on me, and I started tried to help with environmental issues in the best way I knew how, by teaching. Doug’s an actual living American Hero, incredibly fierce, but also deeply compassionate and caring. I should be more like him. We all should.
When I moved from Santa Cruz to St. Louis, the battle for the environment seemed much less immediate, and the enrollments for Wilderness Studies was a tenth of what they had been out West. I also began to find it harder and harder to be hopeful – the prognosis is really dispiriting. Finally, a very wise student wrote in their evaluation, “I’m not sure what it was, but Doris seemed burned out on this stuff.” I’ve not taught it since. Maybe I’ll be able to return to it if I can rekindle the fire. Not the best choice of words, it strikes me, with climate change incinerating the West Coast as I write this.
I spent as much time as I could outside, hiking or trail running, a good bit of it on my own, and had a lot of really incredible, joyous experiences. I remember running down a huge sloping meadow overlooking the ocean at sunset, and having a long conversation with a group of coyotes. I doubt they found my attempts at imitating their vocalizations very convincing, but they were quite happy to socialize. Lots of other amazing wildlife: I was regularly in close proximity to bobcats, and the sky was thick with all manner of raptors. On the water, marine mammals like seals and sea lions, the occasional dolphin, and squadrons of pelicans patrolling the waves. It was years before I didn’t get a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought of leaving all that.
Philosophers at Santa Cruz?
When I got to Santa Cruz, the philosophy was for a short time pretty amazing, since Dave Chalmers and Alva Noë were both there. It was a formative period for Dave’s work on consciousness, Alva’s work on perception, and mine in moral psychology. So a good place to talk about the mind, and we certainly did. Dave moved on pretty quickly, alas, as did Alva. I’m not in touch with them as much as I’d wish to be, but we are still friendly.
Among the senior faculty, there was Ric Otte, a really smart epistemologist and philosopher of science, and Jerry Neu, another really smart philosopher who works on Freud. They’re both retired now, but I learned a ton from them both, and we are still in touch. I also talked a lot with Dan Guevara, about both moral philosophy and the environment.
At what point did you think empirically informed research in philosophy is not going away?
The character wars began in a pretty remarkable circumstance: people were making important claims that were obviously empirically assessable, and ignoring empirical work that is obviously relevant to assessing those claims. Of course, on that way of putting things, my comments on the circumstance must be glaringly obvious too, so maybe I should find another construal! The heat of the pushback suggests that there’s more going on than that, I guess. I’m pretty stubborn, and a bit of a true believer, and since I didn’t have any plans to go away, I always had a lot of faith in the idea of interdisciplinary, empirically informed moral philosophy.
Not to say it wasn’t a seriously uphill fight. We certainly met with resistance. But pretty early on, things started to stick. Steve Stich, Gil Harman, and the great social psychologist John Darley taught a seminar on empirically informed ethics at Rutgers in 2000, where a lot of the soon-to-be usual suspects, like Josh Greene and Shaun Nichols, became friends. I was visiting the Values Center at Princeton, which was a critically formative experience in my career, and was able to attend. In 2003, Steve organized the founding meeting of the Moral Psychology Research Group, and in 2004, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong organized a big conference at Dartmouth, which was sort of a coming out party for us. By the time the group published the Moral Psychology Handbook in 2010, it definitely felt like we were here to stay.
Becoming more established isn’t cost free. It’s not just the question of whether the revolutionaries can govern (even just a few districts of philosophy and psychology) but more importantly, the question of from where the inspiration comes. I suspect many of us lived by the feud, and miss it a bit. We worked so hard to establish the methodology, now what? The dog has talked – will it say anything interesting?
I’m optimistic though, because so many excellent younger folks, in both psychology and philosophy, continue to join the field, and so many special people are contributing, from graduate students to the most senior folks. So there’s a lot of reason to think the good times will continue to roll.
Santa Cruz seems like one of the nicest places in the world, so why on earth did you leave?
It is! But for various political and institutional reasons at both the university and departmental level, Santa Cruz has not been able to develop the resources needed for the PhD program, which started when I was there, to truly thrive. It was difficult to meet the needs of the graduate students, and some very good ones transferred out. Additionally, after Chalmers and Noë left, there was not a lot of support for empirical approaches around the department. More generally, my conception of the job requirements didn’t well fit with much of the gestalt at UCSC. When the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Program at WashU, which celebrates interdisciplinary work of the sort I do, reached out, it was hard for me to resist. I enjoyed St. Louis, but the professional advancement came at personal cost – hard to recreate the joy I found with the coyotes and bobcats.
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.
