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 Stephen Yablo.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview, Stephen Yablo talks about his parents, a psychologist and an engineer, his bar mitzvah, ping pong, Spiderman, Atlantis, impossibility, drugs, breaking and entering, correspondence courses, working with the mentally disabled, attending University of Toronto, philosophy of dance, Protagoras, van Fraassen, Joni Mitchell, taking classes with John Slater, van Fraasen, and Hans Herzberger, philosophy post-Wittgenstein, moving to India, joining the program in Logic and Methodology at UC Berkeley, working with Davidson, Myro, and Grice, getting 38 (!) job interviews, embarrassing himself in front of Sellars, landing a gig at Michigan, moving to MIT, the difference between philosophical progress and understanding, The Minority Body, Nintendo Wii, the leveraged freedom chair, The Verificationist, Synecdoche, Lupin, and his last meal…
Any sign you’d grow up to be a philosopher?
Yes and no. No, in that I didn’t know until college that there was a field called philosophy. Yes, in that I’d encountered philosophical writing over the years and adored it. My great uncle Joseph Chaikoff, the family’s one professed communist and also our family doctor, had given me for unknown reasons a small green volume on Nietzsche. There were books by a Canadian author, George Grant, on the shelf at home, I guess from my parents’ college days. Grant wrote about the idea of a nation or the like. (Don’t laugh, or do, but I tried to follow his lead with a one-page piece “The Individual and Mass Society.”) I’d heard from my mom and dad about Emil Fackenheim, teaching Hegel and the Talmud downtown at U of Toronto. Ricky Levine showed me Obiter Scripta by Santayana at Jewish summer camp. Polish Logic, edited by Storrs McCall, was remaindered at the local library and I bought it for ten cents. Why that book in particular? I still can’t quite figure it out.
When and why did you decide to major in philosophy?
Second year, after playing around with math, physics, and something then called mathematical psychology. I guess in the end it was a double major with math. I don’t specifically remember why except that people I’d been uncomprehendingly reading anyway all turned out to have been philosophers. Toronto had a huge department, 85 faculty or so, and there were unbelievably many courses to choose between. Plus you could take as many as you wanted more or less, since there were hardly any distribution requirements. I might be making this up but I believe 30 of my forty undergraduate courses were in philosophy.
What was your intro class like?
I don’t know if there was one. The first class I remember was Ancient Philosophy with Frances Sparshott, who revealed at some point that his passion was philosophy of dance. For our final paper he had us invent a pre-Socratic philosopher who ought to have existed but strangely didn’t. What a great assignment. I made up some kind of conventionalist/relativistic figure who probably in retrospect was not all that far from Protagoras. Although maybe not, in further retrospect, since Sparshott called my guy “anachronistic,” a word I had to look up.
Inspiring undergrad teachers or classes?
John G. Slater taught an undergraduate course entirely about Bertrand Russell. He had a huge collection of Russell books in his office, which was set up like library stacks. They were in all sorts of languages. I seem to remember that one of my “jobs” in India was to find Tamil or Telugu versions of Problems of Philosophy. Slater was connected to the Russell Archives at McMaster. Who would have guessed his papers would wind up in the steel town of Hamilton, Ontario, not far from Toronto? Reminds me of a Susan Sontag piece in The New Yorker about making plans in high school to do a pilgrimage to Old Europe in search of her literary hero Thomas Mann—-until she discovered he was living at the time on Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades. Slater had us reading everything from Principles of Mathematics to more popular stuff like Marriage and Morals. Russell said when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature that it was for Marriage and Morals, but this was apparently not true; according to Wikipedia the Prize was awarded not for any particular book but “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”
Another inspiring class was with Bas van Fraassen: Formal Semantics. He explained Kaplan’s then new ideas about the semantics of indexicals. He told us about intuitionism, models, presupposition, truth, proof, and paradox. I tried to make up my own paradox in that course, which I remember well enough not to want to repeat it for you here. I was an insufferable prick and he let me down very gently. He took enormous care with his paper comments, right down to the grammar. It was from van Fraassen I learned that there is no apostrophe in possessive “its.” I don’t know how he managed to communicate this without causing embarrassment, but that was van Fraassen; he had a gift for that sort of thing. I remember students commenting after class that he knew everything about everything but wore his learning lightly. There was also a grad course on Belief and the Will. I hardly understood a word, but can tell you there was a lot on St. Augustine, Descartes, and doxastic voluntarism. His technical and humane letters sides were always both in play which impressed me to no end.
I learned the most from Hans Herzberger, especially his seminar, The Inexpressible, which somehow wove Tarski and the inexpressibility of truth and Frege on the concept horse together with St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy, the Tractatus, the silence of the Buddha, and a lot else. I remember Bimal K Matilal coming from Oxford to lecture on Indian Logic. Saul Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth” had appeared in 1975 (this was 1978 or so) and we spent a long while on that as well.
When exactly did you decide to go to grad school for philosophy, and why?
I decided in Pune but was travelling when the time came. I applied from Kathmandu to the Program in Logic and Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley — founded I think by Tarski in the 1950s. This was probably on the recommendation of Hans Herzberger. Hans was living that year in Madhya Pradesh (actually Andhra Pradesh‼) in south India, where his wife Radhi taught at a Krishnamurti school, the Rishi Valley School. He is there now, too! They very kindly allowed me to stay with them for six weeks. I was rewarded with a ringside seat as Hans was developing his own formal theory of truth, a competitor to Kripke’s. I wrote my first eventually-published paper there under Hans’s guidance, on an alternative, top-down formulation of Kripke’s theory of truth.
What was your dissertation on? Who was your dissertation adviser? What was that process like?
The metaphysics of objects and events. (It was called “Things.”) There is no fact of the matter, it argued, as between essentialism and antiessentialism. Each could mimic the other’s successes and each faced analogues of the other’s problems. The secret sauce was a plenitudinarian version of modal many-thingism. There was a theory of causation in there somewhere too. My advisors were Myro and Davidson. Myro was beyond generous with his time and ideas. I remember him wanting to reschedule an appointment because something had come up two hours later and he thought we might need three hours. Davidson was strongly antiessentialist and referred me to the Carnap–Quine debate on quantified modal logic. He asked me once who believed essentialism any more. Kripke was for him the exception that proved the rule, so I mentioned Wiggins. Stop right there, he said, David Wiggins is my friend! (I have told this story too many times, apologies to everyone tired of it.) I was highly opinionated in my no-fact-of-the-matter-ism and was not too good about taking advice.
You can get full access to the interview and help support the project here.
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.
