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 the forthcoming interview with Mike Huemer.
In this interview, Mike Huemer, Professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado Boulder, discusses being a little kid thinking about where God came from and the nature of consciousness, Ender’s Game, his mother’s reaction to his decision to major in philosophy, taking classes with Searle and Feyerabend at UC Berkley, social justice warriors, Ayn Rand, the problem of induction, moral intuitionism, anarchism, the collapse of communism, the fledgling internet, dualism, which views in ethics are complete non-sense, submitting a stylistically Wittgensteinian writing sample, grad school at Rutgers, Colin McGinn, Vann McGee’s logic class, Civilization (by Sid Meier), refuting skepticism, two common grad student problems, evolving as a teacher, the job market, landing a job at UC Boulder, woke ideology, the great questions of philosophy, his book, Approaching Infinity, reincarnation, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, his blog Fake Nous, and his last meal…
So, how did you get into philosophy?
I got into philosophy through a class on “the Nature of Mind”, taught by Richard Wollheim. It was Philosophy 3, so presumably intended for beginners. I wanted to find out why consciousness exists, and this class sounded like it was the most likely to answer that. It didn’t really. To this day, I’ve never gotten the answer to that question.
Wollheim stood at the front of the class lecturing for the whole time, and I’m pretty sure none of the students had the faintest idea what he was talking about. In the course readings he included what I now recognize as classic articles in philosophy of mind, like “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?“. Great papers, but far over the heads of freshmen taking their first ever philosophy class. He was pretty out of touch.
However, there was also a discussion section that went along with the class (like most classes at Berkeley). And the TA (Karen Pilkington) would just have us discuss fascinating philosophical questions every week. In one class, she pretended to be one of the first generation of robotic TA’s. She invited us to determine whether she was conscious or not. Of course we could not tell.
It was clear then that this Philosophy stuff was the most interesting subject they had at Berkeley.
Still feel smart when you got to Berkely?
Yes. People had told me that when I got to Berkeley, things would be very different from high school, because suddenly, everyone around me would be smart. Then school would be hard, and I’d have to finally work hard. Nope, false. It was still easy. I was still at about the top of every class. I could still get A’s without doing most of the readings.
How did your parents react to your decision to major in philosophy?
My mother thought philosophy was a waste of time. She thought I should major in math, because I was good at it and, apparently, I had an uncle who had majored in math and then became a rich banker. I completely ignored that.
Favorite authors in college?
Ayn Rand, Hermann Hesse, Richard Bach, John Searle, Arthur Schopenhauer. I usually didn’t do the assigned readings for my courses, but I went around the library and found other things to read instead, like the above authors.
That might seem like a weird list of authors, because I’m pretty sure that if they were all in a room together, a brawl would break out. Rand and Schopenhauer would be punching each other in the face. But I liked authors who were clear, and sincere, and passionate about what they were writing.
Why do you think Rand is not taken seriously by most academic philosophers? Style? Substance?
Two reasons: One, her writing is heavy handed and sprinkled with colorful insults toward almost everyone. Two, she didn’t read much of the existing literature in philosophy, which means that she didn’t recognize things like which premises needed extended support, what objections a smart interlocutor would raise, etc. If she had engaged with other philosophers, she could have developed a more sophisticated intellectual system, but she just assumed that she didn’t need to do that.
Favorite professors in college?
I had two favorite professors: John Searle, and Vincent Sarich.
Searle was very clear, sensible, and witty. He also covered a ton of material. To this day, I think most of my knowledge of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind comes from Searle’s classes in those subjects. He supervised my honors thesis on the mind/body problem. He never had more than a couple of minutes at a time to talk to me, though. People referred to his Philosophy of Mind class as “Philosophy of Searle”, since he assigned all his own books and was very forthright about his philosophical views. I thought it was just great.
He also let me in his graduate seminar in philosophy of mind, where we discussed the Kripkenstein problem (from Kripke’s book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language). I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Searle thought there was any non-trivial problem there. (I later figured out that it was because he and Kripke and Wittgenstein were all assuming nominalism. They didn’t actually say it; they were just presupposing it all the time. It didn’t occur to me that they would be assuming such a ridiculous thing.)
Tell me a bit about Sarich.
Vincent Sarich was an anthropologist who had done work showing that humans and chimpanzees’ common ancestor was a lot more recent than people previously thought, based on some kind of genetic molecular clock or something. Anyway, he got in trouble for talking in class about the brain size differences between different groups. The SJW‘s of the day went ballistic and tried to get him fired. They failed since he had tenure, but they gave him a lot of publicity, which is how I learned of him. I decided to see for myself what this guy was up to. He turned out to be a lot nicer than people were saying. He would walk back to the anthropology building after class with a few students in tow and sit on the lawn talking with the students for hours, about whatever we wanted, for as long as we wanted. He said his job was to make us think.
Are any controversial, or half-baked, ideas off the academic table, in your estimation? Where’s the line?
It depends on what you mean by “off the table”. Obviously, some ideas are not worth spending time on. If someone proposes that human beings are actually robots built by cats to take care of them, I don’t think academic anthropologists should spend any time investigating that. On the other hand, I wouldn’t fire someone for holding such a view. I can’t think of a view that I would fire someone for holding. I can think of some information that should be censored, but not for being controversial or half-baked. E.g., I think you should not be allowed to publish plans for an atomic bomb, or a stolen celebrity sex video, or libels against specific individuals.
You took a class with Feyerabend. What was he like?
Feyerabend was not one of my favorite professors, but he was a very distinctive professor. He was teaching Ancient Philosophy. He would just sit on the stage at the front of the lecture hall, rambling for the whole period about relativism and the presocratics. It wasn’t so bad, but I don’t think we learned much from him. We never did manage to get to Aristotle in that class. The TA’s had to assign the grades because, I was told, Feyerabend was not allowed to assign grades anymore, since he would just write “A” on the top of the grade sheet and an arrow all the way down. One time, a student had died during the semester but still got an A from Feyerabend. Feyerabend reportedly said, “Well, he would have gotten an A.”
Consider majoring in anything other than philosophy?
I considered multiple other majors, including physics, psychology, sociology, political science, and maybe some others. I was good at almost everything, so I thought that I should do the thing that was most important to have done well; I wanted to make the best use of my abilities and not waste them, you see. I loved philosophy, but I wasn’t sure it was useful enough.
What convinced me that it would be okay to major in philosophy was Ayn Rand. From my last year of high school to my first year of college, three unconnected people suggested I should read Ayn Rand. When the third person said it, I finally got a copy of The Fountainhead and read it. I thought it was just great. Then I read several of her other books. I showed up to philosophy class one time with a copy of Philosophy: Who Needs It. One of the other kids looked at the cover and said, “Well, if that’s how you feel about it, then why are you in this class?” Another student helpfully explained, “No, that’s not what she means. She means everyone needs it. That is, everyone needs her philosophy.”
Rand basically portrayed philosophy as the key driver of human history, and doing philosophy as the single most important job that any human being can do. That’s what convinced me that it would be a suitable major for me.
How did your philosophical views evolve in college?
I started out with few philosophical views, and I started to develop more in college. I started trying to answer Cartesian skepticism (which would ultimately become my dissertation project in grad school).
I started trying to figure out the problem of induction. It would take about a decade, starting with an undergrad course in which I was introduced to the problem, for me to develop the view finally set out in my paper “Explanationist Aid for the Theory of Inductive Logic“.
When I first heard about ethical intuitionism, I thought it was lame and rested on “arbitrary” assumptions. But when I thought about it more, I came to realize that it was just true. I can’t really even explain why I didn’t like it at first. I was just confused.
The most important way that I grew intellectually was just learning to think clearly, instead of being stuck in the fog of utter, ridiculous confusion that all undergraduates start in (and most people remain in for their entire lives). I attribute my ability to get my thoughts clear and organized to the study of analytic philosophy.
You’ve been at UC-Boulder for more than 20 years. Lots of people jump around. Why did you stick around?
Well, it’s super-hard to move once you’ve gotten tenure; there are very few senior-level openings. I didn’t realize that when I started in the academy. (Important thing for new academics to know!) Also, after my political views became well known, I think it would be extra-hard for me to move anywhere. Also, Denver is a really good city to live in.
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
You can get early 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.
