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 Jonathan Ichikawa.
In this interview, Jonathan Ichikawa, Professor of Philosophy at University of British Columbia, discusses growing up Christian during the satanic panic, making use mention errors (when he was 4 years old), Star Trek, divine foreknowledge and free will, starring in a high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, going to Rice University, his first philosophy class taught by a future colleague, becoming an atheist, harboring libertarian sympathies, opera, 9/11, feminism, developing an interest in Cognitive Science, considering a career in law, applying to grad school in philosophy, privilege and the role of luck in his career, impostor syndrome, working with Ernie Sosa at Brown, starting and working on the popular blog Fake Barn Country, Christa Peterson, the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, moving to Rutgers where he started working with Brian Weatherson and Jason Stanley, polyamory and jealousy, intuitions, epistemology, the Arché Research Centre in St Andrews, meeting his wife Carrie, developing an interest in social and political applied philosophy, how Hume and Descartes influence the status quo, Terry Pratchett, Arabian Nights, and the question he would ask an honest omniscient being…
Favorite classes and inspirational teachers? How did you discover philosophy? What was the hook?
I took my first philosophy course my first term, quite by chance — there was a gap in my schedule and I wanted to pick an interesting elective for it, and I had a friend who was enrolled in an intro-level philosophy and cognitive science course, so I came along and joined it. That course was actually taught by Eric Margolis, who is now my colleague at UBC. I enjoyed the course and did well in it. Unlike the science classes, this course did reward my high school strategy of just coming to class and paying attention and being clever. (Not all philosophy courses are like this though!) I didn’t have any early intention of being a philosophy major, but I kept taking philosophy courses as electives, because I enjoyed them and did well in them.
Did you consider doing anything other than philosophy?
I went through a lot of ideas about majors during my time at Rice. I came in thinking Computer Science, but realized pretty quickly that that wasn’t going to work out for me. I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I’d come in with the academic discipline to really learn the material in my first couple of courses. Then I was on a business/management track for a while, then decided I wanted to major in Political Science.
Following that philosophy course, I became interested in Cognitive Science, which was an interdisciplinary major at Rice, so I started taking Linguistics, and Psychology, and Neuroscience, and more Philosophy of Mind. Rice has a pretty robust culture of double or even triple majoring, so I cycled through various permutations of majors throughout my four years. The Cognitive Science major was my main organizational framework, insofar as I had one at all, in my course selection.
I also wasn’t doing a lot of thinking about post-college career plans. I sort of ended up on a pre-law track. I worked in the summers, and part-time during the terms, for a publishing company that produced legal texts, so I was doing some careful reading of code books and court decisions and legislative changes. It was while I was working that job during a summer between grad school terms that I think I became the first person in the world to notice that Texas accidentally banned marriage in 2005.
I actually didn’t decide to pursue a Philosophy major (double with Cognitive Science) until my last year at Rice, when I decided I was interested in Philosophy graduate programs. I had taken a lot of philosophy courses by that point, either for the Cog Sci degree or as electives, so this wasn’t too hard — but it did mean taking some of the required intro-level courses in my last year as a more experienced undergraduate student. I also was the kind of student who talks a lot in class, so I’m sure I annoyed my classmates and professors.
How did you grow as a student?
Honestly when I look back on that time, I’m sort of surprised I made it through in four years and a double major, considering how unfocused I was academically. Coming in with a good amount of AP credit helped. But I was really just starting to grow up, and grow into an intellectual identity. I enjoyed learning and took a playful attitude towards it. It was enough to carry me through a BA.
What did your parents make of your decision to major in philosophy?
I don’t think my dad and my step-mother were thrilled about the idea, but since I didn’t actually have or announce that idea until late in my undergraduate career, when I was pretty clearly planning on postgraduate study anyway, I think it went down a little easier than it might have. I was thinking about both law school and Philosophy PhD programs.
Overall, in college, how did your views change? Like, your relationship to religion, for instance?
Religion just sort of fizzled out of my life once I got to college. For maybe a month or two I spent a little time and energy exploring the local churches, because I came in still thinking that was the kind of thing that would be important to me. And I participated in some events with some of the campus Christian groups. But none of it excited me, and without the family pressure to pull me along, I eventually realized that I didn’t care. I think I remember being interested in defending some of my Christian beliefs in some of my philosophy courses along the way, so some of my Christian identity lingered for a while, but basically throughout my teens, spanning both high school and college, I very gradually became an atheist.
How did you get into feminism?
As far as I can remember, I was also first exposed to feminism in anything like a sympathetic way as an undergrad. (Before that, I think maybe I heard only a few passing references to it in church, and the occasional Rush Limbaugh rant on the radio.) I didn’t have any kind of formal study of it, but I remember some conversations with friends about some of the very basics. My girlfriend had a “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt. I also remember that one of my classmates was leading a campaign to phase out some rapey college chants that had been passed down through the years. I didn’t see what the big deal was at the time, but I consider her a hero in retrospect.
Did you start thinking what you were going to do after you graduated?
I didn’t decide what to do after college until my fourth and last year as an undergrad. I hadn’t been focused on that question until then — I was just enjoying living and being in college — but it eventually became obvious that I needed a plan. Law school was an obvious choice — I was creative and analytical and a good literal reader, and I had been working with legal texts in my summer job. But as I started thinking more seriously about it, and talking to the lawyers I knew, and thinking about student debt and work lifestyle, etc., the idea of pursuing law professionally left me pretty cold. I think I probably would have enjoyed law school, but I’m at all not sure I would have enjoyed working as a lawyer. So even as I stayed halfway on that track — I took the LSAT and started collecting law school applications — I started to explore other ideas too. I asked my philosophy professors a few questions about philosophy grad school, and got some good advice and guidance (some from my current colleague Eric Margolis again). I decided in the fall I’d apply to law programs and philosophy programs, and choose between them later, but decided at the last minute not to send off law school applications.
What philosophy programs were you looking into?
I was open-minded about where to go for my philosophy PhD. I applied all around the United States. I didn’t have very specific ideas about what kind of philosophy in particular I was interested in, but my writing sample was in ethics — wrestling with questions about how to think about welfare when the number of people who exist is one of the variables, looking at Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion“, etc. I ended up with a few good offers to choose between, and decided to go to Brown. I did not end up focusing particularly on ethics at Brown — I worked primarily on epistemology with Ernie Sosa — but recently I’ve found my way back to ethics.
In retrospect I think I was quite rash in enrolling in a PhD program, and in choosing Brown in particular. I didn’t really do my homework at all. I didn’t know much about academia, and had only the vaguest sense of what it’s like to be a professor or how hard it is to become one, and I never even visited Brown before accepting my offer. They offered to fly me out for a visit, but the dates conflicted with an operetta I was working on that spring. I would certainly not advise anyone today to make their decisions the way I did. Then again, today, someone with ideas about philosophy as unfocused as I had at the time wouldn’t have been admitted to a good PhD program anyway. I just moved across the country by myself to an area I’d never been, without really having any idea what I was getting into. Things worked out, though; I was lucky. I ended up really enjoying my colleagues and faculty and work at Brown.
[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 access to the full 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.
