Abdul Ansari is a third year PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research primarily lies in normative ethics, meta-ethics, and moral psychology—with epistemology, social philosophy, and the social sciences close at hand.
What excites you about philosophy?
For me philosophy is emotionally engaging. I am drawn to the fear of losing beliefs and values near and dear, the thrill of reimagining ethics and politics in light of new conceptions thereof, the unmatched joy of sitting with issues that seem, really, to matter, the sehnsucht for clarity about my anxieties, the hopefulness of recommending new ways to conceptualize the world, and the chance to appreciate beautiful complexity lying “behind” ideas characteristic of everyday thought and action.
What are you working on right now?
The beating heart of my research is a question central to the world’s great philosophical humanists, from Aristotle to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Hume through Mill and Nietzsche, Du Bois to Edward Said, Bernard Williams to Peter Railton. Namely: What must value be in order to fit the kind of non-ideal valuers that we are? In grappling with this question, my research develops a framework for understanding value as a relational entity, as depending on and fitting what we are like—concerns, anxieties, abilities, frailties, social situations, and all.
To that end, I am writing essays on the nature, epistemology, and importance of what matters, on:
What best explains the existence and functional roles of a person’s good and reasons?
Must the stuff of ethics—wellbeing, norms, apt emotions, meaning, reasons— suit what finite subjects happen to care about?
Do desire, personal taste, and preferences have normative power: a stunning ability to create, by fiat, truths about what matters?
Are normative and evaluative truths vulnerable to loss, our access to distortion?
Why are different modes of valuing appropriate or fitting, and valuable?
How does humanity retain worth—and how ought we appreciate this value—under the specter of injustice, dehumanization, and despair?
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
Topic? Let’s try topics.
First, philosophy dealing with normativity should work with our friends in anthropology. True: Anthropology has a reputation as a haven for relativism, epistemic and moral. But fields change. And anthropology has taken—what gets called—“the ethical turn”. An increasing number of ethnographies focus on the life and formation of determinable normative concepts like ‘virtue’, ‘good life’, ‘understanding’ and ‘meaningfulness’, particularly in contexts philosophers don’t pay enough attention to: like urban America, gangland Brazil, religiously divided India, war-torn Vietnam. Such work stands to enrich our philosophical imagination about what normative concepts are and could be, and paves a way beyond armchair speculation for discerning the functions and conceptual roles of ethical and epistemic concepts.
Second, it is time for analytic ethics, political philosophy, theory of mind, and epistemology to closely engage postcolonial worlds. While analytic philosophy is starting to take nonwestern philosophical traditions seriously, there is less emphasis on the histories, cultures, social lives, and linguistic practices of “ordinary folk” and locales outside America and Europe. This is a missed opportunity. As philosophers, we investigate issues of perennial human concern. And the human resides not just in America and Europe, but in parts of the world that were former colonies of Western empire—the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, East Asia. Humans around the Sahara, under the Himalayas and beyond the Great Wall have a lot to say about knowledge, value and justice; some of what they say challenges our common ways of carving up the normative sphere. Friends in history, sociology, postcolonial theory, and religious studies (etc) have extensively studied such practices. Let us listen to them.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Mentoring. Whether students in my classroom struggling to find their voice and major, members of my immigrant community who just need some help navigating college, fellow academics whose ideas were thirsty for support, critique and enthusiasm, close friends who became family, who just needed a critical but compassionate ear helping them articulate and form their goals and beliefs.
Favorite holiday?
I am a shameless proponent of the hygge hype, so give me a crisp fall day with apple cider and long walks, or a winter morning with snow falling endlessly, hot chocolate, and a good novel.
Which books have changed your life?
Plato’s Phaedrus—for showing me that philosophy can be a form of love.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—for documenting an ethics tethered to the world.
Ghazali’s Mishkat al-Anwar—for exemplifying cultivated moral perception and imagination.
Nietzsche’s The Gay Science—for an unyielding and sincere devotion to discerning, interrogating and affirming value, in its many forms, amidst the ruins of an old world.
Chekhov’s Selection of Short Stories (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation)—for persuading me to appreciate everyday life in all its unruliness, messiness, and beauty.
Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus—for being the first work of philosophy I ever read, and invoking metaethical anxieties my research still grapples with.
Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—for persuading me that properly paying attention to what matters is central to being an upright person.
Favorite film?
Boyhood. This movie is a beautiful invitation into memory and nostalgia. The main character is my age (and I also grew up in Texas), so I am overwhelmed by the Proust effect whenever I see him do as we did in the 2000’s. As Walt Whitman puts it:
‘There was a child went forth every day,And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.’
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
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.
