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 Audrey Yap.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview is available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
In this interview Audrey Yap, Associate Professor at the University of Victoria, talks about growing up in Vancouver, Buddhism, the relationality of identity, taekwondo, depression, emo poetry, Tori Amos, going to the University of British Columbia, getting good at things, working at Starbucks, being encouraged to go to grad school, Stanford, 9/11, the history of algebra, working with Michael Friedman and Solomon Feferman, wushu, déformation professionnelle, Jobs for Philosophers, landing a job at University of Victoria, the inspirational work of Susan Brison, decarceration, teaching philosophy in jail, doing analytic philosophy instead of going to counseling, the joys of co-writing and helping other people figure stuff out, Marcus Aurelius, socially engaged philosophy, Indigo Girls, The Expendables, Ursula Le Guin, and her last meal…
What did your parents make of your decision to major in philosophy?
By that point, my dad had moved back to Malaysia, and we weren’t especially close then. I don’t think my mother really minded what I did with my life—I mean she had had to spend her post-divorce years figuring a lot of that out for herself, and I’m sure she had her own problems. I’m lucky in some ways that I was pretty independent and didn’t have any kinds of care responsibilities. So since I was a scholarship student, I managed to get by working pretty much full-time hours at Starbucks to pay my rent. I guess I didn’t feel like I had to justify my choices to my parents since they weren’t on the hook for them, financially. So I got to spend plenty of those years doing pretty irresponsible things to a body that I now take much better care of, grateful that it wasn’t the age of social media or the present overdose crisis in my province.
When did you start thinking about grad school?
I would never even have considered grad school (I didn’t really know what it was) if one of my undergrad mentors hadn’t suggested I apply, and even told me where to go. So when I got tenure, I knitted him a “thank you for my whole career path” present, which is a little reversible soft toy that’s a duck on one side and a rabbit on the other. I think it still lives in one of the UBC seminar rooms.
You got into Stanford! Was this exciting? Scary?
I couldn’t believe it. It was the norm where I grew up to just apply to university near where you live, so the American culture of choosing schools was totally foreign to me. That meant I’d never even considered applying to a place like that, much less thought about what it would be like to go there. I defended my PhD thesis in 2006 and I’m still secretly afraid someone will tell me they made a mistake and never meant to accept me in the first place.
Was grad school what you expected? Was grad school in general, or writing the dissertation, challenging?
I moved to the US for grad school the week after 9/11. That was disorienting and terrifying. Not just because I actually knew some people who lived in New York City, but because the US’s reaction showed me a lot (I was really naïve at the time) about just what military and political power meant.
I had no idea what to expect out of grad school. I don’t think I knew anyone besides my professors who had ever been, and somehow it never occurred to me to ask. I think some of my family was a bit annoyed that I was staying in school still, instead of doing something—I actually don’t know what they expected, maybe getting married and having kids?—more productive with my life. I had a really hard time my first few years in grad school, though. I don’t think I was well prepared to be there, and I felt incredibly behind everyone else most of the time. I actually don’t think that feeling has ever gone away!
But I had never written a big project like the dissertation before, and I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. I think I’m extra hands-on with my graduate students now, even when some of them don’t need me to be, partly to help protect them from feeling as lost and unsure as I did.
What was Stanford like?
I spent a lot of time around logicians, Kantians, and philosophers of science. I took a lot of logic because I thought for a while I would research in it. But every time I came up with a potential research question, even for a seminar paper, it seemed like Sol Feferman had already given a proof of it in the 60s. So I lost steam pretty quickly. I also spent a surprising amount of time reading and writing on Kant. But we had all these people especially—Allen Wood, Michael Friedman, Lanier Anderson, and Tamar Schapiro—who were all fantastic scholars and experts on different aspects of Kant’s philosophy. So maybe I just couldn’t help it.
What is philosophy?
I got asked this at a job interview and it’s giving me scary flashbacks.
Ha! Sorry. Exciting and disconcerting trends in philosophy? How do you see the future of philosophy?
I love how normal it is to be doing socially engaged philosophy. I never even managed to take a class in feminist philosophy when I was a student, and now I meet all these people doing PhDs in the coolest, most interesting stuff. Philosophy still feels very conservative to me overall, but also has the potential to become something much more expansive. If we’re not all shut down by a pandemic and/or late-stage capitalism or something, that is.
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.
