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 interview with Greg Caruso.
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
In this interview, Gregg Caruso, professor of philosophy at SUNY Corning, Visiting Fellow at Northeastern University London, and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, talks about growing up working-class in Long Island, reading Sartre, On The Road, and the autobiography of Malcolm X, Catholic school, learning to play the upright bass, the Gulf War, going to William Patterson University to become a jazz musician, Kant, changing course and pursuing a career in philosophy, losing his religion, word processors, working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, payphones, taking classes with Rosenthal, Kim, Kripke, Block, and Nagel at the CUNY grad center, developing an interest in, and defending, free will skepticism, how his wife changed his life, teaching as a grad student, landing a gig at SUNY Corning, and his last meal…
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Malverne, New York, which is on Long Island not far from Queens. In many ways, it was the ideal place to grow up. On my street alone, there were fifteen to twenty kids all around my own age. There was never a shortage of things to do or trouble to get into. It was not uncommon, especially in the summer, to leave the house in the morning and not come home until dinner. We spent our days playing ball in the street and, once we got older, riding our bikes around town. We had a lot of autonomy back then. Unlike today, we didn’t have to arrange “play dates” or have our parents take us over to our friend’s house. Instead, we just walked next door or across the street to find someone to hang out with. To this day, I remain friends with many of the kids I grew up with.
Any early signs you’d end up being a philosopher? Like, were you a reflective young person?
I was a very contemplative child. I really enjoyed sitting alone letting my mind wander. I was also prone to abstract thought and discussing the “big questions” in life. In high school, for instance, I took to having deep theological debates with my friends, as well as the brothers that ran the school. But I had no idea what philosophy was back then, let alone that it was a career option.
Favorite classes and inspirational teachers in college? Friends? How did you discover philosophy?
When I arrived at William Paterson University, I was still majoring in jazz performance. But then I took a philosophy course—probably because it fit my schedule or fulfilled a Humanities requirement. It was an intro course with Daniel Kolak, who was well-known on campus for his antics in the classroom. He was a really dynamic teacher and I immediately became hooked. After that class, I started taking every philosophy course I could and at some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I officially changed my major. I remember taking classes on epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ancient philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and phenomenology. But it was a seminar with William Boos on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that convinced me that I wanted to be a professional philosopher. I remember being so impressed by his scholarship that I said to myself, “I don’t know if I understand all this, but I want to do what he’s doing.”
Another big factor in my change in direction was that I met and became friends with a group of fellow students who were also interested in philosophy. We organized reading groups, hung out, and talked philosophy with each other all the time. If I had not met those guys, I don’t think I would be a philosopher today. The group included Rob Talisse (who is now W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University), Dwight Goodyear (Professor at Westchester Community College), Rob Tempio (publisher at Princeton University Press), and Matthew Cotter (now an Executive Director at CUNY). There was also a group of students that I didn’t know as well who were at WPU around that time and went on to have successful academic careers, including Thom Brooks (who is Professor of Law and Government at Durham University). I was just lucky to be at the right place at the right time.
Philosophy… what was the hook?
I think it was a combination of things. In many ways, philosophy just naturally fit my personality. It tapped into my curiosity, my love of reading, and my desire to know and explore big questions. It also didn’t require math or memorizing dates. I really liked its abstract nature. I was also drawn to philosophy’s revolutionary nature. Philosophy is punk! It challenges everything—authority, tradition, and the status quo. Nothing is sacrosanct. In my rebel youth, I found that very attractive.
Same. What was the biggest challenge, given your change in direction?
I don’t recall many external challenges, but I do remember going through an existential crisis. When someone’s identity is intimately tied with what they do, as was the case for me and music, it’s difficult to leave that thing behind without experiencing a crisis of self-identity. You feel like you are betraying yourself in some way. I have a lot of friends that have been forced out of academia because of the job market, and almost all of them experience something similar.
When did you decide to go to grad school? Where did you want to go and why?
I was completely naive back then. I knew nothing about graduate programs or how hard it was to get into a good program. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but I didn’t have a good writing sample at the time. So, I took a year off, during which I got a job working for the AHRC taking care of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. At the same time, I took a graduate course at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, as a non-matriculated student. The course was with David Rosenthal. I used the course to generate my writing sample and ended up doing pretty well. At that point, and still being naïve, I applied only to one program, the CUNY Graduate Center. A number of students from WPU had gone on to CUNY and I wanted to stay in New York, so I had my sights set on going there and studying philosophy of mind with David Rosenthal. By some miracle of miracles, I got accepted. In hindsight, I cannot believe it worked out.
Advice for graduate students?
My advice would be to pick a dissertation topic that is manageable and something you can complete in a timely fashion. View it as a requirement that needs to be satisfied, not your magnum opus. I got caught up thinking about it as the most important thing I was ever going to write, which it wasn’t. Approaching it that way really paralyzed me. Also, be sure to find a supportive advisor that is willing to guide you through the process. It’s extremely important to have someone that is invested in your success.
In grad school, how did you change, philosophically?
Philosophically, my views on free will all started to come into focus. In my dissertation, I defended a form of hard incompatibilism, which maintains that the sort of free will required for basic desert moral responsibility is incompatible with both the causal determination of our actions by natural factors beyond our control and the kind of indeterminacy in action required by the most plausible versions of libertarianism. I became convinced that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense. Initially, I thought I would spend a few years working on free will and then circle back to my interests in philosophy of mind. But that never happened. Once I went down the rabbit hole, one thing led to another. I started to become more and more interested in the practical implications of free will skepticism and what it meant for morality, meaning, and the law. My career continues to be preoccupied with these issues.
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.
