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 Eric Winsberg.
In this interview, Eric Winsberg, British Academy Global Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Professor in the Department of Philosophy, The University of South Florida, talks about growing up free-range in Montreal, his mother’s punch cards, developing an early interest in video games, managing dysgraphia, arguing, Vietnam, thinking about free will, being introduced to the history and philosophy of science as an undergrad at the University of Chicago, rugby, blues, writing a dissertation on computer simulation at Indiana University, chaos theory, David Chalmers, pool, becoming professionalized, working at the University of South Florida for over two decades, climate science and simulation, the accuracy of pandemic computer models and the ethics of pandemic restrictions, Muay Thai, Cambridge, eFoiling, David Hume, and his last meal…
[Interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
Did you talk about philosophy with your family?
I had no idea what philosophy was. When my mother was getting her Ph.D. my father used to joke a lot that philosophy was figuring out whether or not life was a bowl of cherries. I don’t think I really even understood that there was no actual “Ph.” in her “Ph.D.” and that this was some weird M.D./Ph.D. rivalry thing. I remember worrying about free will some and my mother telling me that once I was old enough to understand quantum mechanics I would see why that was confused.
Favorite classes and inspirational teachers in college? How did you discover philosophy? What was the hook?
My first ever philosophy class, which was during my first quarter at the University of Chicago, was with Christine Korsgaard. It was the philosophy-flavored HUM101 of the Chicago core. I really liked the class, and it definitely opened my eyes to the possibility that there were topics of inquiry outside the sciences that weren’t a waste of time. But by far the most inspirational teacher I had was Robert Richards, who taught the “Science, Culture, and Society” flavor of the Western Civ core requirement. This was the “hook” for me, but it was a hook into HPS, broadly construed, rather than a hook into philosophy. I never really thought of myself as going into philosophy until a couple of years into my HPS grad program at Indiana. I think I partly thought HPS was its own thing, and if you had forced me, early on, to say whether I was going to be a historian or a philosopher, I think I would have said “historian.” For example, in our first year, we had to do a “research methods” class, and I picked the history version. They made me go back and do the philosophy version later.
When exactly did you decide to go to grad school for philosophy?
It was after I graduated from college. After college I moved out to San Francisco. I did a bunch of random jobs—mostly as a substitute teacher in some of the private schools in the city. I had roommates who were getting started on careers and I could sort of tell they had a mix of skills and gumption for that that I lacked. So I decided to apply to some Ph.D. programs in philosophy and HPS. I was totally disconnected from a university community though, and most of the papers I had written in college were lost. So I threw together what must have been a pretty pathetic-looking application.
In grad school, what was trending in your department, philosophically?
Well, I was in an HPS department. I’m not really sure if it was trending in my department, per se, but certainly at the time there was a lot of interest in what people now call the “Stanford School” in philosophy of science. I don’t think I was aware of the concept at the time, but I certainly was very interested in, and influenced by, the work of Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright.
Outside of HPS, the 90s was a period when there was a lot of interest in stuff like “complexity,” chaos theory, fractals, critical phenomena, and stuff like that. Indiana HPS hired the philosopher Stephen Kellert, who started as assistant professor the same year I started the Ph.D. program, and he had written his dissertation, and a new book, on the philosophy of chaos theory. He had a lot of influence on me, and is probably the main reason I wrote my dissertation on computer simulation.
Across the quad in the philosophy department, there was a grad student a few years ahead of me named David Chalmers that everyone talked about a lot. So, there was definitely lots of interest in consciousness stuff. People also seemed to be talking a lot about non-conceptual content, whatever that was, and emotions. We also had a lot of logicians around (Jon Barwise, Anil Gupta, Mike Dunn, and Raymond Smullyan) so there was lots of stuff going in logic.
Did video games inform your philosophizing about computer simulation?
I think only in the sense that I grew up witnessing the explosion of the power of computer graphics, and the two biggest places you could see this were video games and visualization-intense computer modeling. One of my prized possessions is a computer file that the astrophysicist Alar Toomre gave me of a simulation he and his brother did in 1972 of galactic tails being formed by the “collision” of two galaxies. They made the movie by printing out each frame on a dot-matrix printer, using letters and numbers as pixels, and then photographing each frame onto a frame of Super-8 film. That kind of thing gives me goose bumps.
How is your department different from other philosophy departments?
It’s mostly focused on history of philosophy and continental philosophy.
What are you doing in Cambridge? Weird man!
I’m a “British Academy Global Professor.” I’m working on a project that has to do with how to best build, use, and understand computer simulations that are meant to guide policy, especially in a crisis. This is something I was obviously already interested in with climate science, but really sucked me in when I saw how powerfully simulation models could be used as rhetorical devices in the pandemic. I want us to find that narrow path where models can be useful and trustworthy for us without becoming tools policymakers can use rhetorically to make the case for what they want to do anyway. It’s honestly still surreal to me that I get paid to do what I do. In graduate school, I never thought I’d get a satisfactory job in academics. I really thought I was going to have to find something else to do. So yeah, being at Cambridge is weird. I still do feel a bit like a tourist here, so maybe that’s part of why it doesn’t feel as surreal as it might.
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.
