Disclaimer: Matthew Clemons is an editor at the Blog of the APA. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the American Philosophical Association or the Blog of the APA.
This month’s post in the Undergraduate Philosophy Club Series is a bit of an anomaly. I am not, as per usual, the faculty sponsor of an undergraduate philosophy club. I am a new editor for the series. Having just assumed the role, and having recently completed my doctoral degree in philosophy, it seems like an auspicious time to reflect on the way in which my own undergraduate studies at Belmont University, and specifically participation in Belmont’s undergraduate philosophy club, was formative for me, and how that informs my work here on the Series.
Although I eventually graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy and the Arts, I started my undergraduate work studying something else entirely. I had an interest in philosophy, or at least interests adjacent to philosophy, but I was not a particularly diligent student and hadn’t thought to pursue those interests in the formal context of the university. Ironically, it was within the university that the inadequacy of my own attempts at autodidacticism gradually became clear to me, motivating me to design my own major which I intended to be a conglomeration of humanities classes. In order for the major to be approved, the planned course of study needed to be reviewed by professors in the relevant departments. Assuming that ancient only meant antiquated, and eager to move on to “something of relevance,” I had left the (usually required) Introduction to Ancient Philosophy out of the course plan. In a meeting with the chair of the department, Mark Anderson, who also happened to be the instructor for the Ancient Philosophy class, I got my first taste of Socratic wisdom without having been formally introduced to Socrates. Alarmed that I hadn’t included the Introduction to Ancient Philosophy, he began tracing the influence of the those philosophers I had assumed were obsolete on the subsequent history of philosophy, the primary effect of which on me was to give me a sense of how little I knew. For what it’s worth, Ancient Philosophy is now one of my areas of expertise.
Dr. Anderson also sponsored the department’s philosophy club, which met once a week for an hour or so on Friday mornings—I want to say at 8AM, but this is probably more a reflection of my impressions as a 20- something undergraduate, for whom anything before 11 AM would have seemed early. Nearly all of the department’s faculty attended, and there were regulars among the students as well. Each week, we would discuss a question posed by someone who had volunteered during the previous week’s session and spend the hour in a free discussion on that topic. The questions were generally very broad, often having to do with the practice of philosophy itself and its purpose. Someone once asked about hope; another person about “living in the now,” and whether that was a good thing. I’m not sure if it was an official rule or just a reflection of our not having been exposed to the canon, but there was very little name-dropping. The hours flew by. Whether or not I mustered up the courage to interject was often less important than the impression I left the meetings with—that something important was at stake and that I wanted to figure out what.
In other words, these meetings cultivated in me the sense not just that philosophy was important, but that it was something worth doing for me. The probing questioning I learned in my undergraduate studies and in the philosophy club is something I constantly sought to recapture in graduate school, where the focus on the maybe necessary evil of professionalization can act as a fire blanket to the philosophical spark kindled earlier. Having experienced the value of the undergraduate philosophy club first hand, I approach my task as an editor of the Undergraduate Philosophy Club Series for the APA blog with a feeling of the importance of supporting and fostering undergraduate clubs.
