Our philosophy club, The Philosophy Society at the University of Washington, formally began in 2018 under the leadership of Jason Lim, who was president of the club before me. Jason had the idea of creating an undergraduate philosophy club that would appeal to non-majors, and that inclusive attitude has informed the club, and our subsequent journal project, ever since. All of our activities are student-controlled. As a registered club, we have a faculty advisor, and we may, of course, seek the help of faculty when we need it, but we tend to run things independently.
We meet on-campus once weekly for officers and periodically for more general meetings with all UW students, in libraries for meetings and in classrooms for larger events, typically for fifteen minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how much there is to discuss on a particular day. We also organize events with faculty speakers, organize reading groups on the work of contemporary philosophers, interview contemporary philosophers, and publish an undergraduate philosophy journal. Preparation levels for the meeting vary depending on the roles of particular members and on the type of meeting we are having. For me, for example, as the president of the club prior to my graduation, there is a good deal of preparation involved. I must have an agenda prepared and remind people about when and where we will meet. For other members, they may come without preparation. For reading groups, of course, everyone must (at least ideally) have read a certain amount of a particular text in advance, although there is often valuable discussion without this.
Our topics of discussion tend to be wide-ranging, given the diverse interests of our members. However, we often find ourselves in disagreements about the nature of philosophy itself, and so philosophy is one of our favorite philosophical topics, I suppose. This has a capacity to animate people more than many properly “philosophical” topics. Often, in reviewing a journal submission, we find ourselves in disagreement about whether such-and-such work constitutes philosophy, whether it is good philosophy despite not having a “point” or an “argument,” and so forth. I suppose we often find ourselves pushing up against the narrow boundaries of the received conception of what philosophy is, a conception that we sort of inherit as university students. One indication in favor of the idea that there is no distinction between philosophy and meta-philosophy, at least in my view, is that our longest meetings typically involve discussions about philosophy as such, rather than any particular philosophical topic.
Besides that, multiple members are interested in the work of those at Pittsburgh and Chicago, so the work of McDowell, Brandom, Engstrom, Thompson, Ricketts, Pippin, Conant, and many others are often discussed. Multiple members also have strong historical interests, mainly in Ancient and German philosophy, so we often talk about, e.g., Aristotle and Kant. In addition we have many members who are interested in topics in applied ethics and political philosophy; many of our invited speakers have given presentations on these topics also. But many other members have different interests, and we have had discussions about, e.g., Kripke’s Wittgenstein, Ricketts’s interpretation of Frege’s argument against a correspondence theory of truth, and so on.
It has been a real difficulty maintaining the group over multiple years. I graduated this past quarter, and so this has been on my mind recently. Thankfully, two current members will lead the club next year, so for at least the next academic year we will continue to operate without interruption. I think that the best way to deal with this issue is to encourage first and second-year students to join, so that there are people with experience to run the club when seniors graduate. This is what I have tried to do, and it has worked so far. As for the future of the club, I would like for us to continue publishing our journal, but also to publish work by students from other universities. I would also like for us to publish in print again. I think there are also great things to be done with reading groups, especially ones that are more casual in character and can appeal to many undergraduates rather than a few. I think one unfortunate thing that happens as people study philosophy formally, and then move on to graduate study, is that they often adopt interests that bear little to no connection to whatever it was that made them want to do philosophy in the first place. It’s not that the discovery of new questions is bad; of course it’s a good thing. Rather, it’s that it’s bad to give up a certain immediacy or excitement in the face of a desire to do what others are doing, what is trendy, what is considered “real” or “professional” philosophy.
Some may reconcile themselves to the inevitability of this, but I think there is no reason why this should happen already at the undergraduate level, assuming that it should happen at all. I want undergraduates always to maintain the adolescent love for philosophy that often brought them to study it at the university level. Such questions as whether good and bad are relative, or whether there is a meaning to life, and so forth, are in a way the simplest questions, but they are also the most important, because they move us not (just) qua philosophers, but qua human beings, and so we are never alienated from them. A path back to such questions should always be possible, even in the most abstract philosophizing.
The philosophy club gives students a place to gather with other students who love, or at least like philosophy, and provides a space for philosophical discussion. That on its own is, in my view, valuable. I think that the philosophy club allows students to meet others who may have different or even in some way opposing intellectual interests. This has the further value of exposing people to new figures whom they may not have read, thoughts they may not have thought before, and so on. I suppose I see the undergraduate philosophy club as, at its best, and hopefully more so in the future, a subversive force which weighs against some of what is wrong in professional philosophy, and in contemporary humanities education. In a way, I have come to think of this as our most important task, and I hope it will be pursued by future club leaders.
Braeden Giaconi
Braeden Giaconi is a recently-graduated undergraduate in philosophy at The University of Washington in Seattle. He is particularly interested in philosophical logic, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, Ancient philosophy, Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy, and early analytic philosophy. As editor-in-chief of the undergraduate journal The Garden of Ideas, he has interviewed James Conant, Stephen Engstrom, and Béatrice Longuenesse. He counts among his philosophical heroes Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, and John McDowell.
