As I’m diving into my first full-time academic job, there is a part of me that really enjoys reflecting on my time in graduate school. While I’m thinking primarily about the oodles of time I had to focus on writing and my friends, I’m also thinking about the courses and professors that made my graduate studies so wonderful. Here, I can’t discuss, let alone mention, all of them. But two lessons from my advisers stand out.
My path to graduate school was inefficient. I only minored in philosophy as an undergraduate and had trouble getting into any graduate programs. After working for a few years, I managed to get into the fantastic MA program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. One big draw for me was that I would be close to family, but another was working with Jon McGinnis. Jon appeared to speak my language. Coming from a small, historically oriented department at a Jesuit institution, a historian of medieval philosophy was someone I could talk to in the strange new world of analytic philosophy.
But Jon set me straight early on. I was working on a paper for a metaphysics seminar. I can’t remember all of the details, thankfully, but I was, more or less, saying what I thought a good Thomist would say about the topic. Having caught wind of my paper, Jon told me to find my own voice. At first, this seemed an attack on the Angelic Doctor himself, but I soon realized it was not (Jon is, in my estimation, a good Thomist). Rather, Jon was telling me to use my treasured philosophical hero, not just follow him. Or, at least, that’s the lesson I took from Jon.
Finding my voice meant seeing where the views of Aquinas and Aristotle could be put to work in contemporary debates. It meant focusing on arguments instead of worrying about the official Thomistic position on x. It meant taking inspiration from historical figures, not reciting them. And finding my voice paid off. I found my way into contemporary debates on causal powers, composition, and hylomorphism. There I found philosophers grappling with the same questions I had been grappling with. I became part of an ecosystem where my interests were shared and my language was spoken. I found ways to develop my core views in productive ways. In short, I stopped worrying about being a good Thomist or a good Aristotelian and started to worry about being a good (Aristotelian-Thomistic) philosopher. If we meet at a conference, you’ll know I’m not there yet, but at least I’m aware of the problem and working on it.
Having found my voice at UMSL, I was ready to hit the ground running when I arrived—down the road—at Washington University in St. Louis. Again, I was able to stay in St. Louis, close to family, but I also got to work closely with a cluster of great faculty that fit my interests perfectly. Eric Brown could keep me from misunderstanding Aristotle, Jon Kvanvig could guide my work in the philosophy of religion, and John Heil, my dissertation chair, could show me the ins and outs of doing Neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.
If you know Heil’s work, then you know that it is thoroughly realist, systematic, and original. In my eyes, John represents the best of metaphysics. But his approach and views are hardly widespread. It might be, of course, that John is wrong about how to do metaphysics and first-order issues in metaphysics. But I’d like to think, and do think, that John’s views aren’t catholic because he does metaphysics as he sees fit, not how it is ‘supposed’ to be done. Or, as John likes to put it, he trusts his gut.
In a philosophical context, trusting your gut might seem tantamount to being obstinate. But to me, it means sticking it out on a project, even if you don’t know what the project is yet. If something doesn’t make sense to you, if it doesn’t feel right, then there’s probably a paper or two in which you can try to make sense of it. By the time I finished my coursework at Wash U, I was confident I would write a dissertation on hylomorphism, the Aristotelian view that objects—and maybe more—are understood best as composites of matter and form. But I had no clue what I was going to write. I had ideas, but no dissertation-sized ideas. So, all I did one semester was read both scholarship on Aristotle and contemporary hylomorphism. One paper, “Each Thing is Fundamental” by Marc Fiocco, just rattled me. I thought Marc was wrong, but I had no clue why. I got so focused on the paper that I wrote a reply piece and sent it to Marc. He tore it apart, and it needed to be torn apart; it was confused and poorly written. (Looking back on my paper, I wonder whether Marc was relieved I didn’t go to UC – Irvine for grad school.) But in focusing on Marc’s paper, in trying to show how he was wrong, I started thinking about hylomorphism in a whole new way. I started to think about how I would build and defend a plausible version of hylomorphism. And the result, eventually, was my dissertation. The view I developed and defended in my dissertation would be alien to my past self. But who cares; my past self was wrong and I got my dissertation done. And it’s all because I stuck it out on a suspicion, a hazy idea, and trusted my gut.
You might think that “find your voice” and “trust your gut” sound like banal, overly general adages with no practical import. But all the practical, nitty-gritty advice you could want already exists in a blog post somewhere (from ten years ago, with extensive commentary). To me, learning how to network at a conference or craft the perfect teaching statement isn’t what’s most important about graduate school; it’s figuring out how to become the philosopher you want to be.
Graham Renz
Graham Renz is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Marian University in Indianapolis. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2023, and holds a BS from Rockhurst University (2012) and an MA from the University of Missouri – St. Louis (2016). His research focuses on questions in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and is inspired by Aristotle and medieval philosophers like Aquinas and Ockham.
