Stewart Huang is a grad student at Brandeis, specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. In this interview, he discusses his thoughts on the graduate school experience.
Which classes were your favorite from graduate school?
My favorite was Professor Palle Yourgrau’s class on fiction, a topic which unsurprisingly became the focus of my master’s thesis. The class was interesting to me partly because it was so new and different compared to other subjects I encountered and mainly because I deal with fictional characters every day, as a lover of video games, movies, and story-telling in general. I also used to be an English major as an undergrad. Looking back, I wish English classes would talk about what this class touched on, the ontology of fictional characters and whether fictional names have referents, which seem so important for the study of literature in retrospect, instead of whatever “psychoanalysis” is.
We mainly discussed Saul Kripke’s Reference and Existence, a series of lectures in which he lays out his view of fictional characters as existent abstract objects and his solution to the problem of true negative existential statements regarding fictional characters. I think it’s a good introductory work in that it gets one to start thinking about these issues: it might have been one of the first to discuss them, but I’m not sure. It also connects these issues with some very famous ideas established in Naming and Necessity like the notion of names as rigid designators, not as descriptions. However, when I had to start the research process for my master’s thesis, I didn’t find this work to be very clear or useful. It seems to have little to say about other views regarding the ontology of fictional characters, aside from the view that they are merely possibilia, which it argues against. I also still cannot make out what its solution for true negative existential statements is. As far as I can tell, Kripke doesn’t really have one and seems to just give up towards the end. But overall, this is a thought-provoking series of lectures in that it makes some unintuitive claims, like the central claim that fictional characters are abstract objects. I was immediately struck by this and spent so much in class just thinking about how it might be wrong. To be fair to Kripke though, I think any plausible view on this subject is bound to be unintuitive in some respects, a feature which makes the topic so interesting and frustrating to think about, and his view is probably the most intuitive one at the end of the day.
After Kripke, we read parts of Mark Sainsbury’s book Fiction and Fictionalism, an introduction to the different views on fictional characters. This book turned out to be an enormously helpful source for my research since it covers so much ground. In my master’s thesis, I ended up discussing a problem, which I call the Problem of Initial Reference, that is very similar to another problem Sainsbury calls the Selection Problem. Perhaps they are in fact the same problem, but I can’t say for sure.
That’s enough philosophy talk. In addition to the topic, I love this class because I had a lot of fun corresponding with Professor Yourgrau, who later became my thesis advisor. I had just become a grad student at this time, so I was learning how to get more comfortable interacting with the professors—addressing them by their first names, for starters. And I’m proud of the progress I made in this class. Towards the end of the class, sometimes I would make these funny comments in response to what he said just to mess with him sometimes. These moments would make my day, and I really appreciate him being such a cool professor and graciously entertaining my tomfoolery.
What notable pedagogical practices did you encounter at grad school? What were your thoughts on them?
Professor Katrina Elliot’s extremely clear and detailed essay exam prompts. I think philosophy courses are generally sufficiently clear when it comes to the expectations for essay prompts, at least in comparison to what I’ve heard about other liberal arts disciplines like sociology. But I have never seen prompts that are as helpful as Professor Elliot’s. These are exam prompts that ask students to explain or connect some ideas discussed in class, laid out in such a detailed and instructive way that makes it so easy to engage with. Here’s an example:
Your first take-home essay exam is to answer two of the following three prompts. For each prompt, you are to write a single, unified essay that conducts the reader through these ideas. (In other words, you are not to treat “A”, “B”, and “C” above as independent questions to be answered with separate paragraphs lettered “A”, “B”, and “C”.) There is no page limit, but I imagine that each essay can be answered in roughly 4 double-spaced pages.
Prompt 1: Mill on Natural Kinds
A) Explain Mill’s distinction between a real Kind and a finite kind. Provide an example of a real Kind, and explain what features of the category in your example qualify it as being a real Kind. Provide an example of a finite kind, and explain what features of the category in your example qualify it as being a finite Kind.
B) Explain the sense in which it is correct to say that real Kinds are made by nature and finite kinds are made for our convenience, for Mill. (see especially pg. 151-152.)
C) Explain the sense in which it is incorrect to say that real Kinds are made by nature and finite kinds are made for our convenience, for Mill. (see especially pg. 151-152.)
I distinctly remember doing this essay at the Brandeis Library and being amazed at how quickly and easily I was able to finish it. Instead of simply telling you to “explain Mill’s view on natural kinds,” it guides you throughout the entire essay such that you know exactly what parts of his view you need to explain. Whereas for assignments from other classes, I was sometimes unsure about the amount of details I should include: is this idea relevant or is it too tangential? Should I discuss this point even though the paper I’m explaining doesn’t mention it? If I ever get to assign essay exams in the future, I’ll use her prompts as a model for my own.
Another notable pedagogical practice I encountered was Professor Eli Hirsch’s impromptu surveys on Zoom classes. He would present two opposing philosophical positions or intuitions and ask students to “raise their virtual hands” if they agree with either of these views. I loved these surveys because they were a form of empirical investigation, something one rarely does in philosophy. But on issues of ordinary language, a frequent topic for Professor Hirsch, this kind of investigation seems quite important: one needs to actually ask what people think to know what they would ordinarily say in such-and-such situations. These surveys were also a great way to encourage students to participate, since, I assume, people often want to express their own views and find it interesting to see what other people’s views are, and they could do so easily in this format. In addition, I think these surveys made philosophy more relatable in the sense that it reminded students that the topics discussed weren’t just highly abstract topics contemplated by people with too much free time. They were connected to values they might hold or disagree with themselves.
Do you have a preferred way for teachers to conduct class? If so, why?
I like when professors discuss a paper simply by laying out the structure of its main argument ASAP, instead of slowly developing it by first reading through the paper more or less line-by-line. I dislike the latter because oftentimes the assigned paper itself isn’t very engaging to read. A fellow grad student joked to me once that Derek Parfit’s On What Matters volume 1 is so boring to chew through, one would think it’s about things that don’t matter. The other pitfall is that sometimes the professor can get into a tangent or become obsessed with some detail like word choice while doing a close reading of a paper. Meanwhile, the students are just sitting there dumbfounded, wondering where the lecture is heading or what the big fuss is about. And when the close reading is finally done, it’s hard for the students to put everything together—it took too much time to develop the argument to remember how it even started. Of course, details like word choice matter, but I’d like to hear about the structure of the argument first so I can properly appreciate the smaller stuff. There’s a sensible order to these things, like having dessert served after the main course.
In contrast, laying out the structure of the argument ASAP is a lot more engaging. The main reason for this is that it immediately generates curiosity, so students are naturally compelled to tune into what the professor has to say next. For instance, the premises could be confusing, or it is surprising how the premises manage to reach the conclusion, at this initial stage of learning about the argument. I especially enjoy when professors break an argument down into a numbered list of premises. The logical structure is laid bare for all to see, which encourages students to interact with it. Whenever I see arguments in this form, I instinctively start trying to figure out the weakest premise to find an objection, almost like I’m playing a board game. I think this style of teaching is a big part of why I enjoyed Professor Hirsch’s philosophy of religion class so much in my sophomore year, so much so that I became a philosophy major in the first place.
How easy or difficult did you find your courses, either the material or the assignments? What helped you succeed?
My dirty little secret is that I rarely did the assigned reading before classes—I hope my dear professors don’t see this. Therefore, when I would go to class and listen to them explain the reading that I was supposed to do, I often felt that the material was so simple and straightforward, since they always did such a great job explaining it. But when I actually had to do the readings for a paper assignment, I would realize just how little I actually understood the material and would find it very difficult. What I got from the lectures and handouts was simply an abridged version with some important details missing. I would have all these questions about how exactly a given argument works: how does thought A lead to thought B exactly? What does this philosopher mean by this particular word? These were difficult questions specifically because it was often hard to tell whether the author made a mistake, which would be fertile ground for an objection, or simply that I am just not understanding things by being uncharitable or unintelligent. This problem can often be exacerbated by the obtuse style that some philosophy papers have: the structure of the argument isn’t laid out well enough; the sentences are too syntactically complicated; there are too many notations and acronyms; or there’s suddenly formal logic—like a cheap jump scare in a horror movie—where clear argumentation would have sufficed.
One example comes to mind. I was assigned an excerpt on Strawson’s Persons for my graduate proseminar. The following is how I started my assignment responding to the reading:
This piece by Strawson is one of the most unreadable pieces of analytic philosophy I have come across so far in my admittedly short philosophy career. With needlessly complicated syntaxes, liberal use of parentheses, lack of concrete examples, and zero sign-posting, this excerpt largely eludes my ignorant mind…
Despite many of the assigned readings being very difficult, there were several factors that helped me succeed in still turning in competent assignments. The first is to be able to follow the lectures well enough to achieve a baseline level of understanding, which would be enhanced later through my actually doing the reading. To this end, I rarely took notes. I’ve realized over the years that it really just distracted me from keeping up with what the professor was saying. I also make a lot of mistakes in my handwriting and typing—this would further distract me. So I decided to just be an attentive listener for the most part, which I found to be effective.
The second is of course class participation. I made up for my nonexistent homework by participating in class and asking questions. One obvious benefit of this is to eliminate points of confusion and test out initial objections. Admittedly, there was always the risk of asking something the reading already addressed and utterly embarrassing myself. But I’d consider the risk to be part of the thrill of the whole activity. Another, more subtle benefit is that it makes the class more engaging and thus memorable, so that I could better remember the material. Yet another subtle benefit is that I could establish some rapport with the professors, like I did with Professor Yourgrau in his class on fiction. I just think they’re all extremely friendly and fun to talk to. And they might have been more sympathetic when grading my work. You never know.
The third factor contributing to my academic competence is the following: a good shower. Given the difficulty of the readings, I often had to reread the same paragraph or even the same sentence multiple times to begin having a decent grasp of what was being said. But sometimes this just didn’t work, and sometimes this made things more confusing. I’d start to get paranoid after so many read-throughs: I’d thought that at least some parts were clear, but now I wasn’t so sure anymore. It’s like struggling with a Sudoku puzzle: you just can’t manage to fill those final blanks, so you begin to wonder whether you’ve already screwed up at much earlier steps. Other times, I felt like I was on the cusp of delivering a good, clear argument, but I just couldn’t do it. I would end up staring at my computer and get nothing done for a few hours. In times like these, I found that a good shower did wonders. It was something like a mental reset. I was able to think a lot more clearly, and good ideas would come much more easily. After thirty minutes in the shower, I would emerge a better philosopher.
If you could improve your graduate experience in one way, what would it be?
Brandeis has a relatively small philosophy department. This means that you get to know pretty much every grad student and faculty member and enjoy small-sized classes. This sense of a tightly-knit community is undeniably a great strength of the department. However, I do wish it was just slightly bigger, both in terms of the student body and faculty. The 2023 cohort only contains four people. They’re lovely, wonderful people, but I wish I got to know just a few more, especially now that my cohort and the previous have mostly graduated—I’m still hanging around campus, anxiously waiting on my PhD applications. In addition, with more faculty, there would likely be more graduate seminars available to us. There seems to be only one or two available every semester. Not to discriminate against the undergrads too much, but I really enjoyed these seminars where we can have more higher-level discussions more frequently and also joke around more as the grad students know each other pretty well.
Also, I wish the food on and around campus was better. This is something I complain about every time given the chance. I’ve already spent 3.5 years in Brandeis as an undergrad, and the cafeterias have only become worse. So my advice to incoming grad students is to not get a meal plan here. For a rough idea of how bad the campus food is, you can read my old article from 2019 on the topic. It also doesn’t help that Waltham, where Brandeis is situated, is home to more than a few mediocre restaurants. They’re not terrible. They might even be considered good. But they’re not great, especially when you compare them to places in Newton, Watertown, Cambridge, Somerville, Downtown Boston, and so on. In addition, there are no good ramen places in Waltham. It breaks my heart.
Do you have any favorite stories from grad school to share?
Not really stories, but I like telling other students the amusing speech habits of certain faculty members. One of the professors loves to start his sentences with the phrase: “I can’t resist the following comment…” I can’t resist a smile whenever I hear him say it—it’s just such a peculiar phrase. I asked him once whether he realizes how much he uses it. He said no, to my surprise.
Another professor likes to start his every response to student comments and questions with “Yeah! Good!” It’s funny but also very sweet, because sometimes what the student (like me) said seemed to be wrong or irrelevant, yet he would always respond with these two words so that the student doesn’t feel shot down when he eventually explains how they were wrong. They would thus feel validated and encouraged to participate more in class. But I’m not sure if he is consciously doing this as part of his pedagogy or if this is just a speech habit he picked up. I’ll ask him next time I see him.
Aside from speech habits, there are also some funny examples professors use I like to share with fellow students. My favorite one is given to demonstrate the concept of conversational implicature. It goes roughly like this: suppose I go to the faculty lounge and see the university president there, and I remark that “he is sober today,” what am I saying? It seems I have somehow suggested that the president has a drinking problem, even though what I said looks to be direct evidence that he does not have a drinking problem. I’ve heard this one so many times, but it still cracks me up every time I hear it.
Sometimes I am the subject of these examples, which I find hysterical. Professor Hirsch is a deflationist when it comes to ontology. He thinks that most philosophical issues in ontology are merely verbal disputes, a famous view of his which he loves repeating, with a certain fervor, to the poor undergrads. I, on the other hand, enjoy talking about all this spooky stuff and entertaining extravagant views. So he would often draw a contrast between us in order to explain his position: “Stewart is a heavy-weight philosopher who thinks… whereas I am just a feather-weight that thinks…” The most hilarious instance of this is when he asked us something about ordinary language and made this remark: “Looks like not even Stewart is inclined to say this.” I could barely contain myself after that. I adore his sense of humor. It’s very much like my own.
Stewart Huang
Stewart Huang received his BA/MA from Brandeis University. His philosophical interests are in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion, specifically on the topic of fictional characters and the ontological argument for God’s existence. Outside of philosophy, he plays (way too many) video games like Elden Ring and the Resident Evil games. He also uploads gameplay to his YouTube channel.
