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 Russ Shafer-Landau.
In this interview, Russ Shafer-Landau, Elliott R. Sober Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin-Madison, talks about growing up Jewish in Pennsylvania, rock collecting, the Phillies, being imaginatively stunted, drums, getting into Freud, Nietzsche, and Camus, the point of existence, Walter Kaufmann, existential dread at Brown, taking a year off and getting a record contract, returning to school with a renewed sense of purpose, taking classes with Martha Nussbaum, working on the index for The Fragility of Goodness, doing conceptual analysis with Chisholm, his anti-analytic philosophy phase, deciding to go to grad school for philosophy instead of business school, running out of money after a year of classes at Oxford, finishing up grad school at University of Arizona, his logical ineptitude, discovering philosophy of law, advice for grad students, applying to ninety jobs and getting one offer, what’s up with Kansas, switching from constructivism to realism, how metaethics has changed, the popularity of Cornell Realism and expressivism, The Moral Universe, how 9/11 motivated him, philosophically, Trollope, Lakecia Benjamin, and his last meal….
[Interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
As a little kid, what were you interested in?
Lots of things. Not philosophy. Rock collecting. Coin collecting. Biographies. History. Any ball sport. I was a die-hard Philly sports fan. So I learned about disappointment from a very early age.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I honestly had no thoughts along these lines. My mom, who wrongly believed I was the perfect child, told me that I could be anything, though she favored my becoming president. I toyed with that for a day but had read biographies of all the US presidents and knew the assassination rate was pretty bad, so I decided against it. But I didn’t replace it with anything. This is because I lack imagination. I am just not the kind of person who envisions all sorts of futures and thinks seriously about what it would be like to inhabit them. The flip side is that I devote almost no time to contemplating the past and imagining how things could have gone better. So being imaginatively stunted is not all bad.
What were you passionate about, if anything?
I always loved playing the drums. Loved rock music. Enjoyed competing in sports and spelling bees. I wanted to be the smartest kid in school and nearly was (at least judging by grades). Then I discovered philosophy…
Any deep thoughts back then?
None. But I thought I had plenty. When I was 14 I was sent off to work as a prep cook in a hotel in the Berkshires. The head chef was a philosophy grad student at Columbia and he took me under his wing for some inexplicable reason and introduced me to Freud, Nietzsche, and Camus. I am far from a morose person but I had a four-year stretch where that was a very apt description.
I imagine your conception of philosophy evolved in college. How? And how did you grow, as a person?
When I returned to college I was still thinking that “proper” philosophy had to be done as my existentialist heroes had done it. During my year off I’d written a 100-page essay that was chock-full of nasty epithets aimed at analytic philosophy. I handed it to Rod Chisholm, Ernie Sosa, and Phil Quinn, and, to my amazement still, they each read and gave some comments on it and did not try to talk me down from my ignorant hauteur. Instead, they offered gentle encouragement to someone whose self-possession vastly exceeded his talents. I came to see that philosophy written clearly and, ideally, elegantly had great value. Since those first philosophy classes, I sought to write as clearly as I could. I still do. I don’t regard myself as an elegant writer. But I do try.
I’m not the sort of person who spends time registering my improvements, failings, or mere changes, so I am genuinely uncertain about what (if any) personal growth occurred during this period in my life. I can say, though, that I came to college thinking I was hot shit. And left college, thankfully, thinking that I wasn’t.
3 philosophical accomplishments you are most proud of?
Umm…I think my book on nonnaturalist realism that came out about twenty years ago did a lot to resuscitate the view. For several decades prior to its publication, anyone caught expressing sympathy with the view would have been met with an incredulous stare. Of course, there are still plenty of philosophers who think the view is batty, but it’s no longer summarily dismissed. I don’t know if this counts as properly philosophical, but I did inaugurate MadMeta (the annual Madison Metaethics workshop) 21 years ago, and I think that it has fostered a supportive sense of community in our field, has helped launch several careers, and has had a nice trickle-down effect in inspiring others to start annual workshops of their own. Last but not least, I think the work I’ve done as a textbook editor and author has benefited students who will never be philosophy majors but who have come away with a much better view of philosophy than they might otherwise have. Actually, now that I’m on an immodest roll I do want to mention one other thing—I am probably the longest-serving placement director in the country. This fall I’ll be starting my 30th year in the role. In that long stretch, I have helped a lot of our students navigate a very anxious time in their life, usually with good results. That’s the most rewarding kind of service.
Since your career started, how has metaethics changed? Like, which views are surprisingly popular or unpopular, given their reception when you started?
I think the biggest change, as noted above, is that nonnaturalism is back on the table. Metaethics is also much more established now as a subdiscipline in its own right. One surprise is the relative dearth of developments of naturalist realism—when I was coming up the Cornell realism of Sturgeon, Boyd, Railton, Copp, and Brink seemed like the next big thing, with a promising research program that has not (Copp’s work aside) been systematically developed. Another surprise is the rise of constitutivism, which was discussed only glancingly, if at all, when I was in grad school. Chris Korsgaard gets the lion’s share of credit for that—The Sources of Normativity (1996) captured many hearts and minds and inspired a new generation to take constitutivism seriously. One last surprise: after deep, powerful book-length treatments of expressivism by Blackburn and Gibbard, we’re 2+ decades on and there have been only piecemeal efforts to extend the expressivist research program.
Exciting projects in the works?
I’ve been collaborating with John Bengson and Terence Cuneo for a decade on a project that was supposed to be one book and has turned into three. The first (Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory) came out a couple of years ago. The second (The Moral Universe) was just published and offers a new version of nonnaturalist moral realism focused on the metaphysical and normative dimensions of morality. Up next: Grasping Morality, designed to complement The Moral Universe but with a focus instead on issues in moral epistemology, moral psychology, and action theory. We are not speed demons so I expect this to take several more years before calling it a wrap.
In general, how have all of the world events—9/11, Iraq, Trump, COVID—that have happened since you were in grad school informed your philosophical views? Is metaethics political? In general, if you want to change the world, or minds, is philosophy the way to do it? If not, what is philosophy for, exactly?
9/11 was very much on my mind when I wrote my second book, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? I took for granted that the bombers had done something morally horrific, and sought to show that anyone who shared that view should regard morality as objective. I wrote that in (for me) record time, less than a year, in 2-hour windows after the kids went to bed. It was 2003 and I was naïve enough to think that the book, pitched to non-philosophers, would actually have some influence in the wider world.
So, is metaethics political?
Not discernibly. But then my powers of discernment are not that fine. If you want to change the world and have a philosophical bent, you can take the chance that you’ll be among the very rare philosophers whose ideas have been picked up, not mangled by political leaders, and implemented on a broad scale. A much better bet: if you are beset by philosophical questions and have the great luxury of being paid to spend a chunk of your time trying to answer them, then go for it. If you want to change the world in a big way, then unless you’re the next Peter Singer, best to either reduce your ambitions or leave academia and kickstart your political career.
What argument against non-natural moral realism do you find most troubling and why?
Finally, a softball!
The argument can be put many different ways but the core challenge is for nonnaturalists to explain how we can grasp a moral reality not of our own making. I know that genocide and malicious humiliation are wrong. You do, too. Explaining that is no easy task.
Are your philosophical views influenced by non-rational factors, you think? What are your biases and how do you combat them?
I’m sure they are, though if I knew what they were, I’d hopefully revise my views accordingly. I’m only rarely able to identify my biases, especially as I tend to hang around very like-minded people. That said, I have sometimes in hindsight managed to see that views I formerly held were the product of lazy inherited thinking or of no thinking at all. For instance, I had (and still have) retributive emotions that prompted me to feel satisfaction when the guilty got their comeuppance. I uncritically accepted some version of retributivism as a good justification for punishment. Then I actually sat down and thought about how to defend it, and ended up writing a couple of articles in the 90s designed to undermine retributivism. But this is far from standard operating procedure for me. As I indicated earlier, I’m not an especially introspective person, and one of the upshots is that unless someone calls me out on them, my biases are likely to elude my detection.
See any good movies or TV shows lately? Read any good books? What are you listening to?
Babylon Berlin was quite something. You can stay in Germany and get even more depressed by watching Deutschland 83. I didn’t exactly enjoy them but they are terrific. As for books: I just re-read Sense and Sensibility and, aside from its pat and hasty ending, was loving it the entire time. I loved Demon Copperhead and then re-read David Copperfield and must say I liked the newer version better. Do you read Trollope? Everyone should. Much more psychologically nuanced than Dickens (though nothing Trollope wrote is remotely as funny as The Pickwick Papers, which would triumph in almost any cage match for funniest Victorian novel). If you, like me, thought it impossible to become invested in whether someone is appointed to a low-level Anglican curacy in rural England, think again and have a go at The Warden. Then you’ll want to read the rest of the Barsetshire novels. Diana Athill’s memoir “Somewhere Towards the End” was absolutely delightful. For two gonzo reads that are summer perfection: Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper, and Aidan Truhen, The Price You Pay.
I listen to a lot of things, very little of it new. Mostly rock, jazz, and classical. Not much pop or folk and if a banjo is involved please escort me out of hearing range, although as with almost every rule there are exceptions, like The Audreys’ perfect album When the Flood Comes. I often have a playlist running through my head and, when I don’t, I have the Sonos speakers on at home. The tracks range from Rickie Lee Jones to Lucinda Williams to Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, Haydn string quartets, classic funk, Joan Armitrading, Arcade Fire, Peter Gabriel, Vivaldi cello sonatas, James Brown, Samara Joy, Mozart piano concertos. You didn’t ask, but the best concert I went to recently? Lakecia Benjamin, who (together with her killer band) blew the roof off the concert hall.
You can ask an omniscient one question, and you will get an honest, direct answer. What is the question?
How’d you get so smart?
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.
