Kjell Fostervold is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. His work focuses on meaning in life, especially on the structure of meaningful lives, the notions of purpose & belonging, and philosophical methodology.
Personal Website: https://www.kjellfostervold.com
What topic do you think is underexplored in philosophy?
So, so many things, but connected to my own work on meaning in life, I think there’s been very little attention paid to both purpose (in the secular sense) and belonging. Ask non-philosophers about meaning, and these notions almost always come up: a sense of purpose, wanting to be part of something bigger than we are, and so on. A lot of the empirical psychological literature on meaning is likewise tied to notions of purpose & belonging. But philosophers working on meaning have largely ignored both of these! That’s one of the things I’m trying to do in my work, to push our thinking on meaning to incorporate these notions in some way, and to think more about the social dimensions of meaning rather than the individualistic focus on single lives in isolation.
If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent, what would you most like it to be?
Play guitar! I regret not learning an instrument earlier in life so very much. Otherwise, fluency in another language. I’d probably go with Chinese!
What is your favorite sound in the world?
Three things: summer rain & thunderstorms, the crunch of walking on fresh snow, and the otherworldly silence of winter nights after a big snowfall.
What is your favorite book of all time? (Or top 3). Why? To whom would you recommend them?
If you ask me this question on a different day, I’ll probably answer differently, but today I’m going to say Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. Graeber’s book is a brilliant observation of the absurdity of much of our professional lives (maybe especially in academia), Lear’s book is an incredible picture of the background structure of our lives & its role in living meaningfully, and the Chambers book is just a lovely exploration of identity, purpose, and belonging!
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
I’m reading the Expanse novels by James S.A. Corey (there was a TV show based on them a few years ago that I quite liked), as well as a whole bunch of Chinese philosophy classics to prepare to teach a class next year. I think I would recommend the former, so long as you generally enjoy science fiction. As for the latter, everyone should read Chinese philosophy. The Mengzi & the Zhuangzi are probably my favorites; they’re both very rich, profound philosophical texts. In some ways they’re very familiar: there is much to do with virtue & other familiar philosophical questions and concepts. In many other ways, though, they present a radically different philosophical picture than most of what we find in European or Western philosophy. We desperately need more philosophers to engage with figures & traditions beyond the standard European/Western canon.
When did you last sing to yourself, or to someone else?
In the shower! I have a whole ‘shower karaoke’ playlist! The Beatles & Oasis have been recent favs, but I love all the usual karaoke staples for shower singing! I guess the last time I sang to someone else was at a karaoke bar, but that was a while ago. I think the song was “Sold” by John Michael Montgomery! I’m NOT a good singer, but that’s not the point anyway, the point is just to have fun!
Who is your favorite philosopher and why?
I always struggle to answer this question. I think I want to say Wittgenstein. When I read his work, I get the sense that he’s trying to show us something profoundly important, but at the same time, I have absolutely no idea what he’s saying. Wittgenstein is also one of the first figures in philosophy that I really fell in love with, back when I was discovering philosophy in undergrad. Or maybe it’s Bernard Williams? Williams & Wittgenstein strongly influenced my thinking, but more in regard to philosophical methodology than anything. I’m suspicious of a lot of systematic philosophy, and I’m also deeply skeptical of many methodological commitments many (most?) professional Anglophone philosophers seem to share. I’m not at all sure, for example, that what we want to get out of doing philosophy is abstract, universal accounts of concepts or phenomena in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, nor am I optimistic that such accounts are even attainable. And I really don’t care for the central focus on categorization and sorting: I don’t, for example, want to understand meaning in life in order to correctly sort lives into the meaningful and meaningless buckets! The point of philosophy isn’t abstract knowledge for its own sake, it’s about how we ought to live! Philosophy has to speak to the existential concerns we face in trying to live well!
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Smrutipriya Pattnaik
Smrutipriya Pattnaik, is the Teaching Beat Editor at the American Philosophical Association Blog and Series Editor for the Syllabus Showcase Series. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. Her research focuses on utopian imagination and political thought in the context of modern crises. She is currently working on her first book, Politics, Utopia, and Social Imagination.
