It took me a long time to get to academic philosophy—in fact, most of my life. I didn’t major in philosophy in college, but in government and history. In the last year, I became increasingly interested in philosophy, taking classes on Nietzsche, Kant, and political philosophy, and doing a lot of reading on my own. I went right from college to law school and became a lawyer, which I did for more than three decades. During that time, I never lost my interest in philosophy, reading and participating in some discussion groups. When I finally retired from the law nine years ago, I knew I wanted to write. The first thing I wrote was a book about the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, which had fascinated me for many years because of the many ways in which it has penetrated our cultural consciousness, in particular the theme of discovering that the person you’re searching for is yourself. Once the Oedipus book was out of the way, as I thought about other things I wanted to write, I realized that they were mostly of a philosophical nature—in other words, not fiction or memoir or journalism or politics. And at a certain point, I realized that, though I could keep studying on my own, I would benefit from the rigor of being in an academic environment. I also liked the idea of being part of a community. Encouraged by my wife, I signed up to take classes at the University of Maryland, which has an outstanding philosophy department. After a couple of years of taking both undergraduate classes and graduate seminars, I realized that since I was taking them for credit, I might as well put them towards a graduate degree. So I applied for the masters program and was accepted. Originally, I thought I was too old to start an academic career, but thankfully, I turned out to be wrong because it’s never too late… if you have the right attitude.
Before enrolling at Maryland, I didn’t really know much about what goes on in contemporary philosophy departments. For me, philosophy meant the great philosophers of history, from the ancients to the early moderns. Twentieth-century analytic philosophy was pretty much an unknown country to me. I had heard of Russell and Wittgenstein of course. But I had never heard of Frege, or J.L. Austin, or Elizabeth Anscombe, or Paul Grice, or many of the other big names in modern philosophy. So when I started at the university, taking classes on logic, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, it was all fresh and new to me. And I found it exhilarating. I loved the logic- and math-infused rigor of 20th-century philosophy. I still love reading the ancients and the early moderns, especially Kant and Hume; the great philosophers always bear re-reading. But reading the 20th century philosophers opened my mind to all kinds of new ideas.
One day I was listening to a lecture on J.L. Austin’s distinction between performative and descriptive statements, and it occurred to me that that distinction was essentially the same as the difference between hearsay and non-hearsay in the law of evidence. In other words, I saw an interesting parallel between the two disciplines—philosophy and law. Pretty soon, I was finding all sorts of ideas in philosophy that have counterparts in the law. As I kept seeing parallels, I conceived the idea of teaching a course that brought them together. The department chair liked the idea—any philosophy class with the word “law” in it has a certain appeal to all those philosophy majors thinking about law school. I have now taught it for several semesters.
When I first started developing the curriculum, I looked around for material to use, assuming that I would find a textbook bringing together the two disciplines. To my surprise, I couldn’t find one. There is a lot of material on the intersection between philosophy and law in certain areas. For example, there’s a large and growing body of writing about the intersection between the law and philosophy of language. Causation is another subject where philosophy and law have been examined under a single microscope. Moreover, many have written about the implications of the age‑old philosophical debate about free will for criminal justice. And recently, some philosophers have explored whether the philosophical concept of personal identity should have a bearing on the length of prison sentences.
But I could find nothing pulling all these issues together. And there are areas of intersection between philosophy and law that haven’t received much, if any, attention. To teach the class, I therefore had to gather and create a lot of new materials, enough to fill an entire textbook. Eventually, I realized that what I had created might be of interest to teachers of philosophy in other universities. I approached a large publisher of academic books with the idea of a textbook. They agreed that it would be unique, and commissioned me to write it. The book is coming out in October. I continue to teach the class. And above all, I continue to study, and love, philosophy.
Ken Glazer
Ken Glazer practiced law for more than three decades before studying and teaching philosophy at the University of Maryland. He is the author of numerous legal publications. He is also the author of Searching for Oedipus: How I Found Meaning in an Ancient Masterpiece (2018). His next book, From Socrates to the Supreme Court: An Introduction to Philosophy through the Law, is coming out this year.
