Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. She has been Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly since 2021, and serves as a member of the APA’s LGBTQ representation committee. Her books include Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Hackett 2004), Knowing What To Do (OUP 2014), Epiphanies (OUP 2022), Trans Figured (Polity Press 2024), and A Philosopher Looks At Friendship (CUP 2024). She has also published a collection of poems, Songs For Winter Rain (Ellipsis Imprints 2024), and a new verse translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Ellipsis Imprints 2024). She recently completed her new verse translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and hopes to find a publisher for it soon. She lives in Dundee in Scotland, and climbs, skis, cycles, and plays the piano.
OUPPS (Open University People Profile System)
(PDF) Directory to my publications
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
The serious answer is Epiphanies (PDF) Introducing Epiphanies.
A more flippant answer (which often feels true) is “Whatever I wrote last.” This Sappho translation isn’t quite the last thing I wrote, but I was very pleased when I got it down on paper over the Christmas break. (The U.S. hasn’t yet banned Sappho, right?)
Sappho, Poem 62
The moon has sunk
and the Pleiades
from my window
Endless night hours
on endless night hours
now follow
For I in this bed do not sleep
for I sleep solo.
What excites you about philosophy?
The immeasurable privilege of the canon we’ve inherited, for one. To be in conversation with so many extraordinary geniuses. It was Plato and Socrates who first got me excited about philosophy, and then Heracleitus and Parmenides. So, then I decided to try, at about the age of nine, to write a complete account Of What There Is. I was just getting going on this when I noticed Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in Bolton Town Library and realized to my annoyance that someone had beaten me to it. Never mind, I’ve come to love Aquinas too. And Augustine and Descartes and Hobbes and Locke and Kant and Rousseau and Mill and Wittgenstein. What a cast.
I am still very much a Platonist, I suppose, if we want a label. But part of the joy of doing philosophy is that it enables you to keep on swapping labels, hopping fences. Because philosophy, real philosophy, is essentially informal. Any attempt to represent philosophy by way of a formal system is always almost immediately broken by the question “And why that system?” If any single question is the truly philosophical one, that question is, in a way that nothing within any systemization ever can be. Of course, formal methods have their uses (some of my best friends are Bayesians); but one of their chief uses is to reveal their own limitations.
What are you working on right now?
Too many things at once, as usual. Today I’m writing replies for an author-meets-critics special issue on Epiphanies that’s forthcoming in die Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie, the leading German-language journal in analytic ethical philosophy. When I’ve done that, I’ll go back to the book I’m writing for Cambridge UP, Why Read Augustine Today? That’s proving a lot of fun, partly because I started off thinking from the title (it’s part of a series of similar titles) that it was my job to say only nice things about Augustine. Well, there are some nice things to say about him. But I increasingly think that some of the most important things that we should say about him are fundamental criticisms of his views.
Above all, his views on tribalism. Tribalism is one of the curses of our world, and a very convenient tool for those who want to divide and rule us. The most extreme possible form of tribalism is Augustine’s later tribalism: God created some of us for eternal bliss, and some of us for eternal torment. Believe that, and you will naturally believe that we can do anything we like to “the damned.” What does it matter? They’re damned anyway. I agree with Jonathan Bennett in “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” that assenting to this Augustinian view is worse than assenting to Auschwitz. “Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities”: the doctrine of hell is an absurdity, and of predestined hell a double absurdity; and it still leads today to tragically many atrocities. I have always been a Christian, but ever since I encountered systematic Calvinism at university, I have been a universalist too. Unless universalism is true, theodicy is impossible.
What is your favorite sound in the world?
The song of the curlew. I spent some of the happiest times in my childhood in a house overlooking Morecambe Bay in Lancashire. A wonderful place for dawn curlews. Do you have curlews in America? They sound like this. Curlew song.
What’s your personal philosophy?
Exactly the same as my professional philosophy. Shouldn’t that always be the answer? I’m a Christian Platonist, a humanist, a socialist, an environmentalist, and a passionate believer in free speech, human rights, and liberty, equality, and fraternity. I try to argue for these values, and I try to live them.
What is your favorite film of all time?
I talk about that here: (PDF) going to the pictures with roger scruton Aug 2019
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
The answer to the second question is bound to be Yes. Life is too short for non-recommendable books. If they bore me, I drop them.
The answer to the first is that I am reading A People’s Tragedy, by Orlando Figes, about Russia 1890-1925; The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham, about nineteenth-century European imperialism and its effects on what Europeans had the effrontery to call “the dark continent”; and How The World Made The West, by Josephine Quinn, about how our “western culture” developed historically through bridges, not walls—through promiscuous cultural melange, not through the paranoid policing of cultural borders, or any other kind of borders.
Yes, I read history mostly. Usually not novels. As the joke goes, in history, the plotlines are so much wilder.
Which books have changed your life?
The Bible, and especially the Gospels; The Lord Of The Rings; and The Last Days Of Socrates, Hugh Tredennick’s Penguin translation of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo: the first Plato I ever read, swiped from my mother’s library when I was about eight.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
My childhood self would say, “Yeah, figures.” But would also be immensely relieved to know that I was going to “make it.” Even in the most basic sense of “make it,” survival, I wasn’t always sure of that. Being a transgender child is very difficult, especially when your parents, though loving, are doing everything they can to stop you from being transgender, and even more so when you yourself are also trying your hardest not to be transgender. (PDF) Introducing Trans Figured for Polity
When did you last sing to yourself, or to someone else?
I sing the melody while I am practicing piano harmonies, to get the timing right, or less wrong. I sing along to CDs and Youtube. I sing to cats; I sang to one this morning, called Picasso, whose human is my piano teacher. I sing a lot.
You’re stuck on a desert island and you can only have one recreational activity. What is it?
Building a boat to get out of there.
Where is your favorite place you have ever traveled and why?
Lots of possible answers, but one is definitely “America.” The first time I ever visited the USA, in 1999, I hired a car at Seattle Airport, bought some Bob Dylan tapes, and drove all the way across Washington State to a philosophy conference in Moscow, Idaho. I saw glaciated mountains, sagebush deserts, mighty rivers, soybean plains that could have been in Iowa, little ramshackle railroad towns, authentic American strip-malls. And I got to know The Basement Tapes and Hard Rain and New Morning extremely well. It was awesome.
I’d love to do something like that again. But not possible right now. It’s hard to believe that it’s no longer safe for me as a lefty trans woman to visit the Land of the Free, but here we are. I hope the USA will regain its sanity soon; I’d love to come back, and I will as soon as I’m not risking immediate deportation or being disappeared by masked knuckle-dragging storm-troopers.
If you were a brick in the wall, which brick would you be?
Not into walls. Into bridges.
Who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman? Wonder Woman vs Supergirl?
I don’t know. I mean, why are they fighting at all? Why not just calm down and have a cup of tea?
What would you like your last meal to be?
A platter of pieces of cheese in which each piece is half the size of its predecessor.
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Jessica Castellani
Jessica Castellani had a unique high school experience attending Toledo School for the Arts, where she played in a percussion ensemble and steel drum band for six years. She earned her dual Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Religious Studies from the University of Toledo. Her primary focus was ‘the Self’ and the mystical experience of losing it. She earned her Master of Art in Philosophy from the University of Toledo as well, with a specialization in Comparative Philosophy, Eastern Studies, and Continental Philosophy. She has taught World Religions and Introduction to Philosophy at The University of Toledo both in person and virtually. She is a member of the Buddhist Temple of Toledo, tutors students, and has worked in the service industry for over a decade. In her free time likes to spend time outside and with her pets, friends, and family.
