Michael Crawford is Beat Editor for Research/Diversity and Inclusiveness. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Furman University and his M.A. in philosophy from the University of South Carolina. He has previously served as copyeditor for the blog. His interests are in ethics (particularly in neuroethics and the ethics of emerging technology), philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. He also has interests in Merleau-Ponty and later Wittgenstein. When not writing or editing, he is performing/teaching drums and percussion, cooking, or reading.
What excites you about philosophy?
I think I was first attracted to philosophy because there weren’t any limitations about which topics you could interrogate. I (like most high schoolers) just wasn’t aware of how deep the rabbit holes could go. It’s easy to get bogged down when there’s too many options, and I likely have spent too much time in the proverbial fly bottle. Regardless, that particular fact about philosophy—where nothing is off limits and everything can be examined, even when we have trouble even formulating the questions—still excites me, and I hope that sort of excitement never goes away.Â
What topic do you think is underexplored in philosophy?
I have thought for a while now that the extent to which the mind is embodied (contra computational theories) is deeply underappreciated, and I suspect the consequences of this underappreciation extend farther and broader than we can currently imagine. This is not really an underexplored area per se, but I think it cuts deeply. You can look around and quite easily see the damage that has been done by the assumption that you can have certain kinds of intelligence without the (presumed) messiness of different sorts of bodies. Maybe in some cases that view would be more parsimonious, but that just isn’t how our world is. We’ve barely started to notice how far down our Cartesian assumptions go, and it might take a long time to untangle them from everything else.
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
I recently picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. No spoilers, but yes. He approaches sci-fi worldbuilding from a place a lot of other writers might not—thanks to his background studying biology.
What technology do you wish the human race could discover/create/invent right now?
The Autodoc (but for free and for everyone) from the sci-fi series The Expanse would be about as good as things could get. In the show, we see it used to perform surgery, inject chemotherapy, mix chemicals for medications, heal radiation sickness, etc. Even though we see it used often in the show, it isn’t readily available to ordinary people—similar to the Med-Bays in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. The real technological development would be making it so that it isn’t cost-prohibitive to be deployed at scale. That idea probably seems way too utopian, but I’m holding out hope.
What time of day are you most productive and creative?
An exceedingly normal time of day: the morning. It took me a while to figure this one out. I used to think I was a night owl, but I suspect that was out of necessity until my schedule and sleeping habits changed for the better. These days, I clearly do my best and most sustained thinking/work mid-morning through early afternoon.
What advice do you wish someone had given you?
I don’t think I would have understood it until it had already happened to me, but probably just the idea that life wouldn’t happen on the nice, neat schedule that I had planned out. I would have benefitted from more patience—as I’m sure all of us could.
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.
Smrutipriya Pattnaik
Smrutipriya Pattnaik is the Teaching Beat Editor and Series Editor for the Syllabus Showcase Series at the APA Blog. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida and holds a PhD 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.
