Paul Butterfield is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Alfred University in New York. His primary area of research is interpersonal ethics, and particularly the ethics of humor. His recent publications in humor ethics include articles in Hypatia, the Journal of Value Inquiry, and the Southern Journal of Philosophy.
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What excites you about philosophy?
My answer to this has always been: having an odd, abstract thought, then doing the research and discovering that some of humanity’s greatest minds have had the same thought, and that there is an entire history of ideas and arguments dedicated to considering the very thing you were wondering about. I didn’t initially go to college to study Philosophy, and picked the subject up just to find out what Philosophy actually is. I suddenly found that strange little questions which had idly crossed my mind before—“Does it make sense to be scared of your own death,” “Is an action that makes people happy always the right thing to do”—were subject to centuries of ingenious inquiry, argument, and counter-example. The thrill of having conceptual questions taken seriously by serious people is still what drives my interest in the subject.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
I love turning people onto Philosophy—especially people who, like me, didn’t see themselves as the kind of person who could be a philosopher until they started taking Philosophy classes. When I came to Alfred University in 2022, I had a goal of increasing the popularity of our program amongst students who hadn’t come to college with an established interest in the subject. I have been working hard to generate that interest, and we’ve had great success: the program’s enrollment has multiplied many times over in the last three years, and we believe that we are currently the fastest-growing Philosophy program in North America. You can read an article in the Daily Nous about our success here. I think an interest in Philosophy is a wonderful gift, and to have encouraged that interest in so many of our students makes me immensely proud.
What are you working on right now?
I am writing a book on humor ethics that is radically applied and specific. One thing I love about humor ethics is that it is a topic of obvious, immediate interest to people from all walks of life, and a pre-existing fascination with Philosophy is not required in order to have ‘skin in the game,’ so to speak. But people outside the subject are sometimes disappointed when they ask me to weigh in on a very specific comedic controversy and I have to tell them that my proclamations on humor ethics are general, so I can’t necessarily give concrete, definitive judgments about real-life incidents. For this reason, my upcoming book takes a specific case of contentiousness about humor—Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, for example, or Ricky Gervais’ jokes at the expense of trans people—as the starting point for each of its chapters. I then offer a philosophical analysis of the example, and try to unpack the theoretical assumptions, consequences, and mistakes that are at play in each case.
I am also expanding my focus from humor, specifically, to the ethics of interpersonal interactions more generally. With that in mind, I am writing a paper that considers the question of whether a wronged party can have an ethical obligation to forgive a repentant wrongdoer.
What is your favorite holiday and why?
One of the fun things about living in the USA, but not being from the USA, is that you’ll occasionally get a day off for something you didn’t know existed. So my favorite holiday is probably any American federal holiday not widely celebrated in the UK, which I never seem to commit to memory and am perennially surprised by.
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
The list of classic novels that I haven’t read is humiliatingly long, and I’m trying to address it. I recently read ‘Emma’ by Jane Austen (deserves the hype) and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ (somewhat less so), and I’m about to start ‘East of Eden’ by John Steinbeck. ‘Of Mice and Men’ by Steinbeck is a rare example of a famous work of fiction I actually have read, and it’s given me high expectations for this one.
What are your goals and aspirations outside work?
I’ve been playing tennis and chess for years, and remain absolutely terrible at both. I hope to grow the list of hobbies I regularly participate in and am still inexplicably awful at in the future. Pilates might be next.
What’s your top tip or advice for APA members currently in graduate school?
Early in your time at graduate school, meet with a mentor you trust and establish a set of things you want to have achieved by the time you graduate. Understand why these things are your goals, and prioritize them.
I give this advice because I think one of the traps we can fall into in grad school is what I’ll call ‘side quest collection.’ One of the things that makes graduate school such a wonderful experience is how open your professional world can seem during that time: you are exposed to a whole series of new opportunities, and, naturally, you’re going to want to go after some of them. But sometimes we find ourselves dreaming up a new plan each semester—someone in our subfield suggests hosting a conference together, so we spend several months working on that; a friend tell us that we really ought to be writing something about the hot new topic in experimental philosophy and that becomes our focus for a while—and our experience can end up being a bit unfocused and random. Having a clear set of goals that you can refer back to helps to keep your ambitions coherent and your progress clear.
I think this is a good idea for hard-headed, career-facing reasons—there are certain achievements that are going to help your employment prospects more than others, and it’s only good sense to prioritize those if you’re planning a career in Philosophy—but it’s also a good idea for reasons of personal fulfillment. A PhD student with continuously changing ambitions is, I think, setting themselves up for endless, unquenchable anxiety; whereas ticking off a set of goals you selected thoughtfully in the past can be a calming reminder of just how far you’ve come.
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 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.
