J. Angelo Corlett (PhD, 1992, University of Arizona) is Professor of Philosophy & Ethics at San Diego State University. He specializes in Philosophy of Law; Rights; Punishment; Race, Racism, and Reparations; Social Epistemology; Moral Responsibility Theory; the Right to Freedom of Expression; Plato’s Socrates and Plato; Philosophy of Sport; and Academic Ethics. He is the author of almost 200 peer-reviewed philosophy books and articles and has earned numerous teaching awards throughout his career. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review (Springer: 1995-2018).
What excites you about philosophy?
Being able to explore and contribute plausible solutions to some vital historic and contemporary problems demonstrates how philosophy is extraordinarily relevant to our lives and exciting, especially when philosophical progress in understanding is made.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
J. Angelo Corlett, “Offensiphobia”, The Journal of Ethics, 22 (2018), p. 113-146.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/black-reparations/
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
My demonstration of moral and philosophical integrity and courage in the face of significant pressures to cravenly conform to ideological groupthink within the US Higher Educational Industrial Complex.
What are you working on right now?
A follow-up book to my Analyzing Social Knowledge (1996), which is tentatively entitled Social Knowledge. It is the first monograph which includes a history of social ontology and social epistemology, and devotes several chapters to describing and criticizing leading social ontologies before providing criticisms of leading social epistemologies and then providing my own coherentist-reliabilist analysis of the nature of human social propositional knowledge.
What topic(s) do you think are under-explored in philosophy?
Analytic philosophy of racism: the logico-linguistic, cognitive-scientific analysis of what genuinely counts as racism and what does not, and why.
The ethics of freedom of expression.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Mentoring several students into and through some of the most highly-ranked PhD programs in philosophy. This not only strengthens the quality of the profession of philosophy, but it improves the quality of what is taught to future generations of students with regard to philosophical education. Additionally, of course, it provides my mentees with the greatest quality of philosophical education possible for them.
Name a trait, skill, or characteristic that you have that other philosophers may not know about.
Several of my students throughout my 40-year teaching career tell me that I am “hilarious,” “inspirational,” “real,” and “brave” in my teaching. I seek to “bring ethics to life.” I have always infused a good dose of humor into my teaching, as Socrates urges us to do, as it constitutes a “relief from seriousness.” Like many comics during my lifetime, I rose from welfare poverty as a Latino child to where and what I am today with the generous assistance of others. While my story is of humble origins, it is an exciting one that keeps me inspired throughout my teaching, research, and service career. I learned from among the greatest comics that hilarious storytelling often works very well when employed to effectively illustrate a point of lecture or discussion. I am grateful to stand-up comics and programs featuring comics such as John Candy, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, Bill Cosby, Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen), Dolemite! (Rudy Ray Moore), Gilbert Gottfried, Dick Gregory, Kevin Hart, D. L. Hugley, Key and Peele, Martin Lawrence, Denis Leary, George Lopez, Bernie Mac, Cheech Marin, Melissa McCarthy, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, John Elroy Sanford (Redd Foxx), South Park, Katt Williams, Robin Williams, among others, who inspire me to infuse many of my own life experiences into the classroom for exciting ways to bring philosophy to life for students.
Often humor is born from the pain of poverty. Even after all these decades, most of the same stories still connect with almost all my students based on their spontaneous positive in-class reactions and several student reviews. Many students, after several years, express to me that they still recall some of the stories and the philosophical points they intended to illustrate about linguistic ambiguity, intention in words and actions, responsibility and punishment, etc. The pedagogical goal is to make certain vital philosophical concepts hilariously unforgettable for as many students as possible—especially those who share my humble early history.
What is your favorite book of all time? (Or top 3). Why? To whom would you recommend them?
Plato’s corpus of writings. Plato’s dialogues provide fascinating examples of analytic philosophy at work on issues of justice, knowledge, art, education, love and friendship, language, punishment, legal obligation and civil disobedience, metaphysics, religion, and various other important topics. I recommend Plato’s writings to everyone.
Which books have changed your life? In what ways?
Plato’s writings brought me into philosophy as a college sophomore in 1976, while throughout graduate school studies the writings of G. A. Cohen assisted me in best understanding the philosophy of Karl Marx, Angela Y. Davis’ Women, Race & Class and Gloria Watkins’ (bell hooks) Ain’t I a Woman and Feminist Theory rescued me from white feminism of the racist variety, Joel Feinberg’s many works grounded me in responsibility, punishment and rights theories, John Martin Fischer’s several works grounded my thinking about moral responsibility, and John Rawls’ works have persuaded me that the center is the best place to reside philosophically concerning justice and fairness.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
“What’s a philosopher?” “Does it pay better than a paper route?” “Is it dangerous?” “Is it even legal?” “Do you get tips?”
When did you last sing to yourself, or to someone else?
I do not engage in self-punishment or the punishment of others.
What’s your most treasured memory?
Holding my mother’s hand as we stared into each other’s eyes as she lay dying, and my telling her that I love her and thanked her for how wonderful a mother she was. She taught me by example how to laugh and live a morally good life. She lived a long and beautiful life and I dedicated my life to her.
What are your goals and aspirations outside work?
To spend quality time with family and friends, though I object to the implied work-play attitude that seems prevalent these days. For those of us who live to “work” because we genuinely mostly enjoy what we do, the line between “work” and “play” is so thin that we consider our professional time to be what we have been and remain inspired to do. The very idea of a “work-play balance” seems also in part to be premised on the problematic assumption that what we do as academicians is indeed work (as opposed to enjoyment). For those of us relatively few in academia who were raised in genuine poverty for many years, academia is not work in a laborious or arduous or toilsome sense such as our brothers and sisters who are pickers (farmworkers) or custodial staff, but rather a privilege and in many cases a well-deserved position in what is and hopefully will remain (along with pickers and custodial staff) one of the most valuable sectors of society.
Since my college days, I have considered philosophy to be my calling. Unlike Socrates, I received no “oracle” declaring me to be the wisest. If I did, no reasonable person, including me, would believe it. For wisdom would declare otherwise. But it is reasonable to think that I am a “wise guy.” But that is an entirely different matter. Vacations are also enjoyable and necessary for social and psychological purposes. It is a privilege to spend time with one’s family and friends just as it is vital to spend time with philosophy, philosophers, and other academicians.
If you could have a one-hour conversation with any philosopher or historical figure from any time, who would you pick and what topic would you choose?
Plato’s Socrates on various philosophical topics.
Who is your favorite philosopher and why?
Plato’s Socrates. He is depicted as continually searching for answers to most important questions, a perfect example for us all. He is no ideologue, no arrogant, close-minded, and ignorant dogmatist.
Who do you think is the most overrated/underrated philosopher?
Aristotle is perhaps the most overrated philosopher I have read. He misrepresents many ideas found in Plato’s dialogues. Aristotle also had a habit of misrepresenting the ideas of many thinkers with whom he thought he disagreed. See some of the works of classicist Harold Cherniss for primary textual evidence on this matter.
Where is your favorite place you have ever traveled and why?
Ontario, California, aka, “Onterio Varrio Sur” (OVS: South Ontario barrio) because that is where I was raised until my college years. It reminds me of my rather humble and dangerous origins and how far I have come, with much assiduous work and generous assistance from others. It reminds me that instead of dying young and likely from gang violence (I was shot at on two different occasions by gang members from my OVS), I am instead living the “American Dream.” However, visiting my OVS is also disheartening because of the many friends and others with whom I grew up who died violently due to gang violence or in otherwise unfortunate ways. Little doubt this is why I philosophize on several of the topics and as I do. Inspired philosophy is often born of struggle, and that which is born of struggle is often expressed in humor, which in turn is often born of pain within said struggle.
It is in part my tribute to those who could not escape the cycle of grinding poverty and gang violence, including the incessant presence of human trafficking and illegal drugs. I also experienced some things that defy some of the unscientific and fictional ideas that some academics tout today, such as the bulzgeschicte-laced shibboleth that only white males are and can be racists. In my OVS, to either become a member of certain Mexican mafia-affiliated Chicano and Chicana gangs or to impress ingroup members, often a Chicano/a murders a black person. Membership certainly has its price in my OVS…especially for Black people. This is a paradigmatic instance of brown on black racism if there ever was one! As a Latino, I am glad that I experienced how complex racism can be in the real world so that my philosophical work on racism can reflect such complexities. However, I am ashamed that, generally speaking, we brown folk are some of the most anti-black racists.
I also enjoyed visiting throughout Arizona; Belgrade; Big Sur State Park; Copenhagen; Disneyland; Grand Canyon National Park; Half Moon Bay, CA; Hong Kong; Kennebunkport, Maine; Monterey, CA; Niagara Falls, Canada; Newfoundland, Canada; Nova Scotia, Canada; San Francisco; Santa Barbara; Seattle; Sequoia National Park; Stockholm; Vancouver, Canada; Yosemite National Park; and Yucatan, Mexico.
If you could only use one condiment for the rest of your life, which condiment would you pick and why?
My lovely wife’s salsa fresca. Goes well with almost any main dish as well as handmade masa tortillas. Delicious and healthy. Reminds me of my upbringing.
What’s your favorite quote?
“The unexamined life is not worth living”—Plato’s Socrates.
Which famous people have you met thus far because of your journey in philosophy?
Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Y. Davis, Vine Deloria, Jr., Hans Kung, and Cornel West.
How and why did you become a philosopher?
I was a sophomore in college having recently completed my legal studies major, when I took an introductory philosophy course in a section of which I was assigned to read Plato’s The Apology of Socrates (Jowett trans.). I was so enthralled by the account and the injustice suffered by Plato’s Socrates that it changed my life and I have since then (1975) been so deeply inspired by Socrates’ speech that I have devoted most of my philosophical research and teaching to matters of ethics and justice. My philosophical interests have widened and deepened since then. My calling is to avidly search for wisdom and truth as best I can, Socratically following the best arguments and evidence wherever they might lead, and to teach this to students and to learn it from other philosophers. The more deeply I investigate philosophical issues, the more it seems there is even more to explore.
As my graduate studies in philosophy were approaching their end, I met some philosophers (Bernard R. Boxill, Angela Y. Davis, Howard McGary, Jr., Rodney C. Roberts, Cornel West, etc.) and I discovered that certain problems of historical injustice that have plagued my mind ever since I was a boy were legitimate philosophical interests. This is how and why I began a few decades ago to engage problems of racism and justice in the hope of discovering plausible answers to said problems. But none of this would have been possible had I not been mentored in many of the finer aspects of mainstream analytic philosophy by Allan Buchanan, Joel Feinberg, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, John Pollock, Nathan U. Salmon, and Burleigh T. Wilkins, among others. To my mentors I am eternally grateful. Because of my being taught Willard van Orman Quine’s crucial use-mention distinction by Salmon and exploring the concept of racism and racist language with Boxill, McGary, and Roberts, for instance, I was able to apply Quine’s crucial distinction to racialized language and explain precisely what makes some racialized language racist and what makes other racialized language not racist, and why (The same distinction also applies to sexualized language).
I am proud to have made that contribution to philosophy [Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Cornell UP, 2003, p. 78. Also see Corlett, “Offensiphobia”, Corlett, “‘For All My Niggaz and Bitches”: Ethics and Epithets,” in Hip Hop and Philosophy, eds., Darby and Shelby (Open Court, 2005), etc.], and I teach it to my students, as relevant, as my tribute to our Black brothers and sisters and to analytic philosophy. Finally, I am grateful to fine colleagues throughout my student and faculty careers: Robert F. Almeder, Jovan Babic, Joe Campbell, Robert Francescotti, James Humber, Sasha Jokic, Robert Kimball, Thomas Maloney, Paul Menzel, David Meuller, Deborah C. Poff, Frederick G. Shackleton, Paul D. Simmons, Milton Snoeyenbos, and Sandra Wawrytko. From them I have learned much and they are those from whom I continue to benefit as a servant of philosophy.
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.
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 Arts 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, she likes to spend time outside and with her pets, friends, and family.
