Tag: history of philosophy

Reading as a Social Practice: On Objectivism in Reading Texts

Let me begin, once more, with a question for my colleagues in philosophy: How can we spend a lifetime on a chapter in Aristotle and think we’re done with a student essay in two hours? Both can be equally enigmatic.

I have raised this question several times and received some very interesting answers. What the question, as well as the numerous justifications, clearly reveal, in my opinion, is the state of our reading culture. The difference between the amounts of time spent on such texts is, of course, often justified with regard to the professionalization of reading. Nevertheless, we as scholars and teachers are role models in our respective disciplines. So let’s take a closer look! At least with regard to the type of text (a piece of Aristotle’s work and a student paper), there should be no significant differences: both are, in a broad sense, scholarly texts. The truly significant difference lies instead in a social factor, which, following Miranda Fricker, could be described as an epistemic injustice. It is not any particular characteristics of the text, but rather certain presuppositions held by the community of readers that lead to this injustice. These presuppositions are not simply your or my private opinions about Aristotle, but are structurally embedded or institutionalized in a long history, namely in the form of an existing canon that prioritizes so-called classics over students.

Now you might say: Well, that may well be so. However, such presuppositions are external to the act of reading itself, contextual, incidental, so to speak, but not central to engaging with a text. The text, due to its inherent characteristics, must be decoded, so to speak, and thus stands, as it were, on its own. Objectively.

This almost classic objection is quite typical, not least in philosophy, but also in other disciplines, which is why I intend to focus primarily on refuting it. However, my aim here is not merely to engage in a petty feud. Rather, I consider the question of what reading is to be a fundamental question of philosophy. Surprisingly, with few exceptions, this question is almost never addressed in philosophy. Yet reading, especially the careful reading and reconstruction of written texts, is certainly among the core businesses of philosophy. But if you ask colleagues how they read, you often hear—and this is no joke—”I just read.” It seems to me, however, a major oversight not to specifically consider the conditions of one’s own activity, that is, the reflexivity inherent in reading. In keeping with my long-term project with Irmtraud Hnilica, my thesis that reading is a social practice means precisely what the aforementioned objection denies: that social factors in reading are not merely incidental, but central to reading and the development of quite different reading cultures.

In the following, I would therefore like to first take a look at our reading culture, which promotes the aforementioned objection insofar as it considers texts to be something objectively given. Here, I am interested in the question of how and since when we have considered texts to be something objectively given. Secondly, this question will reveal that the assumed objectivity of texts is an illusion. Thirdly, I would like to outline what I consider reading to be. To help you prepare, I’ll tell you now that we might best understand reading by considering it in analogy to singing songs, namely as a cyclical and ritualized activity. It is the characteristics of this social activity that produce objectivity. Fourthly, I would like to suggest how the persistent illusion leads to a degenerative mechanization of reading. Finally, I would like to ask how this approach could help us in practice to understand our own and other reading cultures.

1 On the Foundation of Objectivism in Philosophy

Let’s begin again with the objection depicting texts themselves as objectively given. If we take this objection seriously, then there should be striking differences between the texts of a student and those of Aristotle, differences that justify the varying effort required. However, even before we can look into the texts themselves, the past, our very own past, will catch up with us. Whether we like it or not, we are standing in a tradition that treats certain texts as sacred. Aristotle, as an author, belongs to this tradition; for almost 1000 years he was considered philosophus, the philosopher par excellence. Even his fiercest opponents attempt to read his texts as the consistent pronouncements of a genius. The sacralization, or, to put it more cautiously, canonization, of Aristotle’s and other works has been followed, at least since the Enlightenment, by a distinctly different reading culture. Against the comprehensive commentary literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages, there is a recurring and increasingly emphatic push for the suppression of close reading by the cultivation of so-called independent thought. For example, Schopenhauer* writes:

“When we read, someone else is thinking for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is like when the student learns to write with the pen going over the pencil marks of the master. So when one reads, most of the thought-activity has been removed from him. Hence the palpable relief we perceive when we stop to take care of our own thoughts and move on to reading. While we read, our head is truly an arena of unknown thoughts. But if we take away these thoughts, what’s left? So it happens that those who read a lot and for most of the day, in the meantime relaxing with a carefree pastime, little by little lose the ability to think – like one who always rides a horse and eventually forgets how to walk. This is the case of many scholars: they have read to the point of becoming fools.” (Schopenhauer 1851, § 291)

Interestingly, Schopenhauer’s pessimism regarding reading is motivated by concerns similar to today’s warnings against social media, which simultaneously assert the decline of our reading and thinking abilities. If Schopenhauer were right, perhaps we should give up reading altogether, shouldn’t we? But it is precisely the assumption that a text contains the thoughts of others, which we merely follow through reading, that solidifies objectivism in relation to texts. Not surprisingly, certain texts were considered harmful. As early as the late 18th century, there was much criticism of “Lesesucht” (reading mania), particularly in Germany, with young people and women being considered “at-risk groups” in particular. At the same time, the historical-critical method was established in theological and historical disciplines. And in philosophy, alongside a methodologically grounded canonization of classics, notably by authorities like Kuno Fischer, the beginning of the 20th century saw a distinct renaissance of the efforts of the early modern Royal Society to establish an ideal language for the sciences, promising corresponding texts as objective reference systems for describing the world.

One characteristic we still share with the early 20th century is the idea that written texts can be rationally reconstructed by separating arguments from historical and rhetorical embellishments. This allows one to move directly from the surface of the text to its deep structure, to note the logical form, and to reformulate the core statements into premises and conclusions. This idea naturally suggests that the argument is embedded in the text and that one can search for it there—after some introductory instruction. Accordingly, much of current philosophy didactics is concerned not with reading itself, but with the analysis of arguments. Meanwhile, the wave of Critical Thinking, understood in this way, has also spread beyond philosophy to all those who want to teach any kind of competence.

Of course, one should learn how to analyze arguments, but one should also know precisely what one is doing. One is offering a specific translation through omission and substitution. On the one hand, it is claimed that the argument is contained within the text, but on the other hand, that the argument remains invisible without translation. Beginners are often led to believe that there should be one correct reconstruction.

Let’s take a closer look. To illustrate this, let’s consider the famous last sentence from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

– Firstly, you can interpret the sentence positivistically: as a restriction to what can be meaningfully said by the natural sciences. (In this case, you interpret the “must” as descriptive.)

– Secondly, you can interpret the sentence mystically and ethically: as a prioritization of the unspeakable as what is truly important. (In this case, you interpret the “must” as normative.)

– Thirdly, you can interpret the sentence as self-contradictory and, in this sense, therapeutic: because it speaks precisely of something about which one cannot speak. (The “whereof” names something that is indicated as unspeakable in the reflexive pronoun “thereof”.)

These interpretations contradict each other, but can be validated not only by the quoted sentence, but also by the contexts of the Tractatus and later writings. Once you have seen how many conflicting reconstructions of this and other classics exist, you might be quite puzzled by the idea of textual objectivity. It’s clear that the analysis of relevant arguments relies heavily on communication between logically trained readers, where the original text itself is often seen as an obstacle. Instead of focusing on how the negotiation process between readers shapes the reading experience, however, the approach remains one of optimizing the reconstruction of a classic. What emerges could easily be described as fan fiction.**

If we take this seriously and not merely as polemics, it becomes clear that philosophy, in certain schools of thought, is indeed in close proximity to entirely different literary genres. But even the insistence on philologically rigorous reading generally takes the text as the source of the doctrines and modes of thought derived from it, as is also suggested by the general distinction between primary and secondary texts. Overall, this assumption regarding reading can be described as objectivism. But how should we understand this objectivism in our reading culture?

2 The Text as a Possibility of Readings in Interpretive Communities – Objectivism as an Illusion

By objectivism, I mean the assumption that what we believe we have gleaned from the text is actually found within the text itself. On the one hand, this is a correct assumption, because all readers will confirm that they derive their interpretations from the texts. Of course, it must be added here that a text can indeed be read as a chain of propositions that are decodable and whose presence most readers will be able to agree upon. On the other hand, however, it is a misleading assumption, as can be seen from the fact that there are endless disputes about interpretations. Just think of the Wittgenstein quote. If this is true, then objectivism is, on the one hand, correct, but on the other hand, misleading. On the one hand, correct, on the other hand, misleading? Am I contradicting myself here? – Please bear with me. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must recognize that a text is not identical to its reading. The text is a possibility for reading, while reading is the realization of the possibilities inherent in the text. Following James Gibson, we can speak of affordances that the text offers. As Sarah Bro Trasmundi and Lukas Kosch have shown, a text offers you various possibilities for action or reading. Which possibilities you ultimately choose in your reading depends on further factors. These factors are—so I argue—primarily social. Specifically, this means that whether you read a text in one way or another, and thus what meaning you derive from it, depends on your interactions with other readers.

Of course, you usually don’t even notice this because—especially in our reading culture—you are often alone with a text. But fundamentally, you were never truly alone with a text: As a child, you were, hopefully, read to. As a student, you were constantly corrected by others. And now, now that you’re an adult, you hear voices. Not in a pathological sense. The interactions with other readers are simply mostly implicit, solidified into habits, even traditions. Following Stanley Fish, I would like to call a group that shares certain interpretive habits an interpretive community. Fish locates the negotiation of meaning for texts within corresponding “interpretive communities.” You’ve learned to read menus, and you know what to do with them. And you wouldn’t mistake a menu for a poem, would you? Even before you skim the essay on your table, you know that it contains an argument because it’s a philosophical text—and if it didn’t contain an argument, it wouldn’t be a philosophical text at all. That’s how the tradition of your interpretive community dictates it.

(Taken from this quite insightful podcast.)

It is precisely the fact that a text is not identical with its reading, but rather offers possibilities for reading, that makes us prone to objectivism. The customs of certain interpretive communities are thus presented as properties of the text itself. From this perspective, objectivism with regard to the texts themselves is an illusion.

Now you might say: “Oh, it’s not so bad. Whether I believe I find the customs in the community or in the text itself is irrelevant; the main thing is that I find them!” – That may well be true. However, it becomes a problem when you are looking for something but expect to find it in the wrong place.

3 What Really Generates Objectivity – Reading, just like Singing

So how does reading work? Of course, much can be said about it. But essential points can be understood by considering reading in analogy to singing songs. Let us first return to objectivism.

Written texts have two important properties, it seems, which we also attribute to objective objects: constancy or repeatability and shareability. When I close a book, it seems the text is there constantly, or at least I can read it repeatedly. And when I lend you the book, it seems you can read the same text as me. Thus, these properties of repeatability and shareability seem to be inherent in the text itself.

On closer inspection, however, the matter is different. The aforementioned advantages also arise in a seemingly non-representational activity like singing. Listen to this:  

You just heard Bruder Jakob (Brother John, Frère Jacques)! Most of you will not only know it, but could also sing it effortlessly even if you were jolted awake at 3 a.m. Again, the song is consistently in your memory, and you can repeat it. Moreover, others can sing the same song. And you would even recognize it if someone sang it off-key or changed the rhythm.

The song thus possesses a certain objectivity; it is independent of our spontaneous performance and our imagination. But it doesn’t possess this objectivity because it is written down somewhere. If you listen closely, you’ll notice that, firstly, the song is played in a 7/8 time signature instead of the usual 4/4 time signature, and secondly, that it is much more richly harmonized.

The relational object, however, is not a text; there is no physical object to which you could point. Nevertheless, it seems to be an objectively given point of reference. What establishes objectivity despite all the variance is therefore not the physicality of the object, but rather these two properties: repeatability and sharedness with others.*** Sharedness, or rather, repeatability by others, plays the crucial role here. Why? Because without social sharedness, I could not be corrected in my repetitions. Alone, I could mistake any nonsense for a repetition.

Only in agreement with others can there be anything like a correct or genuine repetition. (This is the consequence I draw from Wittgenstein’s private language argument.) Only when you affirm that the 7/8 version is also “Bruder Jakob” is it considered “Bruder Jakob.”

For precisely this reason, in singing as in reading, it is not the physicality, but the shared repetition, that is, the correct repetition, that establishes objectivity. What singing and reading have in common here is that they are embedded in a long history of social interaction.

Like reading, you may have first experienced singing by being sung to, by it being repeated, embodied, shared, and perhaps even ritualized. Just as you were initially read to repeatedly in typical situations: reading and listening were embodied, perhaps in bed with a book and pictures. Shared, that is, perhaps by your mother, your father, perhaps with other children. And perhaps as a bedtime ritual that has shaped your expectations and structured the evening. Singing, like reading, is inscribed within you as a ritual, so to speak. That’s how we learn it. Reading is embedded in these biographical narratives, not just in an abstract tradition.

In my opinion, it is precisely these factors, and especially repeatability and shared experience, that lend objectivity to what is read, objectivity to which the text, much like a song, ‘in itself,’ offers only a possibility.

So what does this analogy with singing offer us? Firstly, it clarifies how, with regard to the factors of objectivity—repeatability and shareability—we ascribe an objectivity to texts themselves, which we actually derive from their social embeddedness; unlike texts, songs don’t have any discernible objects. Secondly, it points us to crucial social sites and situations: if we want to seriously engage with reading, with the negotiation of meaning among readers, then we must go to the places where this actually happens. Accordingly, a philosophical engagement with an 18th-century text would require us to examine epistolary culture, salons, and, more generally, the establishment of conversation as a site of thought.**** While it is quite natural for many of us to have conversations about texts, this form, conversation itself, arose at some point and—this is one of my conclusions from my central thesis—plays a decisive role in the meaning and use of texts pertaining to certain genres. Alongside peer-review processes, conversation is a crucial space where, not least, philosophical reading culture takes place. Accordingly, you can locate the different interpretations of Wittgenstein in very different discussions or communities: the positivist interpretation in the Vienna Circle, the mystical one around Elisabeth Anscombe, the therapeutic one, for example, around Peter Hacker.

The basic idea is thus: The objectivity attributed to texts is an illusion, suggested by  properties of reading (actualizing affordances in the text) and projected back onto the text. Reading as a social practice is (like singing) repetitive and socially diverse. It is not the text, but social reading that creates objectivity.

As Suresh Canagarajah puts it: “Meaning has to be co-constructed through collaborative strategies, treating grammars and texts as affordances rather than containers of meaning. Interlocutors draw from other affordances, too, such as the setting, objects, gestures, and multisensory resources from the ecology. Thus, meaning does not reside in the grammars they bring to the encounter, but in the negotiated practice of aligning with each other in the context of diverse affordances for communication. In the global contact zone, interlocutors seek to understand the plurality of norms in a communicative situation and expand their repertoires, without assuming that they can rely solely on the knowledge or skills they bring with them to achieve communicative success.” This is precisely the point I am also trying to make: texts do not contain meanings, but rather offer affordances or possibilities.

4 The Consequences of the Illusion: The Degeneration of Objectivism into Mechanical Reading

If what has been said is true, then it is also possible that certain reading cultures will disappear or change. However, this does not necessarily mean that we will unlearn how to read, but perhaps only that the way we read and the places where meanings are negotiated can change. This is noticeable not only with regard to recent technologies, but also in everyday practice, especially in teaching. I believe, however, that the still widespread illusion that texts themselves are objective is leading to a degeneration in our reading culture. And here I come back to my initial observation that we might be living a scholar’s life with a chapter by Aristotle, while we spend only two hours on a student assignment.

This practice, which, incidentally, is also linked to increasing literacy, the so-called mass university, and the simultaneously stagnating number of lecturers, is initially perceived as stemming from external political pressure—and yet, it is increasingly becoming so entrenched that the guidelines for student text production—for instance, in the Netherlands and Great Britain—are themselves so schematic that one actually believes one can judge after 20 minutes of reading whether the requirements have been met. Such a mechanization of writing and reading is, of course, only justifiable if one believes that texts themselves are objective entities that are accordingly either good or bad. This mechanization is, incidentally, not a consequence of ChatGPT. Rather, it is the other way round: a reading culture that is changing in this direction consistently learns to use such technology.

From the Netherlands, I know that the mechanization of reading is already taking hold in elementary schools, where, from the very beginning, students are taught reading comprehension (begrijpend lezen) in order to test their knowledge of text structure in multiple-choice tests, and then people wonder why most young people have no interest in reading.

It seems that such uninspired role models lead to readers who, in turn, produce texts for exams that are hardly ever read. So why should anyone bother writing them themselves? Why bother reading them?

All of these are developments that, at least at universities, cannot be described independently of the introduction of New Public Management in the 1980s. (What good is it to tell a student to look at the text to understand it if there is hardly any interest in doing so outside of class? No, universities are not ivory towers; rather, cultural deserts have formed around them, in which we see primarily stakeholders instead of interpretive communities. But this criticism is nothing new and also a bit one-sided.)

Because, of course, there are places where the meaning of texts is still negotiated. We find them at literature and even philosophy festivals, on social media under #booktok, in often student-led reading groups, and, of course, in our teaching and research events. Here, reading is sometimes so explicitly social that it is actually performed. This, too, is not entirely new, of course. If we are interested in the foundations of reading, we have to go to these places. What is particularly interesting for our reading culture, I think, is that Large Language Models erode not only trust in the authenticity but also in the objectivity of texts. We are experiencing a massive desacralization of the text. Because unlike the divine authority presumed behind biblical texts, we now constantly suspect a deceptive demon. Accordingly, I believe that the academic rebellion against this desacralization is also a rebellion against the death of the illusion that texts themselves possess inherent quality. To name this desacralization does not mean falling for the grand promises of relevant AI product manufacturers. But we can also use this technology to sensitize ourselves to the fact that it is not the texts themselves, but our reading, our singing, our rituals that create meaning and make it something shared.

5 A Few Conclusions Regarding the Practice of Reading

What are the practical implications of these insights? How can we improve reading practices through such findings? Firstly, I would like to remind you that this research project on reading as a social practice is only just beginning. But if the meaning of texts in reading is essentially unlocked through the interactions between readers, then it helps not to stare at the text itself, but to always ask ourselves first: What do I expect from this text? What am I assuming it’s supposed to tell me? Is it supposed to provide me with an argument for something? What do I do if the text doesn’t meet my expectations? Should I humbly assume that I’m too stupid for it? That I don’t belong to the club of readers who say they understand or even love such texts? And why is this tome even on my desk or in my Adobe Reader?

Once you’ve confused yourself enough with these questions, you can actually look at the text and see what’s written there without immediately searching for “the argument”. People always say you shouldn’t just read, but read thoroughly: But what does “thoroughly” mean? Should I choose lots of colors to highlight the incomprehensible passages? Seriously: This instruction is about as helpful as telling you to concentrate. How do I do that? Stare into space and roll my eyes cleverly? – How do you even know when you’ve concentrated well enough? If you can say something that your conversation partner nods to politely in agreement? I can order from a menu, I can sound good with a poem, but what do I do with a philosophical text? When have I truly understood something? We can still only see this through conversation. – Is that enough, though?

Well, a fundamental insight that follows from these theoretical considerations regarding reading is that a philosophical text offers possibilities or affordances, and thus always different ways of reading it. It is a myth of completeness, particularly prevalent in analytic philosophy, that all implicit possibilities can simply be made explicit. Such completeness contradicts the necessary openness or underdetermination in texts. Think again of Wittgenstein’s famous quote. Another very memorable illustration of this is the duck-rabbit, which, in terms of possibility, remains precisely both. My project would therefore not be to reconstruct the one true argument, but rather to reveal different and potentially conflicting possibilities. Accordingly, one must accept that the text allows for various interpretations, which are only gained within different interpretive communities.

At this point, philosophers usually develop a typical fear of relativism. However, as Stanley Fish already noted, emphasizing possibilities is not about a relativistic position, but about plurality. Such plurality, however, by no means leads to arbitrariness. But what, then, are the limits to this space of possibilities? First, there are of course propositional limits: you cannot say that a text asserts non-p if it explicitly asserts p. Unless, of course, you perceive signs of irony. Here, the matter of limits becomes difficult again; and you will ultimately decide one way or the other. Furthermore, there are situation-specific conditions of appropriateness. If someone asks for directions to the train station, it’s not appropriate to respond, paraphrasing Robert Frost, by musing about less-traveled paths. Just as one shouldn’t sing Frère Jaques at an inaugural lecture or at a funeral. Or should one? Of course, we can break with conventions. For example, it’s entirely up to you whether you sing the song in 4/4 or 7/8 time signature, or even reharmonize it psychedelically with suspended chords. Convention gives you something to play with, or sing with.

Accordingly, Alva Noë makes a crucial point when he compares philosophical texts to scores for thinking, which can also be interpreted in very different ways:

“What the philosopher establishes in their labors are not truths or theses, but rather scores, scores for thinking with. … The philosophy lives for us like a musical score that we – students and colleagues, a community – can either play or refuse to play, or wish that we could figure out how to play, or, alternatively, wish that we could find a way to stop playing.”

I would simply add that, analogous to musical notation, philosophical texts can give rise to a multitude of interpretations. Here we don’t just have a single, obvious interpretation of a duck-rabbit, but a whole zoo with possible shifts in perspective.

Now, that may all sound very nice. But one mustn’t forget that interpretations aren’t chosen arbitrarily, but primarily with regard to social affiliation. If you choose an interpretation, you might belong to a club that’s currently out of fashion. The problem with my musings, then, is that they can be received in very different ways. Academics, in particular, fear reputational damage; therefore, they are very reluctant to admit their lack of understanding. “I don’t understand this text” usually is taken to mean something like, “The author is too stupid to explain it to me properly.” If, on the other hand, one can express genuine and sincere incomprehension, one has truly made progress. But such humility is something one has to be able to afford, so to speak. Therefore, it’s not enough to simply seek conversation; one must overcome one’s shame. You can’t learn to sing well if you’re too afraid of singing off-key.

But at some point, you can truly begin to name the difficult parts and ask yourself exactly where and why you’re stuck. Reflected confusion then becomes a genuine conversation starter. Because if a text offers the possibility of understanding it, it also offers the possibility of not understanding it.

____

* Thanks to Arnd Pollmann for pointing out this passage.

** I borrow this classification from Charlie Huenemann, but I forget in which of his posts it was introduced.

*** See on repetition in music and language Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’ On Repeat as well as Bente Oost’s vlog on this blog.

**** Thanks to Miriam Aiello for conversations on the topic of conversation.

CfP: Reading as a Social Practice. An Interdisciplinary Workshop

CfP: Reading as a Social Practice. An Interdisciplinary Workshop

Berlin, 27-28 March 2026

Organised by Irmtraud Hnilica (Mannheim/Hagen) and Martin Lenz (Hagen)

According to a widespread consensus, we are currently living through a reading crisis. This workshop seeks to take a step back from the rhetoric of decline and instead raise the question of how reading itself can be conceptualised and approached from different disciplinary perspectives, particularly in philosophy and literary studies. To a first approximation, we propose that reading is determined not only by texts themselves or by individual readers, but mainly by the interactions between readers. We especially invite submissions engaging with this claim—whether through historical investigations of reading cultures, theoretical reflections on the social dynamics of interpretation, or analyses of contemporary practices in both analogue and digital spheres. We explicitly welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages. The aim of this international workshop is to spark new collaborations that will eventually result in a joint interdisciplinary network devoted to the study of reading as a social practice.

To submit, please email an abstract around 500 words to Martin Lenz (martin.lenz@fernuni-hagen.de) no later than 31 October 2025. Please use ‘Reading 2026’ as the header of your email. The email should contain a short bio of the author‘s details (including position and affiliation). We hope to notify you about the outcome by the end of November 2025.

The languages of the workshop are English and German. For each talk, there will be time for a 30-minute presentation, with about another 15 minutes for discussion. Upon acceptance, we grant reimbursement of accommodation and travel expenses.

***

CfP: Lesen als soziale Praxis. Interdisziplinärer Workshop

Berlin, 27./28. März 2026

Organisiert von Irmtraud Hnilica (Mannheim/Hagen) und Martin Lenz (Hagen)

Einem weitverbreiteten Konsens zufolge erleben wir derzeit eine Lesekrise. Dieser Workshop möchte einen Schritt zurücktreten von der Rhetorik des Niedergangs und stattdessen die Frage stellen, wie Lesen selbst konzeptualisiert und aus verschiedenen disziplinären Perspektiven – insbesondere in der Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft – betrachtet werden kann. In einer ersten Annäherung schlagen wir vor, dass Lesen nicht nur durch die Texte selbst oder durch individuelle Leser*innen bestimmt wird, sondern maßgeblich durch die Interaktionen zwischen Leser*innen. Wir freuen uns auf Beiträge, die sich mit dieser These auseinandersetzen – sei es durch historische Explorationen von Lesekulturen, theoretische Reflexionen über die sozialen Dynamiken der Interpretation oder durch Analysen zeitgenössischer Praktiken in analogen wie digitalen Räumen. Explizit erwünscht sind Einreichungen von Wissenschaftler*innen aller Karrierestufen. Ziel dieses internationalen Workshops ist es, neue Kooperationen anzustoßen, die in ein gemeinsames interdisziplinäres Netzwerk zum Lesen als sozialer Praxis münden sollen.

Bitte senden Sie ein Abstract von ca. 500 Wörtern bis spätestens 31. Oktober 2025 per E-Mail an Martin Lenz (martin.lenz@fernuni-hagen.de). Verwenden Sie als Betreff Ihrer E-Mail bitte: Reading 2026. Bitte ergänzen Sie Ihr Abstract durch eine akademische Kurzbio mit Angaben zu Position und Institution. Wir hoffen, bis spätestens Ende November 2025 Rückmeldung geben zu können.

Workshopsprachen sind deutsch und englisch. Vorgesehen sind 30 Minuten Vortrag und je 15 Minuten Diskussion. Fahrt- und Übernachtungskosten werden übernommen.

How to read (part eleven): With texts against interpretations

A telling fact about human intelligence is that we can hold a lot of false beliefs and still survive or even live a jolly good life. For all I know, there are flat-earthers around whose beliefs don’t seem to interfere much with other beliefs. It’s telling because it raises the question of how much really depends on our knowing the truth (imagine the word capitalised). Much less spectacular but vital for philosophers and historians of philosophy, the same might be true for our understanding of texts.* Many of us might live with grand misinterpretations without ever noticing. (I, for one, lived with a mistaken understanding of what the term “proposition” means roughly until I wrote a paper about it. ) This fact triggers at least two responses: (1) A fair amount of people think that this sad state of affairs can be amended by proper reading which will eventually lead to a proper understanding. “I just read carefully and see what it says”, or something like that. (2) To this a more sceptically inclined colleague might respond: “Well yeah, but it’s all down to your interpretation.” These fairly common yet opposed responses give rise to two opposed myths about reading: The first is that the text simply contains what we can say about it. This kind of hermeneutical givenism is often met with what one might call interpretationism, that is, the idea that there is no text an sich but only interpretations. This opposition is frustrating because it polarises approaches that actually depend on one another. As I see it, the relation between them is not one of contrariety but of a dialectical swinging back and forth. Even if there is not one single correct understanding of a text, there are many false ones. If this is correct, we should exploit this fact for (becoming aware of) our practice of reading by looking for frictions between what we think we know and what the text presents us with. In what follows, I would like to share some ideas how to exploit such frictions. The crucial point is that a claim on what a given text is about should be refined in the course of confronting the actual text. You may start with the assumption that a text is about X. If you’ve done some proper work, you should find that the text is about Y. Here is how:

What are philosophical texts about? – Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself. Philosophical texts typically consist of arguments for a certain claim. That’s at least what should be true of our currently most common genre, the philosophical paper or essay. Thus, a good way to read those is to begin by identifying the conclusion that is argued for and then to look for the premisses supporting to the conclusion. How do you find the conclusion, though? What’s often overlooked is that this question is twofold. It has a textual or grammatical sense and a topical or disciplinary sense. In the textual sense, papers or passages often contain a line saying “the aim is to show”, an explicit statement with the defended view or a “therefore” (or “thus” or a similar word or phrase) introducing a conclusion. You should by all means look for such items when reading, but I suppose that the assumption of what a given text or passage is about is settled well in advance by what I call topical sense. Usually, you don’t just bump into a text wondering what it’s about. That question is normally settled by a a course instructor, secondary literature or a bibliography listing this text under a course title or keyword. In this sense, the conclusion is generally embedded in a topical network of a topic (the nature of the mind) as related to a discipline (like philosophy of mind), a common problem (how do mind and body interact), and a set of positions (say, dualism vs monism) on that problem. So even if you look for the conclusion in the text, it will be the topic suggested by the instructor or some other context that guides your search for the conclusion. I bet that if you were to list Cinderella in a syllabus for a consciousness course, people would start looking for the pertinent points in the text. What this comes down to is, again, twofold: On the one hand, a philosophical text is about (arguing for) a conclusion; and identifying the conclusion settles what you take the premisses to be. However, on the other hand, the conclusion is commonly assumed in advance, since the text is given to you in a topical context that suggests and constrains potential conclusions. If this is correct, it seems that prior interpretations (taken on authority) often settle what a text is about. Try reading Descartes’ Meditations as a text that is not in some sense about dualism and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not impossible, but many people will think you’re avoiding the elephant in the room.

Points of contact. – Guiding topical assumptions might seem problematic, but they are not. They belong to the way we receive the text. Rival interpretations often argue about the right topical context. They can be quite controversial and seem mutually exclusive. Just think of the Bible as a religious text as opposed to a historical document. Sometimes they seem more complementary. You can see the Bible as both a historical document and a religious foundation. The point is, then, not to avoid such contexts (and go for givenism), but to see what actually connects text and interpretations. In other words, you should look for points of contact. What are the interpretations arguing about and how do they relate to the text. Interpretations worth your time do not only argue about the proper topical context but do so by also pointing out a concrete term or passage in the text. This is the proper point of contact. Interpretations and related disagreement must have a clear textual basis.

Where are you now and what is next? – If you have found one or several points of contact, you can begin to see what the text is about – in keeping with various interpretations. Don’t downplay this! Figuring out a point of contact is an achievement going well beyond engaging with doxography or an individual interpretation. You could now write something about the state of the art. But note that, so far, you have not begun to work with the text as such. But how do you begin that and why should you bother? Many people won’t even delve into different interpretations but stick to a doxography telling them authoritatively what certain texts are about. Although doxographies initially derive from engagements with the text, they don’t make these engagments explicit. No one today will actually argue that Locke was an empiricist. Such interpretations are taken for granted, not in the sense that they are taken to be true, but in that they are taken to belong to an interpretive tradition. (In the same way, we wouldn’t call a map of Paris from 1250 or from 1950 false; although it still tells us something, we know that it’s outdated.) If you want to move on, you should know what you want. Do you actually want to read the text or do you want to pass an exam? Are you interested in a certain kind of philosophy or do you want to see how it was or is done, that is, written? As I like to put it, if you’re merely doing philosophy, it’s enough to get the hang of some interpretations. If you want to do history of philosophy, you have to engage with the text. But how?

Build up friction between the text and the interpretations. – Topical contextualisations or doxographies are often taken as a starting point, but they do obscure (earlier) failures of understanding. Students often don’t notice that they have mainly learned to project an interpretation into a text, rather than reading a text. So how do you move ahead? Start from your point of contact, but rather than taking an interpretation for granted, ask yourself what the term or passage in question is about. Begin by trying to explain the passage in virtue of the other parts of the same text. How? Explanations like “Locke is an empiricist” or “This passage contains Locke’s account of linguistic meaning”, for example, will commonly block actual reading. You’ll notice this when you ask for details in the text. Once people parse Locke’s famous claim that “Words in their primary and immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them …” with the assumption that Locke discusses meaning, they are likely to think that “signification” means “meaning”. Arguably, Locke’s text doesn’t offer any such account. So what do you do instead?

  • Provide an analysis of the content and style of the passage as such: explain (technical) terms, see how they hang together and get taken up. Look at logical operators and connections between sentences. See whether it contains arguments or explications of terms. See whether it contains examples. References to other authors or texts. See whether it contains metaphorical expressions. Ask yourself what work the metaphors do.
  • Make a strict distinction between the content and the function of a passage in the overall text. Does it function as an introduction or is it a refinement of something earlier? Is it a key passage in the text itself or part of a larger argument?
  • See whether the technical terms used are part of a common terminology. Study the terminology through dictionaries, handbooks or related texts.
  • Check the translation (if it is one) for consistency with regard to technical terms. Is it a use of terms that’s still common or now part of a different discipline?

Going through some of these considerations will quickly challenge the interpretive ideas. You will likely notice that a text, once you look at the whole, can be part of quite different topics or disciplines and also that the priorities provided in the text rarely match what is deemed relevant in current interpretations. As Jenny Ahworth has shown with regard to Locke’s notion of signification, sometimes a different understanding of one technical term can turn over whole traditions of reading a text. But even if you don’t intend to contribute original research, you’ll have made a first step to developing a solid and independent understanding.

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* Here is part one of my series on how to read.

Reviving the commentary as a philosophical genre

When I was in my final school years and reading lots of Goethe, my German teacher recommended I read some commentaries by Erich Trunz. This was an amazing discovery: Trunz explained the texts on various levels and, above all, he left out none of the difficult passages that seemed impossible to grasp. When I began reading philosophy at Bochum university I found like-mined approaches, especially in medieval studies. But especially the so-called secondary literature on modern philosophy was often disappointing: True, the interpretations were often quite elegant, but they mostly bypassed the dark passages that clearly required a professional interpretation to make any sense whatsoever. The often fleeting remarks on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its numbering system, for instance, left me in despair. Was I not seeing the obvious or were the interpretations I consulted just not geared towards explaining the text? Only much later it dawned on me that the commentary was a philosophical genre in its own right and, outside more philologically inclined circles, a rather rare treat. These days, this is especially perplexing, given that the “diversification of the canon” requires reading unfamiliar material and thus a lot of detailed commentary. But apart from a couple of good examples (especially in classics and medieval studies), one can’t say that the commentary is exactly fashionable again. (See Barry Smith on the neglect of this genre.) Students are often entirely unfamiliar with the genre and sometimes seem to conflate it with what is known as an “opinion piece” in newspapers. After some sketchy remarks here and there, it is high time, then, to say more clearly why a revival of this genre is overdue.

So what is a commentary? – My rule of thump is that commentaries focus on explaining given texts, the linguistic forms of utterances themselves, rather than merely on ideas and arguments. Commentators do not solely attempt to say what a text is saying and what it means or has meant, but also why it is expressed in the way it is expessed. This means that the structure of the commentary follows the text and not the interpretive ideas or goals of the commentator. The beginning of a commentary is thus marked by a quotation of a word or passage from the text itself. Commentaries are often provided along with critical editions or translations of primary texts. They range from occasional annotations to “dark” passages or unfamiliar terminology to full-blown interpretations, giving background information on related texts or tracing unacknowledged sources. That said, a commentary can of course also be a part of a larger interpretation and typically occurs when a specific text passage or term forms the point of contact between different interpretations of a text. In fact, many introductions or guidebooks are commentaries in disguise. But besides critical editions of ancient and medieval texts, it’s mainly Wittgenstein’s work that seems to have invited the genre of commentary.

Why bother? – Do you know Beethoven’s 5th Symphony? Of course you do! Most people only know the opening theme, though. Secondary literature focussing on “central themes” is a bit like that. Arguably, you need a line-by-line commentary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to get beyond the famous Proposition 7 (see e.g. Duncan Richter’s commentary). The point is, then, that understanding a thought, argument or concept is different from understanding a text. But if philosophers care mainly about the former, why bother with the latter? Aren’t the essential ideas enough? Getting the “essentials” of the Tractatus, for instance, is like getting a Readers Digest or worse perhaps a cartoon version of it. Nothing wong with cartoons, you say. Of course not, but why bother with philosophical texts in the first place? But here is a more important point: It is often said that the text as such only really matters, if we consider it or the author an authority we want to defer to. Arguably, then, if we value independent thinking we can bypass the textual details. However, this gets things the wrong way round. For who tells you what “the main point” of a text is, if not an authority that you implicitly defer to? As I see it, then, the supposed “main points” are taken on mere authority and are in fact the outcome of earlier textual work of past generations. It is the detailed commentary that equips you with the material necessary for independent study and thought.

How to write a commentary? – Getting a glimpse of the scholarly work going into a commentary often makes the idea of writing such a thing overwhelming. But fear not, it’s doable. Especially these days with so many searchable resources at hand, you often don’t even need to travel. Here are a couple of preparatory moves, though, that might help you getting into the right frame of mind for beginning to write a commentary:

  • Pick and prepare a bit of text: Pick a text you like and find a bit tricky. Not too much: just a couple of lines. The text is your guide. So actually write it down. No, don’t copy it. Only if you actually write it, you will begin to see tricky bits. Write it down, number the sentences, underline words that you want to focus on, and highlight sections that you find tricky.
  • Think about the origin of the text: Make clear to yourself how the text made it onto your screen: Is it from an early print, a student or critical edition, a translation? Who edited it and when and why? Is the spelling in keeping with the original, is there something standardized? All these things tell you something about the material basis and politics involved in the text and might matter to what you actually find on the page.
  • Translation: If the text is in a foreign language, then try to translate it or write out a given translation beneath or beside it. If you don’t know the language, try to get at least keyterms. Check every keyterm and ask yourself whether you can think of a better alternative. Making a translation is the best way to see what you really don’t get. In my experience, many sentences begin to become unclear if you try translating or paraphrasing them.
  • Paraphrase: If the text is in your native or working language, try to make a paraphrase or transfer bits into formal language.
  • Variants: If you waver between different paraphrases, write down both or more. These are possible interpretations. If applicable: Have someone else make a paraphrase, too.

Now that you have a version of the text, you can begin with the actual commentary:

  • Start with a term you find central: Explain briefly why the term is central. Try saying how its centrality affects the rest of the passage you’ve picked. Say how the term relates to (modern or contemporary) cognates (similarities, differences). Say in what sense the term is part of a terminology.
  • Move on to a phrase you find difficult: Say what makes the phrase difficult for an imagined reader (even if it’s no longer dark for you): a certain grammatical feature, an unknown lexical meaning, unfamiliar terminology, strange wording etc. Now spell out some resources that help(ed you) figuring out what the phrase means: a grammar, dictionary, related texts that come with similar phrases.
  • Where does the idea expressed by the phrase come from? Hardly anything you find in a text is (entirely) original. This means that there is often something to be gained from asking genealogical questions: Where does this idea come from? Is it almost a quotation? Does the terminology perhaps just signal a slight shift of interest?

When writing your commentary, there are some obvious techniques to be used:

  • What if you can’t figure something out? Take the phrase and google it! Likely someone else has commented on it. Or something similar is in a different text that helps you figure it out.
  • Make connections within the text: Try to see whether the terms you commented on shed light on the dark phrases. Check logical connectives and see whether they are well used. Check for omissions, enthymemes, implicit assumptions etc. and write them down. Relate these notes to other parts of the same or a different text.
  • Think of audiences: Who will understand thee text better with your comments. Will it help students, people new to the material or fellow specialists? Try too gear your comments to one of those audiences. Ideally begin with students who had no exposure to the material.
  • Contextualise your priorities: Even if you try focussing on “the text as such”, your interests and what you find worth commenting on will be in keeping with certain interpretive traditions. Make them clear to yourself and use them for deciding how to move forward.

It goes without saying that there are many other factors that you could take into account, but if you follow at least some of these stepts, you’ll end up with a bit of commentary on a bit of text that might present you with a way forward or a spark for doing something else with it. Perhaps you’ll extend it, move on to another text or integrate it in an interpretation. I for one will begin to make the commentary a decisive part of writing exercises for students. My hope is that we might write more commentaries in the future. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or about your favourite commentaries.*

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* Thanks to Susanne Bobzien, Nicholas Denyer, Michael Kremer, and Michael Walschots for some first suggestions.

Writing is decision-making. Introducing reflective tasks in examination (in the light of ChatGPT)

It’s true, even though I said that I wouldn’t worry too much about students using ChatGPT, a few doubtful cases have made me wonder what to do about it. I’ve seen a lot of good advice and discussion already (see e.g. this piece by Matthew Noah Smith among further discussions and resources), but nothing has quite convinced me for my own endeavours and settings. What I am particularly worried about is that some students might stop entirely with working through crucial hardships of writing: trying out formulations, thinking carefully about structure and terminology, setting goals, failing, revising, refining and trying again. Obsessing (especially in how we grade) about the quality of the product (the exam or essay), we might forget about the point of teaching writing. After all, it’s not the odd successful exam or essay but reflecting on shortcomings and setting priorities that will foster learning. As Irina Dumitrescu aptly puts it: “But the goal of school writing isn’t to produce goods for a market. We do not ask students to write a ten-page essay on the Peace of Westphalia because there’s a worldwide shortage of such essays. Writing is an invaluable part of how students learn. And much of what they learn begins with the hard, messy work of getting the first words down.” The main reason for emphasising such tasks, then, is not to torture students, but to teach them thinking successfully and affording control over the process of thinking. So before I set out my ideas for examination, let me briefly motivate my approach.

Two phases of writing. – As I see it, writing is a kind of decision-making. While (1) tacitly articulating things in one’s head and attempting to write them down might count as thinking, (2) coming down on a certain way of phrasing means to decide or commit oneself to a particular mode of expression. It’s crucial to see that these are two very different phases and the way from phase one to phase two might be very long and disparate. As a student, I simply could not get to phase two without very torturous and long processes of trying things out. And sometimes I would never even reach phase two. Other times, I would need to write down two to three pages in order to end up writing and committing to a phrase that I had initially formulated in my head. It felt like slowly working towards finally writing down a phrase legitimately that I had idly considered in the beginning of writing my text. (Even if you’re different from me and do everything in your head before writing down a single line, you need to practise weeding out bad formulations before.) When you do this in handwriting, the constant crossing out and revising remains visible. Today, computers and formatting allow even the most hapless scribbles to look like parts of a finished book manuscript. The perfection of layout suggests a perfection of presentation that leaves the traces of desperate revisions invisible. Coming to phase two, then, means to have ruled out plenty of unsatisfactory formulations and alternative modes of structuring. Arguably, shortening this process of phase one by jumping on the next best phrase or sidestepping it completely by leaving it to ChatGPT means sidestepping thinking altogether and ending up with at text that no-one ever decided on.

Accordingly, I want to discourage students generally from unreflectively holding on to the first form of words that passes through their minds. Rather, I’m looking for tasks that make students ponder on their work and encourage second thoughts. So I hope to design something that works even for students who are not resorting to ChatGPT or other forms of cheating.

What I want students to go through. – Is this a fitting expression, and what is left out in using it? Does this structure work, given the content? What would change if I presented things in a different order? What is the main point I need to get across? How did I come to think of this as the main point? Should I rather focus on a seeming side-issue? Etc. Between the blank page and a successful piece, there are so many things and versions and other potential pieces that might be equally successful. Despairing over such choices is a crucial part of the process of writing. Leaving it to ChatGPT means learning nothing, nothing at all about writing and about yourself, let alone about ways to find your voice. Drawing out the gloomy consequences of leaving thought-processes to machines, Maarten Steenhagen sees us heading “towards a de-skilled society. More and more, thinking itself is being turned into a service, a product that is offered by some company or other. When people look for answers or want to understand something, they turn to Google, Bing, or to social media. There, they are likely to find easily digestible, byte-sized snippets that will do for most practical purposes.”

So what are the tasks I’m going to try out in my courses? – How can I see and evaluate whether students thought about the presentation of their ideas? I guess by asking to do so explicitly. So in future exams and essays I will add two kinds of tasks to the standardly requested answers (or papers).

  1. On the level of content: Instead of having students just write down answers to exam questions, I will ask them to motivate their answer in relation to an insight they had. Ideally, this insight should relate to a previous discussion in class. It could take the form of “I think this or that in the light of the following idea, premise, assumption, argument (where the specific item relates to a discussion in class)”. If one wants to extend this procedure, one could add further steps to the motivation, such as an objection to the answer given and a tentative response to the objection. (This idea builds on my teaching of structured questions.) So whereas the actual answer is the item to be graded, the additional items (motivation, objection, response) ensure a relation to the previous action in class (or whatever you ask it to be related to). Obviously, the addition items allow for a fine-tuning of the grade, too, but the main point is to encourage reflection, ideally by means of relating to actual discussions in class so as to introduce elements that cannot be achieved by ChatGPT.
  2. On the level of articulation: Here, I would ask students to add a reflection on their formulations or terminology. Either positively, by explaining why they have chosen a certain form of words, or negatively, by explaining why they have decided against a certain form of words. The precise term or phrase is for the students to pick. What they need to do is say something like “I used the term necessary because this excludes the possibility of exceptions.” Or, “I first thought about using the term thing but then I realised that what I meant could also include processes.” Again, the point is not to turn this into a demand for whater-tight arguments for certain modes of expression, but rather to encourage and monitor some level of reflection on one’s own language. It goes without saying that this also could be done or requested in relation to discussions in class. (Ideally, this exercise will also train the grasp of “operational concepts”, i.e. the means through which we express certain contents. See on this my conversation with Daniel-Pascal Zorn.)

While these tasks are thought of in relation to exam questions, they could also be introduced in essays and other assignments. Here, they could easily be requested in the form of footnotes offering some self-reflection.

I don’t know if these and related tasks will prevent ChatGPT from being used and abused, but at least the request to invoke discussions that happened in class will be difficult to mimic for such a device. In any case, they would take some reflection for making the relation, ensuring at least some reflection on part of the student.

At this point, I’m just beginning to experiment with tasks that encourage reflecting on one’s texts. I’m pretty sure, there are many people who have already thought of this and related issues more thoroughly. (* I am particularly grateful to Sara Uckelman for sharing her reflections. You can follow up on these on FB.) Please feel free to add ideas or, as always, comment on the ones presented.

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As it happens, this blog is now up and running for five years. So I’d like to thank you all for your continuous reading, encouragement, and discussion.

Love as imitation. A note on the role of love in academic teaching and learning

“I am touching on a point that I’ll soon leave behind again, since it relates to the profoundness that I intend to bypass, I mean the disparity between university and truth. To study medieval philosophy in a philosophical way one has to learn a lot, but one should not prioritise learning. As with any kind of philosophy, one has to ask questions. One has to have problems; one has to have confidence in being able to solve them; one still has to be on the move, wishing to make discoveries, wishing to learn something of vital importance from old books. This is countered by many intimidating experiences, especially during one’s studies. One loses this confidence if one is not encouraged. This encouragement comes only from others, from role models, from friends, from teachers whom one – let’s be frank – loves. Only among friends can one do philosophy. But if university career paths merely produce sober thinking clerks (Denkbeamte), then philosophy does no longer exist at universities. And without this spark you might still become a specialist in medieval logic – which is no small endeavour – but then medieval philosophy is not just dead but forgotten, too.”

Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003*

In times of increasing worries about ChatGPT and education systems more generally it’s soothing and inspiring to re-read some of the works of my teacher Kurt Flasch. Neither he nor my PhD supervisors Burkhard Mojsisch and Gert König were very good at preparing me for a career on the international job market, but they surely inspired some resilience against its crushing mechanisms. Re-reading the passage I translated above made me think about love of teachers again. Not in the recently well-rehearsed sense of academic ‘metoo stories’, but in the sense of what I’d like to call love as imitation. I know there are a lot more topics in the offing, but the idea of love in academia is, as far as I can see, perhaps the least understood.

So what does it mean to love a teacher? – Quite simply, to love one’s teacher means wanting to be like them. While it might involve interacting with them on some level, the crucial aspect is wanting to become like them, and that means, for instance, approach problems like them; speak, sound and listen like them; read like them or perhaps even enter into the form of life displayed by them – in one word: imitate them. (As I have argued earlier, love is, amongst other things, the ability and desire to understand another person. A strong way of understanding the other, then, is imitating them.) When I was a student, I had a couple of professors I really loved in that sense. I ended up following their courses, not primarily because I was into the topic all too much, but because I thought that, whatever they would teach, I would be learning something worthwhile. But how do you learn, how does that kind of love play out? While I was (back then) completely unaware what that meant, I just attempted to imitate them. This was quite palpable to me. When I wanted to pursue a certain (stylistic) approach, I would simply hear and try to imitate their voice in or their style when writing. – You might find this strange, but that’s probably what’s going on when we learn to find our voice in any kind of art, be it playing music, trying to paint or draw, or trying to speak and write.

Shouldn’t we aim at independence? – I guess the reason why imitation is so underrated in teaching is that we’re told to value independence. This is a fair point, but there are two issues that should be considered in response: Firstly, there is no independence without belonging. We’re not monads but always relating to a form of life and style that allows us (and others) to recognise that we’re engaging in the kind of practice we wish to engage in. How do I know I’m playing music if there is no one I’m relating to in my musicianship? Secondly, when we imitate we are never perfect imitators or impersonators – we end up appropriating and making things our own. So when I imitate my favourite teacher, you won’t hear Kurt Flasch but – willy nilly – an appropriation of his approach. In fact, the initial enthusiasm for pursuing something is fostered most by imitating a role model, be it a musician, an actor or a philosophy professor. In doing so, we might begin by rehearsing the things – half understood – we value most. After a while, though, we’ll find them pervading what we take to be our own voice.

Where to go from here? – Being a teacher myself, I think I should be aware of the facts surrounding the imitative ways of learning. After all, students don’t do as we say but imitate what we do. So if we act mainly as competitors on “the market”, students will see and imitate us in this respect. If we’re policing them as potentially fraudulent users of ChatGPT, they might follow suit. But what if we were to follow through with the idea that the best kind of philosophy develops in a community of friends?

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* Kurt Flasch, Historische Philosophie, 2003, S. 67:

Why should we encourage the study of canonical authors? Some reflections on the recent Collegium Spinozanum

Had you asked me three weeks ago what historians of philosophy should focus on, I would have replied that there is too much focus on individual authors, be they canonical or underrepresented figures, and return instead, at least every now and then, to the question of how certain texts fare in debates or in relation to problems. However, that was three weeks ago. Last week, I co-organised and participated in a summer school on Spinoza, the fourth edition of the so-called Collegium Spinozanum. Having experienced this, I am all in favour of focusing not only on individual authors, but on canonical ones. The reason is not that the current diversification attempts are bad or wrongheaded. Rather, I see studying canonical authors as a means to an important end in its own right: building a (research) community. In what follows, I’d like to explain this in a bit more detail and also say some things about forms of interaction and support in academic contexts.

(Collegium Spinozanum IV – Photo: Irina Ciobanu)

Unacknowledged reasons for being canonical. – The case for or against studying canonical authors is often made for supposed greatness versus political reasons. Great authors, it is assumed, are deemed thus because they were “great thinkers” who still speak to our concerns. Underrepresented authors, by contrast, are taken to be either just “minor figures” or “unduly neglected greats”. There is much that can be said critically about such lines of reasoning, but what I’d like to stress now is that these reasons largely ignore the community of readers, i.e. the recipients. Focussing on reasons in the “object of study”, they obscure the point that a good part of the reasons for choosing such an object might lie in the recipients and their common interests. But arguably it’s these common interests that shape a real community, not the supposed “lacuna in the literature”. So when a number of people thinks that we should read Spinoza, this might not be triggered by Spinoza (alone) but by the fact that there is something that speaks to certain people at a certain slice of time. In any case, this was the feeling I had when listening to all the papers and conversations at our summer school: We form a real community in that we want to talk and understand each other – a feeling that was not just sustained through the week but also by frequent references of participants to earlier editions of the Collegium (see the FB page related to earlier events).

A common corpus and language for diversity. –  Given the diversity of interests (ranging from well-rehearsed arguments in Spinoza to seemingly remote theological questions, from detailed historical reconstructions to actually practised meditations), reciprocal understanding required and found a common corpus and language in Spinoza’s works. We were mostly about 60 people in the room, with quite different leanings, but everyone had at least read Spinoza’s Ethics and understood how parts were referenced. This point is by no means trivial when you’re part of a group composed of people from very different academic stages (ranging from professors near retirement to third-year BA students) and various geographical regions. All too often, the diversity of assumed expectations and backgrounds silences people and lets impostor syndrome run wild. If you’re at a conference on a historical topic rather than a fixed author, you’ll shut up almost everyone when you steer the discussion to some notoriously understudied authors or areas. “Oh, you haven’t heard of this anonymous treatise from 1200? It’s quite important.” A relatively small corpus, by contrast, does not only facilitate the conversation, it ensures that I’m going to learn many new things about texts that I thought I knew inside out. 

“Canonical” doesn’t mean “well-known”. – Let me return to this last point once more. The status of being a canonical author is often equated with the assumption that we know this author fairly well (and thus should enrich our historical picture by studying underrepresented figures). But this is only true insofar as we repeat canonical interpretations of canonical figures. Once we enter into new conversations and accept that what (at least partly) drives our questions is owing to the interests of the recipients rather than to “the object of study”, we can see why every generation must start anew or, in Sellars’ words, why “the probing of historical ideas with current conceptual tools” is “a task which should be undertaken each generation”. This point should not be underestimated. What we did during this recent summer school on Spinoza was having a vast number of philosophical conversations, trying to push the limits as far as we could see. We were talking mereology, necessity, demonology, intuitions, the evil, and at the same time wondering how Ricœur and Wittlich or we ourselves were faithful to Spinoza’s texts or whether Spinoza had lied to his landlady. In this sense, the reference to the canonical author does not reinforce canonicity, but works like crossroads and allows for striking out in all directions. 

Ultimately, the focus is not the author but the community of readers. – The diversity of backgrounds as well as that of approaches should make clear that, ultimately, the focus of conversations is often not the author but the facets afforded by the interaction of the community. So the point of focussing on an author, a canonical one at that, is not to adhere to the canon or trying to restate ‘the intention of the author’. The point is rather what the author affords to us: growing into a community of readers, a corpus accessible across the globe, a common language to converse about many things we might only begin to understand.  

Summary. – At the end of the collegium, I tried and failed to sum up what we achieved together. Instead, I could only quote a poem by Robert Frost that I wish to restate here:

The Secret Sits

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

(Collegium Spinozanum IV – Photo: Irina Ciobanu)

Local challenges for the summer school. – Since summer school participants do not have angelic properties, they do need all sorts of things, not least a place to sleep. At the time of the summer school, Groningen also hosted two concerts of an infamous German rock band, entailing that most available accommodation was booked out long in advance. Had it not been for our personal efforts and our colleagues from the university’s summer school office, Isidora Jurisic and Tatiana Spijk-Belanova, the summer school could not have provided accommodation for the participants. A lesson for the future is that a university town should probably balance its interests accordingly and take responsibility for leaving some resources for such events.

Thanks. – It doesn’t go without saying that this wonderful event wouldn’t have been possible without the participants, all attentive and present till the very last moment. In particular, I would like to thank my co-organiser, Irina Ciobanu, and the inventor of the whole affair, Andrea Sangiacomo, who ran the first three summer schools on Spinoza since 2015, as well as our keynote speakers who are, besides Andrea, Raphaële Andrault, Yitzhak Melamed, and Gábor Boros. Thanks also to the Groningen Faculty of Philosophy and to the German Spinoza-Gesellschaft for financial support.

How to read (part ten): What if authors are not consistent?

At a recent conference, a colleague kindly pointed out that my interpretation of Spinoza had changed over the last two weeks, since I gave two rather different answers to the same question. Of course, it’s possible that I change or even improve my interpretation in the course of two weeks, but the suggestion was not really that I had improved my position. Rather, the assumption seemed to be that my utterances were inconsistent. Although we could settle the matter most amicably, such a situation can be quite a nightmare. Am I talking nonsense? Am I inconsistent without noticing it? Am I just opportunistically changing my views to align with certain people in the audience? Of course, I could also blame the listener: Was he being uncharitable? This matter is difficult to figure out. But rather than trying to figure out who is to blame, it might be better to ask what it is that affords (criteria for) consistency in the first place.

Let’s first look how important this is. It’s a common and rational expectation that authors be consistent. (This is why I include the following musings in my series on how to read.) If you read someone asserting that p and then asserting not-p, you can easily recognise their inconsistency by the very form of words. Of course, most types of inconsistency are a bit harder to detect, but once you notice them, you seem be faced with a choice: Either you find a factor that explains the inconsistency (away) or you have to doubt the rationality of the person whose text you read. Factors to deal with apparent inconsistencies are abundant features in interpretations. Faced for instance with Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophy, many readers think that he changed his mind or that he shifted his focus. A sensible and charitable reading of such changes will harmonise inconsistencies and look for evidence that confirms the assumption of a change of mind or focus. Even if it’s tricky to settle on a clear story of the changes in Wittgenstein, his case is fairly straightforward because he explicitly declares that he found his earlier work problematic. It’s harder, though, if no such evidence can be found. Of course, one might still assume that there is an explanation that resolves the inconsistency, but if no evidence can be found, we must also allow for the assumption that an author is in fact inconsistent.

But what does such a verdict amount to? I think we’re faced with a choice again: Either we assume a failure of what we call rationality, or we consider the option that consistency is too high a bar. What if authors are, by and large, more inconsistent than we like to admit? I think there is an explanation that leaves the rationality of the author untouched and focuses on what affords consistency. In philosophy, such factors might be found most straightforwardly in the debates that the author’s text is related to. What looks like a failure of rationality might in fact boil down to a change of debate. For me, some of the most obvious examples are to be found in medieval commentaries. Reading Ockham, I often thought he was inconsistent because he addressed problems for his position in one text, while he seemed completely oblivious to these problems in the next text. After a while, however, it dawned on me that the contexts and stakes were different. One text was a commentary on Aristotle’s logic; the other text was a mainly theological commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Having noticed this changed my expectations as a reader across the board. While we might expect an author today to be consistent or “systematic” across their works, this might not have been a common expectation in other times or contexts.

Noting changes in genre or shifts in contexts is certainly good advice for texts of the past. But what about our own practices? Is consistency really a feature of what we call rationality? Or might the phenomenon by much more “local”, pertaining more to certain stable contexts such as debates rather than to minds? For the time being, I’d like to settle for the assumption that consistency is a feature of debates rather than authors.

Worlds, norms, and empathy. A conversation with Tom Poljanšek (podcast)

This is the tenth installment of my series Philosophical Chats. In this episode, I have a conversation with Tom Poljanšek who is currently working as a postdoc at the University of Göttingen.

Our conversation is inspired by his recent book Realität und Wirklichkeit: Zur Ontologie geteilter Welten and zooms in on topics such as the relation between reality and appearance, relativism, bureaucracy, norms, Musil’s Man without Qualities, and empathy as well as Tom’s approach to writing this book. Here is a rough overview:

Introduction 00:00

Tom’s book  01:20

Rules – from semantics to politics   22:00

Implicit rules and trust        28:26

Empathy – and how it figures in sharing experience       40:40

How to read work by students and others openly            51:50

On mapping philosophy and being part of the map        55:40

Philosophy as orientation    01:11:00

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If you prefer to watch this conversation as a video, see below:

Worlds, norms, and empathy. A conversation with Tom Poljanšek

How can you ask and structure questions?

For the last four years or so I’ve tried to integrate exercises for asking questions in my courses. (Here is a blog post on my first attempt.) To my great surprise, students in my faculty now kindly selected my musings and instructions about questions as a “best practice in teaching and learning”, and my faculty nominated me for the pertinent award given by our university.

In what follows, I post a promotional video featuring one of my students* and myself as well as the text that I wrote for the award jury.

Structured Questions

If you ask students whether they have questions about any given text, you’re often met with embarrassed silence. It’s hard to admit that you’re confused. Although asking questions is a crucial activity, how to do this is hardly ever explained. By teaching to structure and analyse questions, I attempt to achieve five things:

  1. Countering embarrassment by suggesting that genuine questions require confusion;
  2. Showing how confusion generates the motivation of a question by having students spell out what (passage) precisely causes confusion;
  3. Showing that confusion is often the result of (frustrated) expectations as a reader;
  4. Detailing how to analyse such expectations as hidden theoretical assumptions;
  5. Having students estimate what possible answers might look like, e.g. by estimating how assumptions in the text differ from one’s own assumptions. 

While stimulating active learning, most steps can be achieved without requiring new information, but rather by developing an understanding of how one’s confusion arises. Accordingly, students are encouraged to enter into a dialogue with their own hidden assumptions and with others, for instance, by articulating how their background assumptions might differ. It is designed to stimulate self-directed learning and exchange as well as benefitting from seeing diversity in assumptions.

The technique of structured questions is an active learning device and was positively evaluated by students at my Faculty. I designed it to foster self-directed learning and interaction with texts and interlocutors. Being geared towards texts and discussions generally, it should be easily transferable to other disciplines. Here is some more information about it:

Questions are an ubiquitous genre in academic exchange. In the analysis of old philosophical texts, questions are a crucial guide in approaching material and in entering a dialogue about it.  As an instructor, I’ve often been surprised by how hard students find it to formulate questions themselves, even if they are good at giving answers. Discussions with students made me realise that the reason is only partly psychological (i.e. owing to embarrassment). Even in philosophy, it is hardly taught how to articulate genuine questions and what (partly tacit) components questions consist of.

I often teach and write (on my blog) about reading and writing texts. So I designed a format for asking structured questions about texts to foster an understanding about one’s own confusions and actually benefit from confusions.

Ideally, the question focuses on a brief passage from the text. It must be no longer than 500 words and contain the following components:

– Topic: say what the question is about (the passage or concepts that cause confusion);
– Question: state the actual question;
– Motivation: give a brief explanation why the question arises (use your assumptions or frustrated expectations);
– Answer: provide a brief anticipation of at least one possible answer (e.g. by guessing at the implicit assumptions in the text and how they might differ from yours).

What did I want to teach in designing this? My initial goal was to offer a way of engaging with all kinds of difficult texts. When doing so I assumed that understanding (a text) can be a general aim of asking questions. I often think of questions as a means of making contact with the text or interlocutor. For a genuine question brings two aspects together: on the one hand, there is your question, on the other hand, there is that particular bit of the text that you don’t understand or would like to hear more about.

In order to enter into dialogue, readers or interlocutors need to learn to consider questions such as: Why exactly am I confused? Could it be that my own expectations about the text send me astray? What am I expecting? What is it that the text doesn’t give me? Arguably, readers need to understand their confusion to make genuine contact with the text. One’s own confusion needs to be understood. The good news is: this often can be achieved without acquiring new information. Instead, bringing together one’s own expectations or assumptions with those of the text (or those of other readers) initiates a meeting of minds.

I began to implement this technique in autumn 2019 with first-year students and have since then introduced it in all my courses. While it was designed with medieval philosophical texts in mind, I realised that it can be used in various contexts and indeed both for approaching texts and discussions. What I didn’t anticipate was that it also seems to help in contexts of blended learning. Last year, I received a number of mails from students thanking me for how this technique had helped them to engage in self-study and prepare for exchanges in online contexts. Since it is geared towards articulating one’s confusion about texts in general, it should be easily adaptable to other disciplines.

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* I’m very grateful the students of our faculty and in particular to Maddalena Fazzo Cusan who kindly agreed to speak on behalf of the faculty’s programme committee at the very last minute.