Tag: philosophy

How to read. Some basics (part one)

It’s a commonplace among lecturers that students don’t know how to read anymore. The culprit is often found quickly: Social media and mobile phones are responsible for almost everything. I’m not sure about this, but I think that it might be a good thing to devote more attention to reading techniques. When I was a student, I was often told to read or even to read carefully. However, what no one really told me was how careful reading is actually done. The situation reminds me of a conversation with my colleague Andrea Sangiacomo, who remarked that we are often told to “concentrate”, but no one tells you how it’s actually done. Just sitting and staring at what you’re supposed to focus on probably isn’t concentration. It’s something one needs to learn and cultivate. The same goes for reading. Ask a fellow philosopher or philosophy student what they do. “I read much of the time”, they might reply. Ask them then how they do it. At this point I often merely get a “well, I just, well, read.” In what follows, I want to say a bit more about the basics of reading. Philosophers shouldn’t shy away from stating or thinking through the obvious. So I’m sure it’s going to be worth your time.

Getting comfy and preparing yourself. – It might seem obvious, but when you begin to read a text, say a primary text in philosophy or a paper, you should get comfy first. Pick a nice place where nothing disturbs or distracts you (too much) and get your text out. Experience teaches many of us that reading real printed texts rather than virtually on a computer file yields better results. But no matter which way you are going to read, make sure that you have some device to underline or highlight phrases and to take notes. I stress this because I see many students coming to class without their texts, let alone notes. While some people have an admirable memory of what they read, the point of highlighting phrases and taking notes is not just to memorise text chunks. Highlighting words or phrases makes you see connections that arguably remain obscure to you otherwise. In reading, we often focus on “the meaning”, but it is important to also see some material aspects of the text: the words and phrases, the way paragraphs are set etc. It gives you a sense of how terms reappear in the following sentence or section, how phrases are picked up again or rephrased in different words, how one sentence is (or isn’t) connected to the previous one and so on. (Frege, for instance, devised his formal notation system, the Begriffsschrift, to visualise logical relations that are salient but often unnoticed in common forms of writing.) After all, one simple way to grasp the topic or strategy of a text is to see which words come up most. Moreover, highlighting phrases or taking notes will draw you into a dialogue with the text. How’s that? Well, if you underline, for instance, you might underline words and then come back to wonder why you underlined those and not others. You notice and also begin to question what you find important in a text. So get out your pencil or the comment mode in your pdf! It’s of course also a way to make the text your own. Coming back after a couple of years and seeing what you highlighted back in the day will make you see your old copy and sometimes make you chuckle or wonder why you worried about that. Now if you forget to bring your annotated text with you in class, you cannot turn to these material connections when the text is discussed.

What are you reading anyway? – Now that you’re all set, it’s time to look at what you’re going to read. Isn’t that clear? The author and title of the text are on the jacket, no? So no worries there. – Far from it! If you pick up Nietzsche’s famous The Will to Power and think that it’s a book by Nietzsche you’re quite mistaken. The Will to Power was compiled from Nietzsche’s notebooks, put into order and attributed to Nietzsche by his sister Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche. Yes, Nietzsche had thought about this idea at length, but the book is fake. This is why it is crucial to consult not just any old version but the critical edition that has been carefully researched from the actual manuscripts. (Here is a brief account of critical editions of ancient texts, but such issues apply across the board.) If you don’t read German and thus cannot study the original, you should be aware that you are reading a translation. The enormously great work of translators often goes unacknowledged, but it should be seen, and seen for what it often is. A translation is not just “the same text” in a different language. It is a new text, developed on the basis of the original version. To get a feeling for this, you should try and paraphrase a bit of text. You’ll soon run into ambiguities or issues that require opinionated choices. Such choices silently come back to you when you read a translation, and there is often more than one translation. There can be whole different traditions of translations. Ideally, you compare different translations and pick central terms from the original to see how they are rendered in the various versions. In any case, you should pick a translation that is based on a reliable critical edition. – You might think that such issues apply mainly to historical texts, but that would be a mistake: Papers in modern or contemporary philosophy can also come in different versions and translations of course. What is more, the question of what you’re actually reading affords you a critical distance to the tendency of identifying a text with the author who purportedly wrote it. And note at least that even correctly attributed authors don’t always believe what they have published under their name …

Why are you reading? – Again, this question seems obvious. You’re reading because you’ve been assigned a text in one way or another. Perhaps you’re even reading for fun. But that’s not what I mean. Well before you begin to read, you will have expectations about what you’re going to encounter. These expectations can be fairly concrete and detailed if you know the author or have heard about the work in question. In any case, it helps to do two things now. (1) you should make your expectations clear to yourself, so that you notice when the text deviates from what you expect it to say. This tells you at once how the author might differ from what you assumed them to say and how you think about the matter. This is interesting because it is a real meeting of minds, a confrontation of your expectations and what the author says. You might then wonder what is responsible for this difference. (2) In any case, you should also make clear to yourself what you are looking for. Are you just exploring what the author has to say? Fine. But more often than not you’ll read with a (tacit) question in mind, like: What does the author say about X? Where X is (related to) the topic of the course you’re following. The more clear it is what you’re looking for, the easier it is to watch out for pertinent key terms or arguments, but also to differentiate what is currently important for you from digressions or sections that simply speak to other issues. Ideally, then, you watch out for your own expectations as well as for items that are unclear to you. What is important to note is that both (1) your expectations and (2) what you are looking for do not as such yield an interpretation of the text. But they will inform, often tacitly, what you highlight in your interpretation or understanding. So it’s good to get clear about these issues. However, don’t worry about this too much at the beginning. Reading, careful reading in particular, is a very slow process, not linear, but involving going back and forth many times, of trying and failing and trying again.

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Click here for part two of this series.

CfA: Symposium on “Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy”

I’m thrilled and grateful to announce that Tamás Demeter, director of the MTA Lendület Value Polarizations in Science Research Group, kindly invites submissions for a

Symposium on Martin Lenz’s Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (OUP, 2022).

Venue: Corvinus University of Budapest

Date: 28/29 January 2023

NEW DATE: 27/28 January 2023

Invited are submissions discussing or inspired by any aspect of the book. Abstracts not exceeding 500 words should be sent by 1 December 2022 to: tsd2333@gmail.com.

Confirmed participants include:

Tamás Demeter

Martin Lenz

Susan James

Eric Schliesser

Kathryn Tabb

Charles Wolfe

The event is supported by Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of Philosophy, RCH, Budapest, MTA Lendület Value Polarizations in Science Research Group

***

If you’re interested, here is a three-minute video about the book.

Diversity in Philosophy. Martin Lenz in conversation with Catherine Newmark (podcast)

[Catherine Newmark kindly invited me for a conversation with the radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Here is a link to the audio file and a brief summary in German.* Below you’ll find a rough translation of the summary.]

Diversity in Philosophy: Who is read, who belongs?

How diverse is philosophy? The canon is still dominated by European white men. The establishment is remarkably homogeneous in terms of gender, origin and class. There are solid reasons for this, says philosopher Martin Lenz.

Is the history of philosophy really just a collection of “dead white men”? For some years now, criticism has increasingly been voiced against the canon of texts that are authoritative for seminars, curricula and public debates: The perspective is much too narrow. Female thinkers and people of colour, for example, are not represented enough with their points of view. Non-European perspectives are ignored.

Competition for very few jobs

The diversity of those who do philosophy is not balanced either. In the workplace, it is still predominantly white men, mostly of European descent, who set the tone, is one reproach. Moreover, in the competition for the few positions at universities, it is mostly people with an educated middle-class background who come out on top, while applicants from other social classes are left behind.

The philosopher Martin Lenz, professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has himself had ambivalent experiences with classism in academia. In a short text for the blog “FirstGenPhilosophers – Philosophy in the First Generation” of the Free University of Berlin, he looks back on his educational path: how often he, whose parents did not study, was tempted to hide his origins, he says, he only realised in retrospect.

Reduction of equal opportunities

“When I studied, signs were pointing to permeability (Durchlässigkeit),” says Lenz. In the 1970s and 80s, there were “active attempts to attract people from all backgrounds to the university.” In the meantime, however, this development is being pushed back in the name of “elites”, “excellence” and competition. Today, the standard of “employability” is increasingly being applied internationally, i.e. the demand that studies must optimally prepare students for a specific profession, according to Lenz. The classical educational ideal is thus giving way more and more to a “training ideal”.

As far as the canon of philosophical texts and topics is concerned, Lenz observes that diversity in teaching itself is already quite advanced. For his students in Groningen, it is “now completely natural” to look beyond the horizon of Western philosophy. “They are growing up with the fact that philosophy is a global occurence,” says Lenz.

Too little incentive for discovery

The fact that the inclusion of new voices in the canon is progressing only very slowly, however, also has very practical reasons, Lenz emphasises. For example, established figures of the history of philosophy simply benefit from the fact that their texts are critically edited, translated, annotated and flanked by extensive secondary literature, i.e. they are easily accessible.

In order to edit and publish texts that have received little attention up to now, one needs strong qualifications, experience and a great deal of time. However, this important work is hardly rewarded in academia. No one earns permanent positions or professorships with it. Another factor in the cementing of the canon is the tendency towards conservative appointment procedures at universities.

“We choose our past”

The current debates on diversity at least show that a canon is never set in stone, says Lenz: “Our commemorative culture is not designed to be complete. We don’t try to think of everything, but we try to think of what we take to be important.” And the question of what we consider important is definitely subject to changing insights and interests, so in this sense we “choose our past”.

So if today, for example, we want to remember a thinker like David Hume not only as “a great philosopher”, but strive for a more differentiated view and “just also remember that this is someone who was involved in the slave trade, then that is also a choice of how we want to remember.”

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* Here the audio file can be accessed directly:

Diversität in der Philosophie Wer wird gelesen, wer gehört dazu? (Deutschlndfunk Kultur)

A review of ‘Handling Ideas’. Guest post by Timon Beeftink

As a student in Philosophy, you are expected to write some essays every now and then. You pick a topic, find some literature, design an argument, and write down your findings—preferably in a clear and organized format, with an introduction, three sections, and a conclusion. Looking back on my first essay in philosophy, an essay on the ‘Third Man Argument’ in Plato’s Parmenides, I clearly find a ‘scholastic approach’: there is no personal engagement—the essay is merely produced for the sake of fulfilling the assignment.

Of course, sometimes you have to write some essays on topics you are not really interested in. But in taking this scholastic attitude, you run the risk of extending this approach to anything you write: by distancing yourself from the content of the essay, you might produce something true—but what is the function of truth if it stood “before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not, inducing an anxious shiver rather than trusting devotion?”[1] What I often find lacking in my own essays, is exactly this personal engagement: I take truth as an external object, rather than something that is to be related to. But how do you write an engaged essay, without running the risk of falling into a non-academic subjectivism? As I see it, it is this question that countless students (and academics) struggle with, and the question that is at stake in various blog posts by Martin Lenz.

As such, I think that many students would be served by some thoughts on how to combine personal engagement with academic writing. Students commonly struggle with writing essays and theses, exactly because of this seemingly necessary lack of anything personal in academic writing. What I learned over the years, especially in Martin’s courses on Medieval Philosophy and Wittgenstein, is that finding your own voice is absolutely crucial: without your own voice, your essay lacks something crucial. Particularly the idea of thinking through the text and problems before consulting any secondary literature, is an approach that sticks to my mind: the problem is then not merely an abstract problem, but ‘your’ problem as well. It would have helped me when I had learned the following points in an earlier stage of the Bachelor:

  • Academic writing is no ‘scholastic’ writing: it is exactly your own voice that makes your academic writing vivid.
  • Formulate a clear question: engage with the texts and write down your own questions, before consulting any secondary literature.
  • Don’t be shy: have the courage to find and write in your own style—don’t think that you have to abstract from yourself in order to write something ‘good’.

In what follows, I’d like to focus on three of Martin’s blog posts, as they deal with the above points. They contain some thoughts every student could benefit from. I think that Martin’s future project of turning these and other blog posts into a book (Handling Ideas: Understanding, Expressing, and Applying Philosophical Thoughts) is a very good idea. A few questions that come to mind by reading your general idea of writing such a book, are the following:

  • What is the target group of the work? Is it particularly designed for students of philosophy, or for anyone writing academic, philosophical texts?
  • Are you planning to use an aphoristic approach in Handling Ideas, or do you want to offer a more ‘systematic’ approach in outlining this ‘handling’?
  • How are you going to structure the work? How do ‘understanding’, ‘expressing’, and ‘applying’ relate? Are you planning to write an introduction on what we are to understand with the ‘handling’ of ideas in the first place?

Anyway, these are some of my own experiences and thoughts on Martin’s general ideas. I will now turn to a more blog-specific feedback on the three posts.

1. How do you turn a half-baked idea into a paper?

The idea of ‘confidence’ that you discuss in this blog, is closely related to what I wrote on ‘Don’t be shy’ on the previous page: the idea that we lack the courage or confidence to actually write what we would like to write. This reminds me of a passage of Nietzsche you once quoted: “Was ist das Siegel der erreichten Freiheit? – Sich nicht mehr vor sich selber schämen”.[2]. At the same time, however, you primarily focus on “visible agreement with other ideas”. I think that this is indeed crucial for developing an idea, but that there is something else at play as well. As I told you in our chat a few months ago, and as you write in Don’t read! Or how to start writing, we might lose confidence in sight of secondary literature: faced with the countless ideas and commentaries, we think that our own idea is not worth pursuing. As the comments of ‘Anonymous’ on Don’t read! Or how to start writing indicate, we often want to say something ‘new’ in our writings. When faced with secondary literature, however, we find out that our idea lacks this ‘something new’, but contains something that is relentlessly discussed already. Even before consulting secondary literature, we might be plagued by insecurity: What if my idea is just a common idea? What if various people already had the very same idea? What if my idea is not original enough? I often ask these questions myself as well. In these instances, I try to be aware of the following fact: you are the person that has this specific idea, and as such, the idea is always something new—it is something new for you. This observation crucially relates to our initial reasons to pursue a career in philosophy: Do we want to teach others something new, or do we want to learn something new ourselves? If this first consideration is our reason for doing philosophy, we are going to have a hard time indeed.

Here in Copenhagen, they use an interesting approach for dealing with this feeling. In twelve weeks, we have to write twelve discussion board posts of 500 words. After four weeks, we take one of the four posts and elaborate on our observations in an 5-paged essay. We repeat this process another two times, and end up with three 5-paged essays that contain our own observations on a specific philosophical text. We pick one of these three essays, and expand it into a 10-paged paper. In this final paper, we engage with secondary literature on the topic, and try to formulate our own position in the debate. This might seem to be time-consuming, but it makes it a lot easier to identify your own questions, problems, and ideas. As such, it is closely related to the method you propose: try to narrow down your ideas, and start by writing an introduction containing a topic, problem, hypothesis, and question. We commonly think that writing is the act of writing—but it is equally well taking some time for thinking about what to write: taking a walk is just as part of the process as is the act of writing itself.

As such, having a half-baked idea might equally reflect the approach we take in writing philosophically. More often, we dive into literature in order to determine our point of view, but that is exactly the place where this point of view cannot be found. We should allow ourselves to take a considerable amount of time on developing our own questions—to actually think about what interests and moves us. Read the text, formulate your own questions. If an idea is half-baked, this might indicate that this idea is not actually yours.

2. Finding your voice in academic writing. Some practical considerations

The second blog nicely follows up on this point of finding your own voice in academic writing. As you express it here: “Rather, style is a result of something else: a result of emphasising those things that matter to you.”[3] Later in the blog, you explain how to find that what matters to us: “So your A and B are not authors or papers; they are two positions, isms, types of argument.” When reading this passage, I immediately had to think of Wittgenstein’s opening in Philosophische Untersuchungen: he uses the text of Augustine to illustrate a common way of understanding language.

At the same time, however, this approach worries me a bit. As you mention yourself, we have to be careful not to “build a straw man”. But as I see it, this is exactly what many philosophical texts do: they do not attack or defend an actual position, but an abstract position of some ‘-ism’. The problem with this approach, is that there is hardly anyone who identifies herself with this position in the first place. Let us take existentialism as an example. Suppose that we write a paper on why existentialism is short-sighted in approaching human life from an a priori concept of the subject. We might succeed in refuting this position—but whose position was it anyway? Camus rejects the label. Marcel rejects the label. Merleau-Ponty rejects the label. Heidegger rejects the label. Jaspers rejects the label. Nietzsche cannot be said to be an existentialist. Kierkegaard cannot be said to be an existentialist. Yes, we might only attack Sartre in doing so. But why, then, not responding to Sartre directly, rather than abstracting from his position in an ‘-ism’ which, besides him, nobody is willing to share? I sometimes get the feeling that this abstraction brings a certain form of artificiality in the academic debates.

But at the same time, you are right in saying that—in focusing on Sartre instead of existentialism, for example—we lose ourselves in details of a particular writer that are not at issue in the actual position we are willing to discuss. We might try to outline the meaning of, say, l’existence précède l’essence, and lose ourselves in innumerous details while doing so—but that in no means helps in the discussion of existentialism we were planning to perform. I feel that it is a difficult balance: not losing oneself in a particular author, nor losing oneself in a too general ‘-ism’. But yeah, it is always easy to lose oneself—as we might say in an Anti-Climacian spirit.

3. Alienation: On learning to talk philosophy

As with most of your blogs, this third blog post starts with something clearly recognizable: “Asking questions serves more as an opportunity to show off, making newcomers feel like outsiders.” I don’t know where this general urge comes from, but we all tend to do this—we only dare to pose a question if it is ‘smart’ enough. But in doing so, we prevent our questions from being genuine questions: they do not flow from a need to expose our very self (which a genuine question does), but from the need to show off ourselves.

Crucial to this post is the notion of ‘alienation’. That philosophy can indeed be alienating, is already clear from ordinary life. Once I told my hairdresser that I was studying philosophy, but she he had no idea what ‘philosophy’ was. So I had to explain—and I had a hard time in trying to do so. What seemed to be a normal way of thinking for me, was completely alien to her. The same applies to children—or even more so. What are we to make of this observation? Philosophy deliberately chooses to alienate from ordinary life, for it is exactly in this alienation that questions are to be found. As you write: “Moving within familiar territory generates no questions or ideas.” But at the same time, we can lose ourselves in this alienation: in posing too many questions, we become alien to ourselves. How do we prevent this risk of being alienated from existence? Might philosophy bring us too far?

To prevent this risk, we might speak of philosophy as having the task to bring about a ‘double movement’: it allows us to alienate from reality, to the end of returning us to reality with a new understanding. We might criticize Socrates for the lack of doing so: he merely asks questions. At the same time, we might use this to criticize overconfident philosophers as well: they never ask questions. As you write, “no one will learn anything if no one leaves the realm of mutual expectations”. Philosophy leaves this realm. But if we do not return to this state of mutual expectations and understanding, we lose ourselves in philosophy’s negative movement: the movement of alienation. The illustration on the Condemnation of 1277 clearly shows this process in a positive way: we leave the realm of expectation, but return to this realm with a new understanding. And it is here that philosophical writing has its place: express this very process of alienation and returning home again.

This brings me to another crucial point you mention: “You might end up having a real conversation.” As I’ve experienced it, it is difficult to have a ‘real conversation’ on philosophical matters when you’re a student in philosophy yourself. I tend to assume the position of ‘teacher’, rather than the position of someone who might learn something of the non-philosophical other. With other philosophers, I’ve no hard time in doing so. But with foreigners to the realm of philosophy, it is very difficult to ‘talk philosophy’. Where to start? What to say? How to depart from a common understanding? What I take to be crucial things, say, that we should not confuse Johannes de silentio with Kierkegaard himself, is completely non-crucial for the person I’m talking to. What to say, and what not to say? Is there a difference in the various ways in which we can ‘talk philosophy’? If so, what are the implications for the process of ‘handling ideas’? Who is the person that handles the idea? Do we ourselves do so? Or do we always depart from a common understanding of reality in order to handle some ideas? What is the relation between our handling of ideas and our relation to others? Can (our relation to) others shape the way in which we handle ideas? Who or what does the handling?

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen AA (SKS 17, 24)

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, §275

[3] Your observation of finding someone “who encourages you to think that the things you find important can actually be said”, are clearly recognizable. It was only after reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that I felt the courage to actually formulate my ideas in my own terms.

Why don’t we mine contemporary philosophy for tools to do history?

Philosophers often turn to the history of philosophy for instrumental reasons. The aim is not to ‘do’ history but to prevent reinventing the wheel or to mine historical texts for interesting arguments or ideas. This approach is common both in teaching and research. Undergraduates are often taught surveys in order to develop some ‘vocabulary’, and philosophical discussions are often prefaced with some big names when introducing, for instance, a “Humean account of whatever”. To my surprise, I rarely find any appeal to the converse approach, that is: historians of philosophy instrumentalising contemporary philosophical arguments or ideas to capture historial ideas or debates. In what follows, I’d like to suggest that this might be a fruitful approach both for teachers and researchers.

Let me start with a simple example. I’m currently running a course on Condemned Philosophy where I discuss attempts at condemning or censoring philosophy. While focussing on a particular medieval case (the condemnation of 1277) I also introduced modern examples (such as the letter against Derrida’s honorary degree at Cambridge). The topic of this course is certainly interesting for a number of reasons. But when thinking about such motions and trying to capture what’s going on more generally I find it helpful to turn to terms coined in argumentation theory and social epistemology. An obvious feature of both condemnations is that certain standards of rationality or evidence are said to be protected against the opponents in question (against pagan or continental philosophers). So why not discuss these cases as instances of what contemporary philosophers call deep disagreement or epistemic injustice? Arguably, such classifications give us a way of capturing what is at stake in condemnations and what sort of reasons we should be looking for when exclusionary moves are being justified. What’s more, the notions of deep disagreement or epistemic injustice are of course controversial in themselves. But their controversial status actually helps in thinking about historical sources in pluralistic ways and helps in trying to get a nuanced understanding of what it is we’re looking at when poring over different cases of condemnation.

In a way, historians do this all the time. Interpreting historical ideas or debates involves taking them as something. Taking Ockham’s account of mental propositions or Locke’s theory of ideas as accounts of mental representation, for instance, is a common move amongst historians. But usually such interpretations are seen as historical accounts of the material, that is, they are either taken as historically well defended or as anachronistic failures that miss the mark. In other words, such interpretations are not taken as merely instrumental, but as proper or improper readings of the pertinent texts. By contrast, my take on the condemnations as cases of deep disagreements or cases of epistemic injustice does not involve the claim that the historical agents themselves would have accepted such descriptions as a valid reading of their disagreements. Rather, it is a tool to decidedly enrich our means of understanding, classifying and evaluating what is going on.

The point I’m trying to make is, then, that we historians should approach texts not just by trying to find historically adequate interpretations, but approach the material with various instruments and make good use of the ample conceptual resources provided in contemporary philosophy. Just like a contemporary philosopher engaging Aristotelian accounts of ethics doesn’t need to care about Aristotle, historians don’t always need to care about the question whether there is a real historical relation between projects or authors of different periods when using current conceptual tools. We don’t need to connect historical dots between the shunning of Aristotelianism in Paris in 1277 and the shunning of continental philosophy in 1992 in Cambridge to see that these events share more features than might meet the eye.

But why, you might ask, should historians bother to use such merely instrumental devices? Well, first of all they allow us to update our grasp of the material. Whether we like it or not, when we refrain from employing contemporary terms it doesn’t mean we’re closer to the actors’ categories, but most likely just closer to the 19th-century surveys that still dominate our historical approaches. Moreover, it allows philosophy students to connect the dots between historical texts and their courses in contemporary philosophy. So rather than arguing over adequate approaches to history, I’d suggest we make ample instrumental use of all the devices at hand.

Don’t read! Or how to start writing

I had an intriguing conversation with a student today. He told me about the thesis he is currently writing and complained that he’s drowning in the literature. He had just rushed through a list of names in the secondary literature when I stopped him by asking what his initial interest had been. After a little moment of puzzlement, he began to tell me, with sparkling eyes, about how he got interested in social notion of the self. It was clear that he was fascinated but had already had a hard time trying to relate this to the secondary literature he was supposed to invoke. – When people start writing a philosophical essay or thesis they are often advised to get an “overview of the literature first.” The next step is to structure the paper by comparing two positions and eventually taking a side. I made this mistake myself for too long. Somehow it seemed natural to set out by doing “the reading”. By now I’m convinced this is a bad strategy. More often than not it crushes good ideas and leaves you with a half-alien set of positions that you’ll have difficulty to form an opinion about. In what follows, I’d like to explain why these problems arise and how an inversion of the order might help. (Spoiler alert: you’ll still have to read, but much later in the process.)

How things might go wrong. – Students are often asked to find a topic or even provided with a set of suggestions. In academic philosophy, this often amounts to finding a position or conclusion to be defended. How do you do this? Well, start reading (secondary literature) and something will come. But this way of beginning often means putting the cart before the horse. Firstly, in view of the vast literature, taking a position will always feel arbitrary. Secondly, given the overall unfamiliarity with the literature, students will likely feel unsure about whatever they say. – Of course, the advice to read first is understandable: it is designed to avoid reinventing the wheel. The incentive is to get an overview and develop one’s own position by ever so slightly deviating or contradicting the literature. Yes, the wheel won’t be reinvented. But the likely outcome is that good ideas get crushed under the wheels before they are looked at.

The problem of legitimacy. ­­– Why do ideas get crushed? Well, think about what reading authoritative texts (in the secondary literature) does to you. Even dry reports of the state of discussion exert normative force. You’ll be inclined to align your terms, your thoughts and your arguments with the state of discussion. This alignment makes your own piece sound authoritative but it will likely bury your initial thoughts. You will now think of them as immature beginnings that eventually led you to the actual discussion. In other words, secondary literature has a deligitimising effect on your ideas. Your ideas? Worthless musings… Of course not. But the effect of supposed authority is strong. Going this way, you’ll structure your piece in line with the actual discussion, you will hopefully tick all the right boxes, apply the hip terms correctly and forget about your early musings. At the end, you’ll note a small unclarity in the literature, improving the field with a valuable correction.

What to do? – Look, I don’t want to talk you out of this. Much of the time this works nicely, even if it leaves you a bit unsure about your aims and goals. If you’re in a hurry, it is good to go along with this advice. Why then change a running system? – Well, perhaps because it might work slightly better and because it might allow you to connect to your own ideas. So here is a suggestion of how to begin in a different way: Try to retain as much as possible of your original ideas. That doesn’t mean to stubbornly hold on to them. Rather, you should try to figure out what you actually think. Often that’s not altogether easy or clear. But you’ll get used to it. But what are your ideas anyway? Now, that is not so obvious. If you want to find your own ideas, you’ll have to watch your reactions. Observe how you react to other ideas! Be it in discussions or in (primary) texts. Something might stand out, upset or irritate you – that’s where your ideas lurk.

The beginning: locating an issue. – If you think you should start by finding some literature about your topic, you overlook that you already have begun with something else. But what was that? When the time comes for you to find a topic for a paper, you should not look ahead but back. Yes, you already have begun. Probably you were confronted with some funny idea or read a bit of primary literature that seemed interesting or puzzling. That is your starting point. Stick with a concrete formulation or the concrete passage that gave you pause. Quote that passage or sentence. Think about it by going through every sentence. Clarify any terms that are unclear with a dictionary. Then write a paraphrase in your own words. Start playing with it. Take out sentences and ask yourself what that does. Formalise it, if you like. Get a feeling for what the passage depends on. Create a map of where that passage belongs. What are other bits of text or associations that support it? Etc.

Understanding yourself through the text: seeing friction. – Remember you picked the passage because it stood out. Now try to spell out what exactly is so very interesting or puzzling and why. This has two parts: (1) You have to figure what the precise formulation is and (2) how it irritates or even counters your expectation. The first step means locating the precise word or idea that gives rise to the issue. It might sound trivial, but it is that term or phrase that your whole paper will be about. Because it is this piece that needs explaining. The second step is more difficult. First you have to see why this concerns your expectations: Well, if something irritates you or looks odd, it’s often because you expected something else to be said. Something is said that you would not have said or not have said this way. That is your expectations frustrated, as it were. But your expectation is not in the text. It’s in your head. Now, your expectation (frustrated by the text) is your entry point for the explanation or argument that your paper is to develop. Unfortunately, it is often not entirely obvious what gives rise to your irritation. Is there something in the text that sounds unfamiliar? Does it counter a belief you hold? What belief? Your task is to find out the assumption (you hold) that makes the text come out wrong, odd or unfamiliar. Once you see that, you have a friction between the text and yourself. Now you begin to understand how your reactions to the text arise. Now you enter into a conscious dialogue with the text. This dialogue arises out of your ideas; the friction makes them visible.

The next steps. – Now it’s still not time to read. Probably the temptation is enormous by now to search for bits and bobs of discussion on the web, but that has to wait. Once you have an understanding of the tension that guides you, it’s good to write an abstract (or introduction) and design a structure. What needs explaining? What is the friction or problem you see? As I have said in an earlier piece, you can employ a number of strategies to spread out your proposal. Only when you have done so, should you begin to dip into the literature. The upside is that now you will have concrete questions that you want answered. At the same time, the fact that you have written out your ideas will (hopefully) prevent you from feeling delegitimised by the discussions you are going to encounter. Rather you will enter the discussion with your own questions and worries. Those need answering.

Exploration. – As is perhaps obvious, the idea is not to discourage reading. Quite the contrary: you should read as much as you like, be it to explore or whatever. But if you want to write, you have to find a way to protect a space for your own ideas to unfold. Your ideas and questions are not your own because no one had them before or because they counter the secondary literature. They are yours because you find them interesting. They guide you. But you have to find them through the friction with others.

Philosophy, language, and my long road to tenure (podcast)

After one of my lectures on the history of philosophy for students from other faculties, Daniel Rebbin and Colm O’Fuarthain, two psychology students participating in the lecture, kindly invited me to a conversation on their Mental Minds Podcast.

So we talked about many things: for instance, about my approach to philosophy, the importance of being confused, language, dialogue, my way into academia, pretence, anxiety, and the meaning of life. Enjoy the conversation and check out their other podcasts. Below I added a rough table of contents (the times might not always be correct):

Contents:

00:00 Introduction              

01:40 Why should we study and how did I get into philosophy?                      

03:15 On confusion and expectations

10:10 Do we always focus on what people say rather than on phenomena?

12:36 Language as a mode of direct perception

15:31 Interaction through language

18:37 Limits of language, and how we share experiences

29:19 On going into academia and the relevance of philosophy for our lives

43:05 The role of luck, chance, and shame

52:34 Intrinsic motivation? – Adolescent wishes

56:30 What have professors gone through to become professors?

1:21:30 My anxiety disorder

1:30:40 What advice would I give my younger self?

1:42:00 What gives me meaning in life?

A brief note on the ethics of the principle of charity

The principle of charity is often introduced as a maxim for reading texts or conversing with interlocutors. In such contexts, it’s mostly taken as the idea to interpret your interlocutor in the most rational way possible. So if you read something and you have trouble understanding, you should try to reconstruct it in the best possible way, rather than dismissing it as nonsense. However, as I see it, the principle also has an ethical dimension in that it is rooted in our mutual recognition as humans.

Why do I think that? Donald Davidson famously claimed that the principle of charity is not optional. While he says this in the context of discussing conceptual schemes, I like to see it as the precondition of shared rationality in virtue of shared humanity. It should be in place when you interpret your interlocutor as a fellow human, as a fellow rational being. Recently, I put it as follows: The more you give your interlocutor the credit of being rational, that is making good sense of your interlocutor, the more you see them as human.* Conversely, the more you attack, try to find holes and belittle what your interlocuter says, the more you tend to dehumanise them. Of course, not every uncharitable reading is a form of dehumanisation. But there is certainly a number of problematic degrees, starting from local and perhaps voluntary misunderstandings, moving on to ‘othering’ your interlocutor, ultimately resulting in forms of dehumanisation.**

When you can’t see clearly, you’ll try to adjust your view or change the perspective. By contrast, when certain philosophers can’t understand someone well, they charge their interlocutor with talking nonsense. Isn’t it strange that we philosophers, of all people, are often so uncharitable? Given that the rest of the world makes mostly fun of us for being incomprehensible, you’d think we should know better. A ressentiment?

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* I’d like to thank Chloé de Canson and Ismar Jugo for great and greatly charitable conversations on this topic.

** Here, I take dehumanisation as a way of seeing others as subhuman in their rational capacities.  See David Livinstone Smith’s work for a thorough account. (Here is a start.)

De boekenkast van … Martin Lenz. An interview with Ismar Jugo from our student magazine

[During this summer, Ismar Jugo from our student magazine Qualia kindly asked me to do an interview for their series on bookcases.* We talked for about two hours about books, philosophy, reading, my daughter Hannah, the principle of charity, and new media. Ismar wrote up a text condensing and commenting on what might have been the gist of our conversation. I am very grateful for this piece and would proudly like to share it here.]

Most of us who have had the pleasure of having Martin as a teacher, know him as a specialist in medieval and early modern philosophy. Thus, I was surprised when he said that the philosophical work that influenced him the most was Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. The work came out in 1984 and, to use Martin’s own words, “it made quite a splash”. What made the book special for Martin is that is offered a systematic theory of almost everything. It touched upon topics of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, normativity, ideology and so on. “It was as if you were reading Leibniz,” Martin said. Such systematic philosophy is not so ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy.

As I already said, I found it quite strange that a professor in medieval and early modern philosophy had book about philosophy of mind as one of his favorite books in philosophy. According to Martin, however, this is not strange at all. “I see the history of philosophy as a natural way of engaging with philosophy,” Martin says, and he goes on, “because you want to see where ideas come about and where they go. And Millikan’s theory was for me, and still is in some degree, a most encompassing and convincing approach. I see it on top of a long history of philosophical ideas that happens to result in something like this.”  From Martin’s perspective everyone who engages with philosophy, engages with philosophy’s past, in some way or another. And, especially, when you are working on questions of philosophy of mind in medieval and early modern philosophy, it is interesting to see how such ideas develop through time.

Talking about the past, I got interested in what book influenced him the most when he was a student. And again my expectations were proven wrong. Nothing about the philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy nor early modern philosophy. The title that influenced him the most as a student was Morgenröte from Friedrich Nietzsche. He had something to explain. “When I was young, around fourteen, I started to grab books from the shelve that I did not really understand. The first book I tried to read was something on paranoia by Sigmund Freud. Later, some people would talk about Nietzsche. Then I found the Antichrist and did not understand a word. Morgenröte was the first philosophical work that I started to make sense of.” Morgenröte is a collection of aphorisms, a style of philosophical writing that Martin still finds interesting. He gradually started to understand these aphorisms. What intrigued him was not only the content of the aphorisms, but also the beautiful style of Nietzsche’s writing. Martin is still interested in Nietzsche. “As with music and recordings, the first one can set the standard for what comes later and therefore be very impactful,” as he said. And then he quoted from the Gay Science: “What is the seal of attained liberty? To be no longer ashamed of oneself.” “As I grow older,” Martin said, “I find ways of overcoming my shame. That is a process of liberation, but also an ethical idea. It is about how you treat others as well.” And as I experienced, making the problem of shame a topic of discussion in a dialogue, gives liberty to both interlocuters. 

Leaving my shame behind, I asked Martin about other philosophical books he found fascinating. He mentioned two works of one thinker: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. Both works were written by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Before reading Wittgenstein, Martin read a lot of Heidegger. Both thinkers are central in his web of beliefs. He started with the Tractatus and, again, did not understand a word of it. To be able to understand it, he self-studied a lot of logic and read many introductions to the work. Eventually he could make more sense of it.

However, there was something of what I could not make sense of. I could not make sense of the connection between the different thinkers we discussed so far and his own work in medieval and early modern philosophy. His answer: “I have problems with making that connection myself. As with a lot of things, there is a professionalized side of philosophy where I happened to be successful in. The things that you are interested in are not always found back in your professional work. It may be a driving force.” The reason why Martin became a professional in medieval and early modern philosophy is because of his teacher Kurt Flasch. “When I thought about medieval philosophy as a student,” Martin says, “I thought: “Oh my God… That must be the most boring thing one can imagine!””  He explained that Flasch gave a seminar about Nietzsche that he took. Martin started to greatly admire Flasch and he still does. “It turned out that Flasch was a medievalist by profession. He just did the Nietzsche seminar as a past time.” Martin asked me to see the resemblance with himself and his teacher. Maybe we were not looking for a connection but for a resemblance after all.

Nevertheless, there is a line that connects all these different titles and thinkers and Martin’s current profession as a specialist in medieval and early modern philosophy. Since he was young, he was fascinated with texts that he did not really understand. In these classes Flasch gave about medieval philosophy, Martin had to translate old Latin texts. “Flasch had a very hands-on approach to medieval philosophy. We needed to translate Latin texts and discuss these. So, I was again reading texts that I did not really understand. It was a bit like reading the Tractatus of Wittgenstein, a kind of medieval version of it. But, of course, if you start from such a low base, you can see your progress and that is something nice. It had also something pioneering and exciting, because in these Latin texts you get the sense that no one has looked at them before. Eventually, I could see my progress and that was very rewarding.” As a former history student, I can relate very well to what Martin is saying here. Accessing the past through old texts can feel like entering a foreign country that only you can see.

When I asked Martin what the role of reading was in his life, he answered: “Not quite the same as breathing, but it comes close.” I can well imagine that a professional academic has to read a lot of philosophy every day. So, I went on and asked what the relation was between philosophy and his daily life. “As a student I was all over the place and during my PhD I did not see myself as a philosopher. I was busy with playing music and other things that did not really relate. When I did my Post doc, I worked seven days a week. Closing the laptop rarely happened. That is a very unhealthy lifestyle. This is an important political aspect before we go on and talk about how ideas interfere with daily life.”  Now that Martin has a permanent job, he considers his relationship with the philosophical ideas he is engaging as very pleasant. “Philosophy helps making sense of my life. It also gives me new tools to think about music.” However, lately it works the other way around as well, according to Martin. “Everyday life creeps into philosophy for me. I feel a growing responsibility to respond to societal questions with the means that are given to me with philosophy. I do this in blogging and other ways of articulating ideas.”

I noticed that we wandered off from the books that were in Martin’s bookcase. I asked him what non-philosophical book made impact on him. It was not a book, but rather a story from a collection of stories. “If you’d allow for stories, I’d go with Ingeborg Bachmann’s Alles; it came out in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr.” He went on and said: “I would recommend it to anyone walking free.” The story Alles is about a man who will become a father soon. He asks himself what kind of father he will be when his child is born. The most interesting part of the story is an inner monologue of the protagonist, where the protagonist sees language as something that prohibits us of having a genuine relation with each other and the world. This part of the story brought Martin to one of his philosophical fascinations: “How do you move from what you think is within you to an articulation that still is in some sense true to that? There is a part that will fail and a part that still wants to go on pushing. The question of articulating what you want to say is one of the big questions in literature. And one of the questions in philosophy. It neatly binds the two together. It is actually a question for all of us.”

The protagonist in the story Alles had fears about failing as a father. I asked Martin if he had the same fears before his daughter Hannah was born. He laughed and answered that his worries were more of practical nature. However, Martin talks with a lot of love and fascination about his daughter who is now four years old. He reads a lot to her and is very surprised how she remembers the stories almost exactly word by word. So, there is no room for mistakes in misreading a word here. There is one book that does not contain any words, only very strong colors. The purpose of the book is to teach children how to deal with and express their emotions. Hannah is surprisingly good at doing that, according to Martin. “It was yesterday evening and Hannah was very tired and upset about something. With everything I said she responded with a way of impatience and whaaaa! And I asked her: ‘Can’t you express yourself in a nicer way?’ And she paused a moment and responded by saying: ‘Well…I am too tired to use nice words.’ I thought that that was amazing because she understood, obviously, something that I would not understand as a child, and even as an adolescent, that sometimes being tired is what does it for you…that blocks something.”  Martin thought it was very observant from his own daughter and, honestly, I think so, too. Being tired sometimes does it for you. In this way I am not only learning from Martin Lenz but from his four-year-old daughter, too.

The interview seemed to come to its end. We already covered a lot of Martin’s bookcase and even that of his daughter, Hannah. Nevertheless, there still were some questions to be asked about Martin’s reading. Many of the books that we discussed were philosophical works and even the non-philosophical works were interpreted in a philosophical way. Thus, I asked Martin if philosophy was also his favorite genre in literature. “Recently, I’ve written a blog post on how the paper model kills other good philosophical genres,” Martin said, “like the commentary and more experimental forms of literature. Going by a narrow notion of professional philosophy, I’d say no. Going by my wider notion I’d say it has to be yes, but then it includes literature, music and other forms of art; anything that is dialogical.” With “dialogical” Martin means a form of writing where there is not fixed form with only a thesis defended by some arguments. According to Martin, an engagement with a text is already a form of a dialogue: this text in the Qualia is saying something and you are interpreting it, talking back from your perspective. “The paper-model has a building block style: you have a claim that you want to defend against objections, and everything is already set. This is boring. The great thing about dialogues is that the unexpected might happen. Discoveries! Insights! That sort of thing. These things do not happen when you sit down to defend a claim. Of course, you might get ideas but these ideas you get from a self-dialogue.”

Martin thinks that the paper has its good sides, but people should keep seeing it in perspective. It is a way of stating results clearly and quickly, but it should not replace the dialogue. Martin tries to give that a place within his teaching: “When we teach philosophy, we teach students too much to insist on these building blocks. They look nice and shiny. But it takes away, to my mind, the crucial part of philosophy. For me that is, engaging in dialogue, learning something. There you get these moments of surprise where you say: ‘Oh! I wouldn’t have put it like that, but now you say it in this way, it makes perfect sense to me.’ You know these moments are the moments I live for.” He pauses and then goes on: “With these moments you get a step further because you see the light that you haven’t seen before. Sometimes you start to understand a position that you thought of as an absurd position. All of a sudden you get to grips with it. You even start to kind of embrace it because it is shining in a new light.”

            The last questions that I asked Martin were not about the books on his bookcase, but rather about the practice of reading itself. I got a specific interest in this topic and after what Martin said, I got interested in what he thinks about that. “Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins,” Martin started with quoting Heidegger, and went on with saying that “if language is the house of Being, then reading along with music paved the way into the parts of the world I want to inhabit most.” Thus, along with music, reading is very important in Martin’s life. He sees reading as perceiving the world through language. To understand this, we need to go back to one of Martin’s favorite philosophers, Ruth Millikan. “According to Millikan,” Martin says, “language works a little bit like your eyes or your sense of smell or touch. It is another sense modality. It is a more abstract sense. Language gives you another mode of perceiving that same thing you would perceive if you would look at it or touch it.” What Martin likes about this perspective on language is that “it makes language more direct. Direct in the sense that when I am telling you something you really did perceive this. There is a level of immediacy that is also given in language. Language is not the stuff that is hovering above the world. Language is right there with your body and the rest of the world. It allows you different ways of perceiving, different from the other senses.”

            Being intrigued in what Martin said, I asked him about his thoughts on the rise of new media. Martin is happy to be able to vent on that. “The new media have a bad name without good justification because whenever there was a new technology people saw the world ending. Miraculously it didn’t. Amongst philosophers there is a lot of talk about fake news as something that is dangerous. And that is true and I would be one of the last to say that that isn’t a problem. But I don’t think that it is a problem of the new media, but a problem of literacy. It is a problem of not making good sense of the media. Philosophers are trained to analyze arguments, but for the new media something else is important. That is knowing what kind of effect they have on us emotionally. How they can build a kind of glue and the opposite of that glue; a kind of poison.”

            Martin thinks that we need to become more literate about the new media. “It is not a given that we understand what we read. The opposite is more of a given. That does not only apply to difficult philosophical texts, but it applies to everything. This works on so many levels. If I would ask you: “How are you?” And you would answer: “I am fine.” That could mean so many things. Of course, there is a literal understanding of that you are in a good mood, but we both know that it is a conventionalized expression to disguise. Contextualizing such a remark is something you need to learn. When we read stuff online, we need to do that, too. Perhaps someone writes this in despair, perhaps drunk, perhaps it isn’t even a person. We need coherence markers; we need to get a picture of the Other to understand who that is. We need to rebuild that person. Like a writer does that with a world in a novel, we need to build it from scratch. And if something is wrong, then we need to notice that. We need to check if something in our reading is wrong or that something in the story is wrong. All these skills need to be learned and I have the feeling that we need to spend more time on this.”

Like with his critique of the paper model of philosophy, Martin tries to incorporate this critique of illiteracy in his education by introducing his students to the principle of charity. In the first place the principle of charity is about interpreting a text in the best possible way, thus in the way that it makes the most sense. However, according to Martin, “the principle of charity has a deeper footing. Donald Davidson at some point says that the principle of charity is not optional. It is the foundation of rationality. It should be in place when you interpret your interlocutor as a fellow human, as a fellow rational being.” Martin goes on saying that “the more you give your interlocutor the credit of being rational, that is making good sense of your interlocutor, the more you see them as human. And conversely, the more you attack and are trying to find holes and a sort of downsize what your interlocuter says, the more you tend to dehumanize them. In the sense of trying to find ways into deeming your interlocutor as not rational. And in that sense, it is not optional.” The principle of charity is, thus, not only epistemologically relevant, but ethically too.

I think that I can speak for Martin as well as for myself that the time went very fast during our interview, or dialogue. We touched upon many topics both inside and outside the bookcase. I heard Hannah asking for her dad and I thought that this could be a moment for me to be charitable in a way. So, I grasped the moment, ended the interview and, by that, gave her Martin back.

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* Published in Qualia 17.3, a magazine edited by students of the philosophy faculty of the University of Groningen.