Why Did You Go Into Philosophy?

During a rough period in high school, I happened to find Nicomachean Ethics and The Groundwork on my father’s bookshelf. Looking for answers and being totally unable to comprehend Kant, Aristotle taught me that the moral world was far larger and more interesting than pulpit chatter.

As a 3rd-year undergrad, I was doing a co-op work term in chemistry. I loved the classroom study of it, but hated the working reality of it: the daily monotony of a lab, working on a project we were pretty sure couldn’t possibly work, but we had to keep trying to get a product to pass an impossible regulatory standard. I was reading some classic philosophy in my spare time and philosophy was asking (and trying to answer) some of the questions I was most interested in. Philosophy of science was my gateway topic, but I eventually found my way to epistemology and philosophy of language.

Boyfriend was holding forth about his aesthetics class. I was a freelance illustrator, shocked to discover that people who couldn’t even draw were maundering at length about art. Signed up for graduate class, filled with righteous they-can’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about indignation. Never looked back.

Philosophy was required for all students in my undergrad school. In the first semester of my freshman year I took a small introduction to philosophy class that featured a lot of discussion, and I was hooked. Plato’s Republic, Descartes’ Meditations (plus Ryle), Kant’s Groundwork, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Nietzsche’s Genealogy.

I was a double major: history and philosophy. I decided that I wanted to become a professor before I decided whether I wanted to be a history professor or a philosophy professor. What was appealing was simply the idea of teaching college students for a living, and remaining a part of the college world. I would say that I enjoyed both subjects equally and could see myself being equally happy teaching either of them, so the subject didn’t really matter to me. But I came to feel that I was better at doing philosophy than at doing history and so thought that I would have a better chance of actually getting a job teaching if I went into philosophy rather than history. For some philosophers, teaching is what they do just so that they can get paid to do philosophy. For me, doing philosophy was something I decided to do just so that I could paid to teach. It ended up being an unanticipated bonus that I turned out to really enjoy doing the research, too.

I went to college intending to be a theatre major, but I soon realized that I hated the classes and all the people in my program. I took a philosophy course completely on a whim. We read the Republic and I was smitten—here was a whole field devoted to asking questions I had been curious about all along! I remember after one class meeting I was so lost in thought about the material that I walked right past my car in the parking lot. I changed my major and never looked back.

In my first year at a tiny community college, intro philosophy was the only course that fit my schedule. I had no idea what philosophy was going in. But it was one of the first times I was ever in a classroom without my (smarter) twin sister, the prof was wonderful (if, I’ve now realized, somewhat idiosyncratic in his take on the canon), and I ended up having a knack for it.

Hume woke me from my dogmatic slumber.

I was originally a physics major with a religious studies minor – the minor in part because I’d gotten the bug from Mr. Straw’s philosophy class in HS. Physics was pretty grueling and wasn’t scratching “big questions” itch I’d had going in, and the religious studies classes were either crushingly dry or fun in a superficial way – a lot of the early ones were big “world religion” survey classes where you learned neat stuff about a dozen traditions, but didn’t meaningfully engage with them. The $1 (Canadian!) rack at The Word was a treasure trove of paperback philosophy classics, though, so I found myself escaping from class work I didn’t find that interesting with Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals under a tree near my dorm room. Then I realized I could make that my work instead of stealing time for it – my original plan was to do a dual-major in Physics and Philosophy, but the Physics profs were very dismissive of my interest in that, and basically treated me like an idiot, and Philosophy was welcoming… so there I was. I have my friend Lauren Fleming’s copy of the Enquiry on my shelf, and it’s one of my prized possessions.

Maureen – Thank you for naming names! As a grad student I was a TA for Frank for several semesters. He is amazing in the classroom. Nearly everything I know about teaching I learned from him.

Went to Northwest Nazarene to major in religion and become a minister. Took a freshman course in Ethics taught by a very dynamic professor in a single-person department (JW Jones–who goes to show that you need not be at all renown to be a great classroom professor) and simply fell in love with the love of wisdom (along with classmates and current philosophers Rick McCarty and Marv Belzer). By the next year I had a double-major, and though I finished both programs, I completely abandoned the religious life (SK’s F&T did that for me) and knew I had to try to teach and write this wonderful stuff. In short I got very lucky and after 3 decades still feel that same excitement in the classroom from the other side of the desk that I felt as a wide-eyed neophyte student. And NNU is very fortunate to continue the strong tradition of philosophy with a lone philosopher–Kevin Timpe.

I was upset by all of the contradictions and the hypocrisy I saw in the world.

I took philosophy as a GE my first year of college. We read “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” I thought it was just the coolest thing that these boringly obvious premises plus a little bit of logic got you this wild conclusion that nobody believes…so then what do you do? Now I start my classes with it whenever I can. (Still not an act utilitarian, though.)

It was a combination of things. I read The Republic the summer before I started college (understanding little, of course), and I’ve had interest in socialist/anarchist/leftist causes that go back much further. But I had the “philosophy isn’t practical” worry and entered college a Cognitive Science major. Oddly enough, two non-philosophy courses pushed me into philosophy. A great political philosophy course in a political science department and a great Cognitive Science course at Indiana ended up convincing me that philosophy would be a better area (more time for attention to theoretical issues, less hassle of everyday laboratory life, etc.).

I started university wanting to be a French major and took some philosophy classes to fill out the schedule. French felt like a continuation of high school; philosophy felt like some radically other thing. I saw in my philosophy lecturers what I then took to be an entirely new level of intelligence (though I now recognize it as just a new type). I fell in love with it, or them, or both – who cares? They set me off on this track, which is a pretty amazing way to spend a life. Happy Philosophy Day, philosophers!

Started college as a pre-med and read Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” in an English class. Loved it and the rest is history, as they say.

I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I thought that studying philosophy would make my comics more interesting. (I figured that if it was good enough for Bill Watterson, then it was good enough for me.) Then I actually took my first philosophy class and everything changed. My professors threw as many problems at us as they could – the mind-body problem, the problem of evil, the Euthyphro problem, etc. It shook me up a lot, and I decided that I had to keep at it until I figured it all out. Of course, that never happened. But I did make progress, and I also discovered how much I enjoy teaching and writing along the way (as well as how valuable that can be in some cases). So, I stuck with it. At least at the moment, I feel very glad that I did.

I got into debate in High School, but I was most interested in Lincoln-Douglas debate. The school was small and our coach didn’t know anything, so I had to teach myself about it. Since LD debate is values oriented, philosophical ethical theories are appealed to in the debates. In researching I became exposed to Mill and Kant. I read Kant’s Groundwork and developed an interest in philosophy. The second year I was on the debate team, I became responsible for coaching anyone new who was interested in LD debate. That was where I discovered that I really enjoyed teaching (and the learning you get as a teacher as well)! After that, I started considering becoming a teacher, and given my interest in philosophy, become a professor of philosophy seemed like an obvious choice.

In college, I took an Intro class and a religious studies class on existentialism and after that I was set on the idea.

First, why did I study philosophy at all? When I was choosing what to study at the University of Melbourne, my older sister was going out with someone (now her husband) who was doing an MA in philosophy. We talked about it, and it sounded interesting, and I always enjoyed a good argument, so I gave it a try. Yes, it was interesting. But then, why did I go on with it? It helped, of course, that I was awarded a scholarship to do graduate work. Otherwise I would probably have become a lawyer. But I could have used the scholarship to study history, which interested me too. Perhaps what swung the decision towards philosophy was that the philosophy department’s faculty and students used to get into lots of interesting debates in the local pub on important issues like morality, God, free will… the historians didn’t, they were all specialized in their own narrow areas of original research. I wanted to think about the Big Questions.

I became bookish in high school after dating someone whose parents had gone to college and I started reading whatever fiction I could get my hands on at the local public library. I became interested in some of the theory behind what I was reading, and one day I added a book about satire to the stack I was checking out. When I got home, I realized that its title was actually ‘Sartre’. I think it only took me a couple of months of working my way through the library’s tiny philosophy section before I made up my mind.

I was waffling between pursuing an Africana studies degree, a Spanish literature degree, and a Women’s and Gender studies degree at a really incredibly wonderful urban state university, UMass-Boston, when I took two philosophy courses that fulfilled requirements for my major. I didn’t know what philosophy was. I’m still not sure what it is, but in a different kind of way. Anyway , it was in those two courses, and the introductory logic course I took the following semester, that for the first time I found people whose thinking seemed to be structured in the same sort of way that mine was. The closest thing I had found before that was mathematics, but I got quickly frustrated and bored with the unfortunate rote way in which the beginning of an undergraduate degree in math is taught. So it is really due to those first three philosophy professors I have ever encountered–who are also three of the greatest teachers and people I have ever encountered–that I started doing philosophy. So I’m really just commenting here to give a shout out to Lynne Tirrell, Lisa Rivera, and Nelson Lande –especially now that I sort of understand how much work it is to be an academic and a good teacher and fulfill all one’s other responsibilities (and joys) in life, I’m astounded by how good they are at their jobs!

I was a physics and math major at a liberal arts school (William & Mary). We had to take four classes in a humanities department–and the humanists had to take four classes in a science department. I picked philosophy because three of the classes in philosophy counted toward my math degree: beginning, intermediate, and advanced symbolic logic. Still had to pick one more, though, which turned out to be ethics because I was a varsity tennis player and it was the only one I could fit in with my practice schedule. And there you go, now I’m an ethicist… 😉

My parents were philosophers. Many philosophers visited our house. I was fascinated by the discussions, which is not to say that I always understood them. This led to my enrolling in Philosophy 1 as part of my Science degree majoring in mathematics, at Melbourne University. I enjoyed the philosophy course more than the mathematics courses (David Armstrong’s lectures played a big role here), and did better in it–matters that were no doubt connected. I then enrolled in an Arts degree majoring in philosophy and found myself exposed to a whole range of challenging questions: what is the connection between mind and body, is ethics objective, what does physics teach us about time, is there an important distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and so on. I was hooked.

I would blame three people for my initial decision to become a philosopher. Brian Grant, Bob Ware, and Charlie Martin. I was initially a psych major intending eventually to be a neuroscientist. I ended up taking an intro philosophy course with Brian Grant because I figured it would be an interesting but easy class that I could half-ass my way through while I focused on all the stats, anatomy, and biochem courses that would actually require my attention. As it turned out, I enjoyed that intro course that much that — not only did it become the course that I focused most on that semester — I ended up deciding to minor in philosophy. The next course I took was a political philosophy course with Bob Ware, which I actually bombed. However, that course introduced me to a number of questions that I had no idea how to answer and that continue to nag at me. For example, questions about how a fair society would look and about how a society could be structured such that everyone could fairly participate in governance. Encountering questions that I couldn’t readily answer and that I couldn’t even initially figure out how to think about made it clear to me that philosophy was important and that it addressed topics that deserved attention. In retrospect it was after this point that philosophy went from being something that I studied in class to something that was actually personally important to me. This set me up for being hooked for life, which happened after I took the last class that Charlie Martin taught before his retirement. Given that it was his final course, it seemed that he was less interested in actually teaching the class content (with the exception of some musing about John Locke) but, rather, was more interested in teaching the class the history of philosophy through the 20th century as he saw it (which really was just a collection of colorful stories of people he knew including John Wisdom, G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and David Lewis) and the process of philosophy (looking for ideas that sing to you in the shower). After taking that class philosophy seemed to me to be a crazy adventure into a land of eccentric figures swashbuckling their way across a sea of fundamentally important questions.

I went to university to study music with the notion of becoming a professional composer. I had to double-major, so I took philosophy; partly because of universal-scepticism worries, but also because I was so uncertain about what I was doing as a composer – why am I writing hours of music, forcing poor musicians to practice unidiomatic runs for hours and poor concertgoers to listen to dissonances they can’t stand, when we have Bach and Beethoven? Ought I not go to medical school instead? These are questions I approached through philosophy; the plan was to find whether I was justified in writing music, and then go do so (or not). Ten years later I’ve not gone back to music (though I’ve never fully admitted I’ve left, and still play and write now and then) – but frankly not a day goes by that I don’t wonder whether I ought to go back, much as I love my the unmatched insight and banter you find in philosophy.

I took a bit of philosophy in high school, though I wasn’t really aware that this was what I was doing–we read parts of Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I, and I wanted more that, so I asked my dad and I think he gave me Plato. Cue teenaged eye-roll. Then my parents moved to Riverside and I met a bunch of the philosophers there and really liked them. I planned on majoring in East Asian Studies at UC Santa Cruz, but then I read Kant in an ethics course. It seemed vitally important that I understand Kant. So I begged David Hoy to let me into his upper-level Kant course even though I would just be a sophomore. After that, I blame David Hoy, who is a gifted, patient, wonderful teacher. I chose to apply to graduate school because of all the things I thought I could do (scientific illustration, poetry, printmaking, non-fiction writing) I knew that no matter how good I got at philosophy it wouldn’t be enough. I would never be satisfied. That sounded like a life-plan to me. No regrets, lots of gratitude.