“I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things ‘vibes’ that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own.”

That’s Robert Wallace, associate professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). In the following guest post, he pushes back against a kind of approach to teaching philosophy offered up by one of his colleagues, Daniel Story, in a post here back in February.

Professor Wallace is concerned about “the implicit contrast [Story] makes between boring technical philosophy of the sort that an LLM could help you understand and real lived philosophy of the sort you get by reading Anna Karenina on the campus quad alongside your professor and classmates,” and emphasizes that “good thinking has always been, in part, a self-isolating enterprise.” He aims to make a case for the value of that loneliness.

Light and Shade in The Classroom
by Robert Wallace

One of my students hurries into my office hours to discuss their term paper on some technical topic in contemporary analytic metaphysics. They accidentally drop a ludicrously heavy book on the floor. It’s Anna Karenina.

I’m right down the hall from the purveyor of one truly happy classroom—Daniel Story—and I am lucky enough to count him as a colleague and a friend. He recently wrote a guest post here about his philosophy of love seminar, where the students are genuinely reading Anna Karenina (“alongside several hundred pages of philosophical texts”) despite what the doomsayers suggest about our students’ inability to read. Daniel’s goal in the classroom is caring, embodied pedagogy. He and his students become a community of readers and thinkers.

I share all of Daniel’s commitments: his anti-elitism in defense of our students, his insistence that students can and will, perhaps, do the readings, the idea that mutual care and concern are essential values to manifest in the classroom. (I marvel at his dizzying array of references and the warmth of his prose). But what I want to draw attention to is the implicit contrast he makes between boring technical philosophy of the sort that an LLM could help you understand and real lived philosophy of the sort you get by reading Anna Karenina on the campus quad alongside your professor and classmates. I want to think carefully about what ingredients help make a happy classroom. It needn’t be Tolstoy.

Here’s the remark:

My students are coming of age as philosophers in a time when it is increasingly possible to go it alone. The lone philosopher has always been a myth. Yet if philosophy means things like understanding compatibilism and publishing in Ethics, this will not always be true; autodidactic vibe-philosophizing is coming.

Now, I don’t have a publication in Ethics yet, and I certainly wouldn’t consider myself an autodidact. But I feel like the character Levin from the novel discovering that the cosmopolitan intellectuals have been discussing him as a type!

This aside leads to Daniel’s positive conception of philosophy as an inquiry into human experience that intellectually connects us to other human beings. Daniel is rightfully worried about a kind of intellectual isolationism that is increasingly possible in our new age of intelligent technologies. This isolation is anathema to a certain conception of philosophy. Daniel says that if he were the only person alive, he would not philosophize. I find this unimaginable. If I were the last person left—apart from survival, apart from grief—how else would I spend the time apart from wondering about how mid-sized dry goods compose out of mereological simples?

References to compatibilism, etc., were of course a coincidence. Compatibilism is, after all, the world’s most wretched subterfuge. And the contrast Daniel drew was genuinely an implicit contrast. He’s teaching philosophy papers too, obviously. But I want to spell out this contrast carefully because it is tangled up with different ways we might approach philosophy, and so to teaching it.

The philosophical issues that matter most to me are the ones that matter because they involve other people. My own work focuses on one such question, the answer to which would radically change the ways we should think about ourselves, other people, morality and interpersonal life, and even aspects of our political systems. It’s just that this question is whether compatibilism succeeds, if we can properly understand it. (I really am the type).

Not just compatibilism, of course, but the whole free will debate, even in its most arcane and rarified form, with novel logical operators or carefully distinguished varieties of counterfactuals included, is an issue of central human significance. And it is a wonderful example of a philosophical issue where one supposes that a person could simply “vibe-philosophize” one’s way to an answer when, in fact, the very best work on the problem has always been in deep contact with the personal viewpoints of the authors working on it while being demandingly rigorous.

Think Gary Watson challenging us with the story of a cruel murderer before revealing his awful childhood in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil”. I’ve argued in print with my own dissertation advisor about it. It made me cry.

Peter van Inwagen suggests near the end of An Essay on Free Will that maybe the best argument for free will just is the fact that we think we’re responsible, even though that’s the kind of awful question-begging anti-skeptical argument we’ve been jeering since Moore raised his hands and refuted Descartes’s evil demon. But it’s a very humbling response to the problem after a lot of careful modal metaphysics. Rigor can make us a little more humane, turns out.

Most of my own work on compatibilism builds on that infamous paper by P.F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”, which is entirely about human interpersonal relationships and the basic concern we have with the feelings and attitudes of other people.

I wear Susan Wolf’s point from “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” like a religious talisman, that we may not be “metaphysically responsible for ourselves—for, after all, we did not create ourselves from nothing—we are morally responsible for ourselves” nonetheless. Making good on this point has been a central focus of my work. Maybe my life, too.

Even beyond this, many of us are taking what Kevin Richardson called here in Daily Nous “The Social Turn” in analytic philosophy, such that “Every area of philosophy now has a thriving and lively socialized subfield”. I always pull this guest post up on the projector screen when I teach “Ontology and Social Construction” by Sally Haslanger; I’ll be damned if I let my student’s views about social construction come from some hip politics podcast. There is so much good meaningful caring work to be taught in feminist metaphysics and epistemology, work that brings to the fore the importance of actual lived conditions in our shared social world rather than idealized, perhaps atomistic assumptions. We better not waste it. (See my “Compatibilism as Non-Ideal Theory: A Manifesto”. It’s painful how much I am the type).

What am I driving at here? The kind of stuff that gets published in Ethics, and in the many excellent venues our profession affords, often is the kind of caring, concerned, big-picture stuff that is equally poised, if not better poised, to resist the seductive charms of our technological isolation as any big important novel. There is nothing outside of our discipline, crunchy technical bits and all, that we need to bring into our classrooms to create the kind of classrooms we want, where students learn to love to read and think their own particular thoughts in conversation with one another. (Needs are, of course, different than wants. You might perfectly well want to teach a big important novel).

Yes, even puzzles about mereological simples and other sometimes silly worries about ontology. Even with people we love and respect. The longest running philosophical debate I have with my wife (who’s not a philosopher) is about the existence of holes, per David and Stephanie Lewis’s beautiful little dialogue “Holes”, which I teach to students every time I teach our somewhat difficult 400-level metaphysics course, and which caused an actual fight at about 3AM in the morning while I was in graduate school. What begins as a puzzle about absences turns into a metacommentary about how to do metaphysics. Which is, of course, a metacommentary about good thinking, and the difficult choices we have to make when we realize that every belief has a cost, and that it’s up to us to decide which costs are worth bearing. And just maybe, there is some commentary in there about how to love one another across irreconcilable disagreement.

This is what I want my students to read.

What then of autodidactic vibe-philosopher, whom Daniel prophecies is coming nigh? I’m not worried. The classical lone philosopher is a myth, as he notes, and a harmful one. And I would be the first to admit that I love a good philosophical discussion, losing all sense of time, and all sense of anything else altogether. (Writing this is, in effect, just making a long discussion I’ve been having with Daniel into a wider discussion with anyone willing to read it). But good thinking has always been, in part, a self-isolating enterprise. Daniel has made an excellent case for community. I want to now make a case for loneliness.

When my student dropped Anna Karenina, they did so in front of the comically oversized poster in my office with a quote from Philippa Foot, herself adapting something from Wittgenstein in the introduction to her book Natural Goodness: “in philosophy it is difficult to work as slowly as one should.” Slow, and therefore lonely. Socrates never wrote anything down—he could stay in the agora forever. We can’t. At some point, we have to sit with our thoughts, to try to put them into a discernable form, to try to get the answer to the question right. It’s time-consuming and solitary. It is, in some sense, autodidactic, though not in the usual way. We have to give ourselves our own arguments before we can give them to other people; we have to test them in the crucible of our own minds before they are ready to be shared with others.

I think often, fondly, and to my own surprise, of Descartes. Maybe teaching Meditations on First Philosophy to intro students has given my Stockholm syndrome. (I wonder if Descartes would have laughed at my macabre joke!) But who better exemplifies this beautiful tension between needing time for individual intellection and community? I certainly couldn’t write something like a guided personal meditation and then ask everybody in my whole intellectual community to tell me what’s wrong with it.

Another lesson from Descartes, I think, is that getting feedback can be a very lonely experience too. Friendship and collegiality make it easier. But they don’t make it less lonely when you stand alone behind your views. Even David Lewis was sad that nobody else could believe in modal realism. Care for our students, and getting our students to care for each other, isn’t just a virtue in a classroom. It’s an intellectual necessity deriving from the difficulty of what we are asking them to do alone.

Nobody is a lone genius. Still, we have to be honest about the costs of thinking. Without arguing directly against Daniel and Nel Noddings, that “the primary aim of every educational institution and of every educational effort must be the maintenance and enhancement of caring”, I’ll just say that the old Platonic vision of care for the soul can get lost when we think too much about doing things together.

About souls and otherworldly things: I think part of the fear about our lonely philosophical future is that in the coming technological ecosystems—LLMs and whatever will end up replacing them— we really could come to understand compatibilism and publish in Ethics all by ourselves. (Or, at least, without the help of other humans). It may be a machine future, but I still have faith in the ghost in the machine. The very best philosophical work has always been essentially first personal and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.

The particularity of the first-personal view, though it is often seen as being absent from techie analytic philosophy by, essentially, pundits and bad press, is essential to the intellectual practice of philosophy itself. While it’s true that the apparent absence of an embodied thinker in analytic philosophy was the product of pernicious social norms in the discipline, that it continues to be an understated element need not be a vice. Sometimes making oneself small is important for making the point bigger. Other times, making oneself large is needed to make the point. I want my students to understand that difference. In our technological future, one expects that our individual ghosts had better haunt the hell out of whatever we’re writing.

So let me be clear. I am not defending the status quo. I’m just offering an assemblage of reminders about what is good about the old, slow, lonely work. I’m teaching care for their own particular point of view, a disdain for all things “vibes” that aren’t carefully thought out, and a deep understanding of the courage it takes to withdraw from other people for a while, to have braved a thought all on your own without a podcast in the background. We need this kind of practice in a world filled with digital immediacy, where everyone’s thoughts are available 24/7 as much as we need to be talking to real people in real classrooms. And you can do this by throwing students against papers on grounding and fundamentality until they lose their minds. (Maybe you have to lose your mind to save it).

It’s true that some of my students aren’t reading because they’re going at it alone. Well, they aren’t reading everything. They happily admit as much when I ask them. Without public accountability, it is true that my assigned readings have less practical deliberative weight among all that is demanded of my students. They are probably reading less than I realize. I’m unhappy. But I can live with that. They are reading something. They are picking their battles. Maybe they’ll find something worth loving.

My approach has always been maximalist. I give my students a bunch of things worth reading. I ask them to read one or two things really deeply and then to write something they want to write. “How many opportunities in your life will you get to think hard about something you’re interested in? Not often enough.” Papers come in on topics that, I hope, are too weird to be spoofed by an LLM. Agentive control in video games. Buddhist approaches to the self versus Peter van Inwagen in Material Beings. The social construction of disability and lookism discrimination.

It’s true that the kind of classes Daniel and I teach—whether embodied and intellectually omnivorous or maximalist and hyper-analytic—are enabled by their small size. But I for one, as a person with small children fully immersed in the workload of a non-elite neo-liberal university, do not have the kind of bandwidth to give even 20 students the full particular care they deserve. Luckily, I’m also skeptical that all happy classrooms share intrinsic features, and that helps me sleep at night. To pick up on a theme from Daniel’s own concern for community, maybe all happy classrooms share extrinsic ones.

There is a line from Anna Karenina that is frequently shared and endorsed on the internet, “All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.” There’s good sense in the quote. You might have thought I was going to say that it’s good that my students get the contrast between my 400-level metaphysics class and Daniel’s seminar on love. The character who says this is Oblonsky, the charming and morally compromised aristocrat. He says it to Levin, the earnest, awkward figure who wants to be rigorously good. (I wonder if Levin would want to publish in Ethics). To be clear, then, my point is not that contrasts will enliven our students. I want us to instead imagine what we can do for our students not across different kinds of classrooms but between them. Contrasts between classrooms like Daniel’s and mine don’t matter on their own. The fact that Daniel and I openly disagree about teaching, about what counts as philosophy, in front of our students, creates the kind of exceptional environment where happy classrooms can sometimes happen. Daniel is right to set up his classroom in a way that helps share his intellectual orientation with his students. And I am right to set mine up in ways that share mine. (And you, if you are a teacher of students, yours). After all, the student who dropped Anna Karenina is also trying to understand compatibilism.

I’ve never read all of Anna Karenina by the way. I’ll finish it someday, Daniel, I promise. Right now, I’m too busy re-reading On the Plurality of Worlds. Maybe one day I’ll ask students to read the whole thing and host reading parties on the quad. A possible Big Book.

Classrooms are like possible worlds, I think. There is a good classroom for any way a classroom could be. But perhaps, as with systems of modal logic, the real question is what classrooms are accessible to each other.