Today’s New APPS interview is with Catarina Dutilh Novaes, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, and who is, of course, a frequent contributor to our blog.
Welcome, Catarina, thanks for doing this interview with us. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you? How do you experience solitary study and writing, collaborative writing, camaraderie at conferences?
To me philosophy does not feel like a solitary enterprise at all, especially now with the ubiquity of Lady Internet in our lives. I’d say there is really nothing about my personal practice of philosophy that could be placed under the heading of ‘pains’ (ok, maybe journal rejections based on stupid referee reports…), it’s all pleasure for me.
How did you come to study philosophy? Can you tell us a little about your childhood?
I was born in Sao Paulo (Brazil), which is not exactly the easiest place to grow up, given its megalomaniac size, but it didn’t prevent me from having a fairly normal childhood. My parents were academics (both medicine professors, and my brother is now a physicist – yep, a family of nerds), and accordingly I was very much the bookish kind, although from 10 years old onwards I was also playing in all of the school teams and swimming (I still have a mild exercise obsession).
Hooray for that I say. I’m a firm believer in mens sana in corpore sano! Did you live in Sao Paulo your whole childhood?
No, there was one big move that shaped my personality and changed my life forever: between 14 and 16 years old, I lived in Paris with my parents, who were then on a (very extended!) sabbatical. It changed my life in many different ways, but the decisive experience was to study for two years in a French lycée. I had a great time there, in spite of the many sadistic teachers I came across (“Mademoiselle, if you cannot even answer this question, then you clearly shouldn’t be in this class”, said in front of the whole class). It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life (well, with the exception of the very first months as a mother!), as upon arrival I spoke very little French and had to catch up with a huge academic gap. But I’ve never learned so much in my life, especially math and (French) literature, and by the end of the first year I was totally on top of things, so to say. At the time at least, philosophy was taught only in the last year of high school, by which time I was back in Brazil; but in the literature classes we discussed the likes of Montaigne, Pascal, Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, so there was definitely quite some exposure to philosophy if broadly construed. You know the French, they are philosophical even when they try to be prosaic!
They are often even delighted to discover they’ve been speaking prose! After your return from France, where did you go to university? Did you study philosophy right away?
I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Sao Paulo. The reasons why I went to study philosophy are actually somewhat amusing; what I really wanted to do was to go back to France to study cinema at the Femis in Paris. But to be admitted, at the time at least a candidate had to have two years of undergraduate study. I figured it would be a good idea to study something quite basic in the humanities. A cousin of my father was then a prominent professor of literature at the University of Sao Paulo, and he advised me to go study philosophy because the department had then the best faculty among the humanities departments (he later declined any responsibility, saying that he was drunk when he told me to go study philosophy).
I suppose there’s a joke about the Symposium to be made here, but it’s not coming to me!
There are quite a few jokes to be made here… But anyway, I got started, still with the initial plan of going back to Paris, but by the end of the first year I was totally hooked, and have remained so ever since. It was the perfect combination of math and literature, which were my favorite subjects in school; but everybody kept telling me that I couldn’t be good at both, that I had to choose. Well, with philosophy I don’t have to choose, and that’s probably the main reason why I’m so happy as a philosopher.
That’s quite Platonic, I think, philosophy between mathematics and poetry –- but a “between” that is higher than both!
I’d say so, philosophy is more than the sum of mathematics and literature, it is a multiplication really (I’m thinking of the two kinds of conjunctions in linear logic, the additive and the multiplicative conjunction). After I graduated in philosophy in Brazil, I came to the Netherlands to join the Master of Logic program of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), which is by the way where I currently work. When I was done with the masters, I had personal reasons to want to stay in the Netherlands, but the prospects of finding an adequate PhD position here were rather meager. Here, PhD students are university employees, which means that there are very few positions (as they each cost a lot of money). But I was lucky to get a PhD position in Leiden, where I had Göran Sundholm as my main supervisor. After that, I spent some 20 months in NYC, mostly as a post-doc at the CUNY graduate Center. In 2007 we returned to the Netherlands and I started my current research project at the ILLC, which is about to end.
What were your first publications? Is there one that stands out as your breakout piece? How did your early research relate to your dissertation?
My first accepted publication (eventually, not the first one to be published due to the usual backlog phenomenon at some journals) was my 2005 paper on obligationes in Synthese. I wrote it in the first half of my second year as a PhD student, and it was a pretty major thing to have it accepted in Synthese then.
I’ll say!
It is still regularly cited, as it was probably the first attempt at a serious formalization of obligationes in the literature, and even though I have now returned to the topic of obligationes with new ideas, I’m still proud of this early work. About 2/3 of my dissertation ended up published in the form of articles (most of them even before I defended), in journals such as Synthese, History and Philosophy of Logic, Vivarium and Journal of the History of Philosophy. So I guess I can’t complain, I had a good start.
I’d say that’s an understatement … Now for something a little less pleasant, but it’s a question I’m asking of everyone: the relation of continental and analytic philosophy has been fraught with tension for many years. How do you negotiate this conflict? Are there signs of a rapprochement?
I don’t really experience this tension in my daily life, perhaps because I am in the more ‘comfortable’ side of the tension, the analytic side (at least given my institutional embedding). I am without a doubt an analytic philosopher (albeit perhaps an idiosyncratic one, given my interests in history and the empirical sciences), but having been in school in France, and then having studied philosophy in Sao Paulo (where the program was founded by French professors of the ‘Structuralist’ school, a tradition that continues to this day), I feel a considerable degree of affinity with many aspects of the continental approach to philosophy. To me, there shouldn’t be a real conflict, and I greatly admire those who manage to combine the two traditions, such as Taylor Carman, Dermot Moran and my boss in Amsterdam, Martin Stokhof. But it takes intelligence and open-mindedness to be able to do that, and philosophers, just like everybody else, have strong parochial tendencies. Basically, I think I agree with you, John, that there’s no real divide, philosophically speaking, although there may be some differences in style.
Let’s go back to your individual situation. Where are you now, compared to where you started?
I started out essentially as a historian of medieval logic, but the goal was always to understand what logic is all about, really. The historical perspective seemed appropriate, in particular because history is a great way to question widely (but usually uncritically) accepted (contentious) assumptions. In a slogan, philosophy is about questioning the obvious, and I always saw history as a privileged vantage point for that.
Looking back on your career so far, have you developed a single core idea, or have you significantly changed your perspective?
I guess the underlying theme of my whole career so far has been to try and understand where the ‘magic’ of formal methods and formalisms comes from. I had this very strong experience of the beauty of mathematics studying fairly high-level geometry and calculus in France, and I’m still trying to understand the power and the limits of formalisms and formal methods as epistemic tools, i.e. how they can be applied to issues outside their own scope. Two years ago I fell in love with the psychology of reasoning tradition, which seemed to offer exactly the missing vantage point I had been looking for to treat these ultimately epistemic questions (since then I have also included cognitive science and other sciences of the mind in my range of interests). I firmly believe that a wide range of philosophical questions can only be adequately treated by an integrative approach combining philosophy, history and different scientific domains (in particular the sciences of the mind). History tells us where our engrained assumptions and ‘intuitions’ come from, allowing us to question them when they turn out not to be as self-evident as we thought; the empirical sciences help us keep our wild a priori confabulations as philosophers under control. Otherwise, it’s all just-so stories… So I would say that I’ve been pursuing the same kinds of questions throughout my career, and now I have settled on the methodology which I think is the right one for the questions I want to address.
What would you say is the most rewarding experience of your professional life? What was the most frustrating?
Pretty much everything is rewarding in my current professional life, I truly enjoy almost every single bit of it. Of course, the current situation of maniac cost-cutting, and the hopeless top-down attitude of the higher administration in most universities is extremely frustrating and worrisome, in particular in that philosophy seems to be one of their preferred targets. But I experience my professional life as a continuous and fascinating dialogue with a wide range of people: students, fellow philosophers, readers, and each of these different levels of interaction has its own beauty. For example, I love to be able to make a difference in a student’s life, put them on the right path, so to say.
In what ways, if any, do you integrate art, science, politics, and other areas of life such as cooking, or listening to music, or physical / spiritual exercise – what have you – into your philosophy?
Physical exercise and philosophy were really made for each other, as far as I am concerned. The Greeks were so right! I have many of my best philosophical ideas while running or biking (under the shower would be a firm third…). As for science, as is surely clear by now, I am a firm believer in a scientifically informed approach to philosophy, so there is really no gap there for me either.
I would certainly agree with that. I often adopt the formula that philosophy should be “empirically responsible.”
Yes, I like that! It adds a deontic layer to the whole thing which really should be there, and which is not clearly present in the notion of ‘empirically informed’. It is just plain irresponsible not to take into account the knowledge about the world produced by what are currently our best sciences (while of course also allowing for them to be fallible and revisable). It doesn’t mean that all philosophical questions should be reduced to and formulated as strictly scientific questions, but to my mind the wide majority of philosophical questions can only be treated adequately if the analysis is informed by findings in relevant scientific areas (metaphysics/physics; philosophy of mind and epistemology/sciences of the mind; ethics/biology and psychology etc.)
What about other activities?
I don’t have time much time left for other activities (in particular given family obligations), but I’ve been greatly enjoying contributing to the New APPS blog. I feel it is a great way to integrate philosophy and real life issues, something that I don’t do much in my academic work; in particular in my posts on feminism, I am finally able to put some of my philosophical argumentative skills to good use on something that might even have positive practical consequences!
Tell us some more about your feminism if you would.
I am a very recent convert. Because I’ve had excellent female role models in the leftish-academic environment where I grew up back in Brazil (starting with my mother, who is still an active and very successful researcher in public health and health policies at the University of Sao Paulo), for the longest time I just didn’t see that there were issues of gender inequality, as *I* had not experienced them as significantly affecting my life (although now, thinking back, I realize they were there alright). It was only when I read Sally Haslanger’s famous piece, and started following the discussions over at the Feminist Philosophers blog that it dawned on me how bad things still are.
We all owe a big debt to Sally Haslanger for that article. Here’s the online version.
I also like to think that the fact that I now have two daughters made me worry about the kind of world they will encounter upon growing up. The positive role models I had and a determined, thick-skinned personality made it so that I did not falter in spite of the biases against women in the profession, but I don’t like the thought that only the ‘tough girls’ can make it; hence all my involvement in creating a better environment for women, especially young women, in the profession. And the nice thing about certain versions of modern feminism, at least, is that they are thoroughly empirically-informed, relying on solid data from psychology, sociology etc. (as exemplified by Cordelia Fine’s oh-so-wonderful book), so it’s not just a matter of ideology. I couldn’t identify much with other versions of feminism, but scientific feminism, that’s perfect for me :)
What are you looking forward to doing next? What are your short and long-term projects?
In July I am going to start a new 5-year research project, ‘The Roots of Deduction’. I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times already. It is a fairly big project, where I will have two people working with me (a PhD student and a post-doc), and where I will be able to pursue the integrative approach (philosophy, psychology and history) that I was telling you about. I am very fortunate to be able to focus mostly on research at this stage of my career, thanks to the generous support of NWO, the Netherlands big funding agency (the 4-year project I am completing now is also funded by them). After the next project, then I guess it will be time to have a ‘real’ job, with lots of admin duties, probably a much heavier teaching load, but at least I will have enjoyed many years of research freedom. It seems to me that this is more of an European phenomenon, that this particular career path would have been unthinkable in the US. (When I lived NYC, it became very clear to me that I would probably be better off building my career in Europe…) But yes, as you can see, I am more enthusiastic than ever about philosophy and my work as a philosopher; it’s been great fun up to now, and it may even get better in the coming years.
(Full disclosure: I have an incurably optimistic and upbeat personality. In France people often thought I was superficial or naïve, or both, that I failed to perceive the inherent malaise and misery of the human condition. Well, it’s probably too late for that now.)
Thank goodness. There’s plenty of misery in the world, but to pretend it’s “the human condition” lets politics off the hook much too easily, and lands us in what Deleuze and Guattari, following Nietzsche, call with as much disdain as they can muster, “priest’s psychology.”
The conception of human nature that I identify most with is the one emerging from e.g. the work of Frans de Waal and others investigating the biological origins and basis for altruism in humans. I like to think that we human beings are only truly happy when we actualize this side of us that really is there (although, of course, it’s not the full story), our inherently social, altruistic side. It’s all about trying to figure out ways to make these aspects take precedence over others (in politics, ethics, everyday life experiences etc.). Maybe when I’m old and wise I will do some serious work in this direction, but for now I am quite content in just trying to untangle a bit the puzzles of human rationality and higher cognition.
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