Today’s New APPS interview is with Mark Lance, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
Thanks very much for doing this interview with us today, Mark. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. You’ve recently published a book with Rebecca Kukla, ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard, 2009). Can you tell us how you approach collaborations?
I’ve always found a great deal of joy in collaboration – that is really trying to think through issues with another philosopher; not the sort of “let’s prove I’m smart” argument that is all too common in the field – and have moved more and more towards that in recent years. I’ve now published with, I think, 8 different people, and am planning projects with others. The process is different with different collaborations, but Rebecca and I, while drawing on earlier individual work, argued through every single point of the book. Then one of us would draft a section, passing it back and forth several times. And the final writing was always done with both of us in front of the screen going over every word together. There is a kind of intellectual intimacy - something rather like a collective mind - that arises from this sort of work that is really quite amazing.
What about conferences? I was disappointed at not being able to meet you in person at the now infamous Snowmageddon APA!
Yes, that was a disaster all around. I am perhaps weird in really liking conferences of almost all sorts. Big APAs let me see friends and colleagues that I see only once a year, and smaller focused conferences are enormously intellectually stimulating.
Do you have a set routine in your daily practice of philosophy?
No, no set routine. I’m quite up and down. While I probably never go a day without thinking about philosophy, I can go weeks without doing any real concrete work, and then spend 10 hours a day for a few more weeks on it. A side benefit of collaboration is that it keeps me a bit more disciplined.
How did you come to study philosophy?
I had no idea what philosophy was when I started college, at Ohio State. I was studying orchestral trumpet, and taking a lot of math because I always saw that as a sort of fun avocation. (The music school was seriously puzzled when I signed up for the senior honors algebra sequence. They actually summoned me to explain that I had signed up for the “wrong” course and didn’t actually have to take any math.) But I had to take a humanities course to graduate and picked an intro philosophy just because it didn’t conflict with all my ensembles. As I’m sure others have experienced, I recognized the practice immediately. I’d always thought about such things, and argued like a philosopher. I just didn’t know it was a “thing”. So a couple extra courses turned into a minor, turned into a career change.
So instead of Socrates taking up music, you were a musician taking up philosophy! Who were your early philosophy teachers?
At Ohio State by far my most influential teacher was Robert Kraut, who really sort of adopted me. He was thrilled to have a student who was actually interested. But there was a fabulous community of majors at OSU in those days. Maybe 20 or so who were really serious and very smart. (Of course there were others who were functionally illiterate, but such is the nature of a huge state school.)
Did it take long to adjust to philosophy? Do you recall any particular undergraduate paper assignments?
I felt so at home in philosophy right away that the decision didn’t take that long. And I wrote some papers pretty early that got lots of attention. I think my third philosophy class was Bill Lycan’s graduate seminar on belief. (Kraut told me to take it and I was naïve enough not to question. Bill was also a fabulous early mentor who gave me lots of encouragement.) Then in my third year I wrote a paper criticizing causal theories of reference that was published in Phil Studies. I had this vague positive idea that reference talk might not be referential. Just after this paper, Bob Brandom came to OSU and gave an early version of his “Reference Explained Away” paper and I was just blown away. It didn’t hurt that Kraut invited me over to his house after the official party and the three of us hung out until like 4 am talking about foundations of math and, hmmmm, what can I say here?, engaging in certain communal intoxicating practices.
I’m seeing a Socratic theme here. Now we’re at a symposium!
Indeed. (No sex.)
Well, it’s really impressive to have published a paper in Philosophical Studies while still an undergrad. Now what about graduate school? You went to Pitt, so I guess the drinking party with Brandom was a big influence!
(I didn't say drinking, but never mind.) Of course Sellars was the dominant figure at Pitt in those years. I was also very much interested in working with a young guy named Jim Van Aken - who though brilliant turned out to be severely mentally ill and left the profession. In the end I worked mainly with Brandom, Belnap, and Joe Camp. But I also learned a great deal from Annette Baier, John Haugeland, John Earman, Clarke Glymour, and Ken Manders. Also the joint Pitt CMU logic seminars which were dominated by Dana Scott. The community was truly wonderful at Pitt in those days. We would typically have seminar from 7 – 9:30 and then go to the bar to continue discussing until near dawn.
I’m seeing a pattern here.
Maybe. The community included Geoff Sayre McCord, Ken Gemes, Bill Blattner, Danielle Macbeth, Alisa Carse, Michael and Phil Kremer, Arthur Ripstein, Sandy Mitchell, Irad Kimhi, and many others. All wonderful philosophers who knew how to integrate philosophy and sociality.
And you hung out with Todd May, too, didn’t you, a mutual friend of ours?
Yes, I also met Todd May while in Pittsburgh. Todd was living in Pittsburgh, but finishing his dissertation from Penn State. We met through politics but quickly began teaching each other and my effort to disrupt the idiotic analytic/continental fissure stems from those conversations. (Our first two serious philosophy talks were in a bar and in a jail cell.) And Todd still has the napkins where we sketched out the history and lines of influence of analytic and continental philosophy.
OK, now I’m calling a halt to this Socrates thing. The bar thing I can handle (“Two philosophers walk into a bar ….”) but let’s just say thank goodness your time in jail with Todd wasn’t exactly like the Phaedo!
Nothing so dramatic. Just a couple nights in a cell. We had been part of a group occupying a major corporate headquarters over their production of first-strike nuclear weapons.
What was your early professional life like?
My first job was a 3-year post-doc at Syracuse with a 1-1 teaching load and no committees.
Liz Lemon on 30 Rock says it best when she’s sick with longing: “I want to go to there!”
Ha! It really was a great time at Syracuse. I taught both John Hawthorne and Alastair Norcross and made a number of other life-long friends, including Michael Patton. My first book grew out of a collaboration with John. (I also met my wife while at Syracuse.)
You’ve already mentioned an early publication. What were some of your other early pieces? Is there one that stands out as your breakout piece?
After the undergrad piece, I wrote a paper in grad school identifying an incoherence in one of Anderson and Belnap's relevance logic systems. Then I published a number of philosophical logic papers developing the logic implicit in Brandom’s work. My first big contribution was my book with John Hawthorne – The Grammar of Meaning – which offered a much more radical take on the idea of meaning as normative than anyone had adopted before.
And since then?
Since then, my work has gradually moved away from Brandom and closer to Haugeland and McDowell, drawing on various “continental” influences, and also bringing in many more explicitly political themes.
Let’s come back for a minute to the continental and analytic thing. You mentioned your friendship with Todd May involved working to overcome that division.
This is something I feel strongly about. There are different research traditions in philosophy, but they don’t line up with the traditional way of seeing a division between analytic and continental. So for instance I see myself as working in a sort of social-normative-pragmatist tradition. The main figures in that tradition are Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, James and Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Sellars, Althusser, Foucault, Haugeland, McDowell, Brandom, Butler, etc. Obviously this doesn’t line up at all with the traditional analytic/continental divide. So while I do think there are recognizably different research traditions - different approaches to the field; perhaps paradigms in some useful sense of that word - the social divide is utterly indefensible. The pretense that there are distinct disciplines and that one can be a competent philosopher of any sort while being "just continental/analytic" is an excuse for narrow-minded or lazy philosophers to feel good about their vices. Luckily I landed at Georgetown, which is completely supportive of – indeed somewhat insistent on – pluralism. I work with an amazingly diverse range of philosophers who draw on whatever influences are useful for their work.
You are lucky, but I’m sure your work helps to continue that insistence on pluralism at GU. Tell us some more about Georgetown. Philosophy and other humanities are under increasing pressure to justify their existence in universities on short-term economic criteria, sometimes in number of majors or tuition income, sometimes in terms of outside grants. How is this pressure manifest at your university? How do you respond to it, practically and theoretically?
It isn’t so bad at GU. The Jesuit tradition insulates us a bit from these forces. The university requires two philosophy classes of every undergraduate. So in a university of 5500 undergraduates, we have about 25 philosophers. Really, Liz, or anyone else, could be jealous of quite a lot that has happened in my career. I'm certainly conscious nearly every day of how fortunate I am. But in the field at large, I think it is a really huge problem. Fundamentally – and this is a big issue that I won’t try to explain here – I think philosophy is not something that can exist comfortably in a capitalist world. The sort of critical stance philosophy demands, as well as the synoptic vision it strives for, lead an honest thinker to condemn some of the most powerful institutions of our society. For that reason, I see things like philosophy as likely to continue to shrink in the official academy until broader challenges to corporate capitalism can be mounted. For this reason, I’m very interested these days in popular education – in building counter-institutions outside the academy that take on serious intellectual missions.
How has the falling percentage of tenure-track positions relative to graduate assistants, part-timers, postdocs, and permanent instructors affected the strategies your department uses in graduate student placement? What does your department do with regard to preparing graduate students for non-academic work?
With the exception of the last two years – which may or may not remain exceptional – we have done very well in traditional placement. We have found permanent jobs for all our graduates. But it is an enormous job, and getting harder. We work very hard at placement. We have meetings starting in the first year to discuss the strategic choice of courses, and the future development of work. We have a publishing seminar where we work with students to turn a seminar paper into a publication. We have a third-year seminar that shepherds them through the process of starting a dissertation. Directors are very attentive. And our actual placement system is also very labor intensive, with a committee going over letters for clarity, multiple mock interviews, and colloquia, etc.
What role do you see for the APA in dealing with these and other concerns of the profession? What do you see as the proper relation between the APA and the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) in the broader struggle of the humanities and of university faculty as a whole?
Neither organization seems to me to be doing anything serious, either within formal academia or in building an alternative to it. I doubt they are the right mechanisms for this fight, though I’d welcome suggestions for working with them. I think a combination of unionization and building alternative institutions is probably the way to go, though I haven’t thought about this in great detail.
Let’s conclude by coming back to your individual situation. Where are you now? Looking back on your career so far, have you developed a single core idea, or have you significantly changed your perspective?
Virtually everything I’ve written has been connected in one way or another to questions of normativity – what is it, how does it arise, what are its varieties and the connections among them. The specifics have concerned language, logic, math, morality, politics, freedom, and epistemology. But I see these all as deeply connected, though in rather different ways than others do. I guess my overall goal is to develop a synoptic vision of social practice that makes sense of Dasein – that being in whose Being its Being is an issue for it. I’m now engaged in a long-term research project with Rebecca Kukla – which began with our normative account of speech acts in ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ and is moving into work on the social dependence of perception, on the moral significance of various second personal speech acts, and to various papers relating politics to the philosophy of language. I'm also writing a book on constructive anarchism and a series of papers on the origins of moral and semantic normativity. I hope these will all triangulate on a single understanding.
What would you say is the most rewarding experience of your professional life?
There have been many, but likely writing ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’.
What’s been the most frustrating?
Dealing with the off-hand dismissal of approaches to philosophy by both dogmatic “pure” continentalists, on the one hand, of “pure” analytics on the other.
I can testify to how irritating that purism can be.
That and the endemic sexism of the field.
Indeed. We have a big project ahead of us in that regard, but at least now it’s a conscious project. Switching gears a little, let me ask 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?
I don’t think there is any clear distinction between science and politics and philosophy. These are drawn upon in almost everything I do. Music, cooking, sport, etc. are important parts of my life, but not so central to my work.
How do you integrate teaching and research? How long did it take you to find the most productive practices here?
I doubt I have found the most productive practices, but they constantly shape one another. I don’t shy away from trying to teach my research at all levels. I just explained the idea of constructive myth – Althusserian interpellation – to an intro class. I’m not sure most really understood, but lots were fascinated, and figuring out how to explain something as complex as this to folks with no background is a magnificent discipline for thinking through your own ideas.
What are you looking forward to doing next? What are your short and long-term projects?
Rebecca and I are writing three papers – one on the normative structure of requests, imperatives, and entreaties, one on sociality and perception, and one on the distinction between thoughts and speech. We will probably move on to a book after that, one which develops political themes from ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’. I am working on a project with a mathematician on “non-local impredicativity” that has important implications for foundations of math and epistemology. I’m writing a book called Awakening Reason: toward a constructive anarchism, and I have those two long papers on the nature of moral and conceptual norms – sort of a neo-Heideggerian approach to the foundations of normativity.
OK, so you’ll be busy for a while!
Yeah, by the time I finish all that, my daughter will probably have kids. So I’ll be able to retire to cooking, spoiling grand-kids, and political agitation. Hopefully in a cabin out in the woods somewhere with the occasional informal student interested in radical politics and philosophy. (Though maybe with a tiny apartment in Dupont Circle with nothing but a bed, a bar, and a world-class stereo, for the weekends.)
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