Today’s New APPS Interview is with Samuel Wheeler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
Thanks very much for doing this interview with us, Sam. Let’s start with your personal practice of philosophy. What are the pleasures and pains of philosophy for you?
A great pleasure for me is what it’s like when I’m working on a paper that has some interesting ideas that I haven’t entirely thought through. The experience of writing an original paper (rather than an assignment, such as “could you write a chapter on Y for our guide to X”) is very much like what I experienced as a painter and print maker during my art-major and post-art-major period—you’re thinking about nothing else, night and day, problems come up, you mull over them, your muse kicks in with an idea, and you go on writing until you hit the next problem.
Yes, there’s a great pleasure in that kind of immersion.
I also enjoy steep learning curves in new stuff that connects with my training, but requires reading lots of interesting and unfamiliar people. In order to write about Derrida, I read, for the first time, a lot of Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger. A long process, but pretty exhilarating.
Yes, with Derrida, there’s a huge tradition to become familiar with. The same with any great philosopher I imagine.
What is your daily practice? Do you have a set routine?
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