Beyond the City

If we think of academia as a big city, then for many years I lived near the center of the city. During that time I often loved the city. But at other times I also felt stifled in the city. I longed to break free. Then four years ago I decided to do it, and started my journey out of the city. At first I thought just because I was no longer an academic I was out of the city. But this wasn't the case. I was moving away from the center of the city, on my way out of it. But for the past couple of years I have still been within the broader realm of the city, just now on its outskirts, which is the philosophy blogosphere.

And for the past six months I have had this blog, which has been mainly addressed to the philosophy profession. Most of my traffic has probably been academic philosophers who got to my blog through other philosophy blogs. So in these past months I have been like a person who got on a soap-box at the edge of the city talking about some of the problems with the city. I have had some great conversations with some people who, for various reasons, are themselves on, or feel as if they are on, the outskirts of the city. A few times a lot of people came to listen to me, mainly because I was saying what seemed to be personal things about some people at the center of the city. But as I stopped saying such things, the crowd dwindled again as they went back to their busy lives within the city.

As I realize that while writing this blog I am on the outskirts of the city, and so within a space which is still oriented towards the city, I feel again the pull to explore new lands beyond the city. The pull which started my movement out of the city four years ago. Out there is where my future, and this has been a stop along the way.

Why has it been so hard for me to leave the city? Why have I not gotten beyond the outskirts even in these past few years? I realize now it is partly because of my anxiety as an immigrant. I took shelter in the city because I was afraid of the wars happening outside the city: the fighting, the distrust, the anger of race relations, religion and reason, the clash of cultures. The city seemed to be a safe haven from such fighting, and that was its initial and greatest appeal to me. But now the fighting has entered the city itself, and it is no longer a safe haven. The fighting outside the city is starting to happen inside the city, and it will happen until it will be the same fighting inside and outside the city. That was what I have been trying to say from my soap-box on the outskirts of the city: Behold, those within the city, you are no longer immune, the fighting has entered the city gates and no one will be spared; clinging to the illusion of peace will only make it more painful when the illusion breaks, as it will for certain at some point in the coming future. Of course, I don't have to say this, as it is already evident to many within the city. I said it nonetheless for myself, so that I could hear it.

We live at a time when our lands are ravaged by internal war. Even the city which seemed immune is getting more and more caught up in that fighting. Can peace be found in such a time? Where can it be found? Each person has to find the peace within themselves, which can contribute to the peace outside. I venture beyond the city and its outskirts as I follow the voice of peace as it speaks to me.

Grading

What I enjoyed the most being a professor was teaching. Being in the classroom, engaging with the students, pursuing collaboratively ideas and lines of argument, seeing the students discover their voices and doing what I could to help with that.

What I enjoyed the least about being a professor was grading. Even more than the pressure to publish. To not put too fine a point on it, but I hated grading. When I had a stack of papers to grade, I would go to the local Starbucks and some other cafe, fill myself with caffeine and sugar, and plow through the essays. 15-20 minutes per 5 page essay. If I had a stack of 20 essays, that's five to six hours. And more if I tried to not give the same set of hackneyed comments on paper after paper.

I was lucky to be at a small liberal arts colleges, where, compared to big universities, I didn't have that many papers to grade. I taught five courses a year. Two intro courses, with about 25 students in each. A couple of mid-level courses, with anywhere from 10-25 students in them. And a seminar with 6-12 students. So maybe a 100-125 students a year. Not bad. A semester is 13 weeks, and I had roughly 4-5 papers in each class. Since I wanted students to have the opportunity to write a fair bit, they had essays due every three weeks or so. Teaching 2 or 3 classes a semester, that ends up meaning grading every week or every other week. There were no teaching assistants, and so the grading was up to me.

However, what I disliked the most about grading wasn't the time, or reading similar essays over and over again. My current job is a bit repetitive, and I don't mind it. I can handle repetitive work; doing the same thing over and over again. No, what bothered me about the grading was the question which nagged me at the back of my mind every time I picked up an essay to grade: Am I being unfair in the criteria I am using to grade this paper? There are three aspects to this worry. A) What criteria am I using to grade? B) What justifies the criteria? And C) Can that criteria really be applied neutrally to all the students in the class?

Academic Writing

When I was in academia I often didn't identify with what I wrote. I experienced my writings as modes of expression in which I was trapped, and within which I couldn't express my deeper feelings about academia. I see now this was because some of what I wanted to express back then were the kind of things I have been saying on this blog, and the essay writing I was learning to become a professional philosopher was not making possible the kind of sharing which this blog enabled for me. This doesn't mean I didn't really believe what I wrote in those academic essays. Only, until I could express myself about what I felt in academia, I couldn't embrace my own academic writing as speaking for me.

Recently I found the main essays I wrote as an academic. My dissertation and other essays. Things I didn't really try to publish or to present at conferences. This blog seems as good a place as any for to me put them. To remind myself that even with all the other stuff I have been talking about on this blog, I was also a normal academic, or one who was trying to learn and develop his views. These are essays I have written in the past decade, and so naturally I don't agree with everything in them. But they do capture the general framework of my beliefs, and it is helpful to realize that yes, this is roughly what I believe.

A few things I wrote as a graduate student:

* Action Without Inner Representations: An essay I presented at the dissertation workshop at Harvard, though this essay was not part of my thesis. At the time I was reading parts of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, and I tried to connect for myself that reading with my education.

* Toward a Direct Realism of Communication: This was an essay I co-authored with my brother Gautam Vallabha, who was at the time a post-doc in psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He was in psychology and I was in philosophy, and to our mutual surprise it turned out both of us were having similar views oriented towards, broadly speaking, embodied cognition. This essay was an attempt to bring together issues in speech perception, which was the focus of his work, with issues in ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology, which was the focus of my work. Working on this essay was one of the highlights of my time in academia, and one of the few times there was a kind of bridge between my school and my home life. We tried to publish the essay in a few places, but it didn't work out, and we got too busy with other things. Gautam left academia a few years before me and he currently works as a computer scientist, though his experience of the transition might be different from mine. There are of course many ways to leave academia, and many kinds of stories.

* Dewey's Neutral Monism: This was an essay I co-authored with my then friend, and now wife, Zoe. She was an undergraduate taking Peter Godfrey-Smith's class on Pragmatism, which I was auditing as a graduate student, and we got interested by something Godfrey-Smith said in class about Dewey, and the essay was our attempt to articulate what we found exciting. What we attribute in the essay to Godfrey-Smith might not capture what he believes, and to see what he thinks you should look at his work on Dewey. Zoe and I didn't think of this as something for publication, as much as something to get some of our ideas down on paper. Zoe decided not to pursue academic philosophy, though her experiences as a philosophy student, and her reasons for making this decision, might not be the same as mine. Again, there are many ways to leave academia, and many kinds of stories.

* On Dreyfus and Kelly on Dennett: This was an email I wrote to Sean Kelly about the essay he co-authored with Hubert Dreyfus on Dennett's view of heterophenomenology. Normally when I tried to engage with philosophers about their views I would become unnerved in some way about the fact of the interaction. I see now this was because unable to express my background concerns about the profession, I felt ungrounded while engaging in the ordinary business of philosophy. This letter is one of the times when I was free of such worries, and was able to engage just with the ideas.

My dissertation:

* Agency and the Mind-Body Problem: The thesis consisted of four essays. The first was on Chalmers' zombie argument for dualism, in which I argue against the conceivability of a zombie world. The second is on David Lewis' argument for functionalism, which I argue misdescribes folk psychology. The third and fourth essays argue against Kantian views of action as defended by John McDowell and Christine Korsgaard.

Some things I wrote while I was at Bryn Mawr:

* The Abilities Theory of Belief: I wrote this in the Fall of 2010, and sent it to a few journals as part of my reapplication process mid-way through my time till tenure review. In it I argue that beliefs are abilities, which are different from behavior or dispositions to behave.

* Reason, Faith and Self-Transformation: A grant proposal I wrote in Fall 2010, again as part of my reapplication process. It is the beginning of my connecting issues in the philosophy of mind to topics in the philosophy of religion, multiculturalism and broader issues of secularism.

* The Unity of Religions: An unfinished essay. In it I try to say what it means to say all religions have a essential unity, and why that is right.

* Truth and Power in Education: An essay for an group online blog and magazine at Bryn Mawr, Serendip, it is also part of The Breaking Project, a collection of essays edited by Alice Lesnick. I wrote the essay as I was trying to make sense of some of what I felt didn't work in my education, and what kind of a teacher I wanted to be.

* Rorty, Non-Foundationalism and Story-telling: A blog exchange I had with biologist Paul Grobstein on Rorty, relativism and academia. Paul, who passed away in 2011, was a great influence on me, and a wonderful inspiration for me, while I was at Bryn Mawr.

* The Work of Being a Person: This is not something I wrote, but it is a student's notes of a  guest discussion I led in Spring 2010 in a literature course on the James Family taught by Anne Dalke. The discussion was based on our reading of William James' essay "The Types of Philosophical Thinking". In part the discussion considers the issue of whether the kind of philosophy James espoused could be professionalized or taught in a classroom.

Building on Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's philosophy can be divided into three parts: the Problem, the Cause and the Solution.

The problem is a view about what is wrong with much of contemporary philosophy, and which has its roots in the Early Modern period. The problem can be stated simply: It is the attempt to understand human life in terms of the categories of the natural sciences, i.e. the new sciences as discovered in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Here is an example of this problem: identifying mental states with brain states. The appeal of this view is the hope that by explaining mental facts in terms of the purportedly more basic physical facts - that of the brain - the mind can be understood in a objective way. The fundamental thrust of Wittgenstein's view is the idea that this kind of "explaining" is vacuous, as it has only the form of an explanation (with the mental phenomena being re-described in physical terms) but doesn't really provide an explanation. Saying we are conscious because we are in a certain brain state is like saying it rains because the rain-God is making it happen. In the rain case, one is taking a certain form of explanation ("Why is the grass wet?" - "Because John poured water there") which we are familiar with in certain situations, and applying it to a different situation and assuming it must be applicable ("Why is it raining?" - "Because God is pouring water"). Same in the consciousness case. We take a form of explanation from one proven area ("Why don't we float off into the air?" - "Because we are made up of atoms to which gravity applies") and apply it to a different situation ("Why do we have any consciousness?" - "Because our brain is made up of atoms which move in certain ways.").

The cause seeks to explain why the problem is so persistent. Why is it that we seek to understand human life through the categories of the natural sciences? Wittgenstein's answer is: it is because we are mislead by language by the surface similarities of how we describe the phenomenon and the types of explanations we are seeking. In effect, according to Wittgenstein, there is a kind of mistake we keep making because our minds and habits are just set up in the way to keep making such mistakes.

The solution seeks to explain how we can overcome the problem. Since according to Wittgenstein, the cause is our being mislead by language, the solution is not being mislead by language. We have to bring words back to their everyday use. We have to resist the bewitchment of language, etc.

Wittgenstein was profoundly right about the problem. But his view of the cause and the solution are completely vacuous. In fact, Wittgenstein's answers to the cause and to the solution are themselves perfect examples of answers which have the form of an explanation but which don't explain anything. "Why is it so tempting to understand the mind in terms of the brain? - Because it is a temptation intrinsic to our lives and language." "What can we do to avoid this temptation? - We have to avoid the cause which draws us into the temptation." Really, that's the best you got Wittgenstein? Thanks, but no thanks. That's not very helpful.

There are actually much simpler and clearer answers to the cause and the solution. Wittgenstein didn't think of these possibilities because of his generally a-historical and a-institutional approach to philosophy. But if we don't treat the problem as some profound battle of the soul to avoid bewitchment by philosophy, but treat it as just a normal sociological, historical and institutional problem, then very different answers for the cause and the solution present themselves.