Volume II (2015)
Interview
Catherine Wilson
CUNY Graduate Center and University of York
Catherine Wilson is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York
Graduate Center and the Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. Wilson gave the
keynote address at the Fourth Mid-Hudson Valley Undergraduate Philosophy Conference held in April
2014 at Marist College. This interview was conducted over email in Fall 2014.
Marist Journal: Thank you for giving the keynote address at the Fourth Mid-Hudson Valley
Undergraduate Philosophy Conference. Some students are skeptical of the value of studying philosophy,
and instead pursue what they consider more practical majors. What do you consider the value of
philosophy?
Catherine Wilson: Well, if they are skeptical they should find a subject they enjoy more! The main
reason to do philosophy is you find it really interesting and find you have a knack for it. But what if your
situation is you love the subject but you are worried about how to support yourself after graduation, or
some well meaning older people are pressuring you about that?
I’ll start with the conventional (though true) view. There is good evidence that the skills in reading,
thinking abstractly, and explaining things clearly that philosophy majors develop can help them land
careers in related fields such as IT, law and public service, and that once they land a job, be it in
publishing or finance or some unrelated field, they tend to advance rapidly.
Scientifically speaking, though, it is hard to tell what is cause and what is effect: maybe bright people
who like to solve problems and think for themselves and write are attracted to philosophy, so they do well
later on. But if you find people think you are good at philosophy and tell you so—well then, you
probably have a fine future ahead of you whatever you end up doing in the world of work.
42
Wilson/Volume II (2015)
At the same time, I don’t like to think of an undergraduate degree mainly as an employment qualification.
The late teens and early twenties are the period of life when one’s creativity, memory, and imagination
are maybe at their zenith, regardless of how clueless about practical matters one is at that age. (At least I
was pretty clueless.) It is a good time to lay in a stock of ideas about knowledge, reality, morality,
aesthetics, the nature of the mind and the emotions, and other such topics that can be drawn on for years
to come. Having studied philosophy and the other liberal arts, you don’t have all the answers or maybe
even any, but you gain a perspective on the ups and downs of life, and you can read the newspaper, see
movies, visit museums and exhibitions with more understanding and more pleasure than most people with
purely technical or business educations can.
MJ: What questions or problems especially interest you in ethics right now? What do you consider the
best approach to take to examining these problems or answering these questions?
CW: I’m currently interested in a major social issue: the problem of the irrationality of warfare as a means
of correcting wrongs, and the wrongness of warfare as a means of advancing even ‘rational’ national
interests e.g. the price of oil.
On the more individual level, I’m interested in exploring the conclusions that can and can’t be drawn
from a Darwinian account of the origins of the moral sentiments. Altruism and conscience are probably
natural to human beings, but we are also naturally liable to take advantage of others and to practice deceit
and exploitation, which culturally developed and enforced moral codes are mean to prevent or minimize.
So ‘formal’ morality seems to both enhance and curb human nature.
Then there’s metaethics—can moral beliefs be true? Well grounded? Are some people objectively
speaking better than others? Or is there only opinion and a spectrum of practices we or just “I” ‘like’ and
‘don’t like.’ This is a very fertile area for analysis.
MJ: Likewise, are there any historical figures or periods that you find particularly interesting? Do you
ever get bored of the big figures in the history of philosophy? If so, are there any philosophers that you
have been thinking about recently?
I never get bored of the big figures, except temporarily. Thus far, I’ve always been able to go back to
their texts and find something new to think about. I especially like the period you might call the ‘long’
Scientific Revolution extending from about 1620 to 1790, when Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz,
43
Wilson/Volume II (2015)
Locke, Hume, Rousseau and Kant were active. I believe its very important to know something of their
contexts and this means being aware of the so-called ‘minor figures’ who can be entertaining to read not
just studying the big names as though they were reacting only to the other big names. I think it is
important to admire what’s admirable but not to be too respectful, and not to confuse complicated prose
with profundity and ultimate truth. Kant for example is not the omega of philosophy—he’s just another
philosopher, with strengths and weaknesses.
MJ: You wrote a book on Lucretius and modern philosophy. Are there aspects of Lucretius’ philosophy
that are attractive to you apart from the important influence he had on modern philosophy?
CW: The Epicureanism of Lucretius is very attractive. He has an implicit philosophy for life that is much
sounder than the Platonic or Aristotelian or Stoic or Kantian. It’s relatively egalitarian, it’s full of
compassion, it’s scientifically realistic and all expressed in beautiful verse embellished with images from
the natural world. I’ve tried to communicate this in my Very Short Introduction to Epicureanism that I
hope will be on the shelves next year—with lots of quotations from Lucretius.
MJ: In your chapter in Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy you argue that philosophy
should take what we know about the world, put it into an intuitive framework, and draw out the moral
implications. Could you say more about this? Have your views changed at all since this article was
written?
CW: I’m an empiricist, so I tend to see new information as driving progress, including moral progress,
more than a priori reasoning. Philosophy should, in my view, take the very exciting results of the
sciences, including physics, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, historical enquiry, and use
it to address, solve or discard philosophical problems, these being the problems delivered by the
discipline we call philosophy. This is how philosophers of my favorite period proceeded—Descartes and
Leibniz with physics, for example, Leibniz with microscopy, Kant with physics, cosmology,
anthropology,
I am not very sympathetic to analytic philosophy which just debates and discusses what the implications
of various concepts are. Even that brand, though, has a use in sharpening skills and seeing where to make
relevant distinctions that the scientists are often not making when they go for grand pronoucements. To
take a concrete example, the classic problem of free will is not going to be solved by trying to ‘analyze’
44
Wilson/Volume II (2015)
the concept and to lay down necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, our understanding of agency and
its limitations will be affected as we get to understand phenomena like addiction, the use of ‘will-power,’
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and self-defeating behavior better. The philosopher can take on board
this new knowledge and ‘package’ it in theoretically appealing terms. A problem like this has
implications for whether and how we punish people and this needs informed discussion.
MJ: You have written on many different philosophical topics. Did you ever find this difficult on account of
the pressures to specialize in philosophy? Do you have any advice for young philosophers?
CW: You are right to identify this as unusual in someone’s career, though the late Bernard Williams was
even broader than me, as he wrote on philosophy of language, ethics, ancient philosophy, Descartes, and
then epistemology.
It was definitely a problem when I was starting out, and one of those well meaning older persons once
told me I had to choose between aesthetics which I was writing on and history of philosophy which I was
also studying. I am pretty good at taking criticism—you have to be in this field—but really, somebody
telling me what to be interested in was pushing it too far! One of the joys of philosophy is that you can
take on different topics—it is more like math in that regard than say history. You say what you have to
say, then move on. But, the learning curve in each separate subject can be steep, and you really have to
‘occupy’ a topic to get noticed and have any influence.
Some of my colleagues focused very narrowly and as a result did extremely well at the start of their
careers as ‘the best young specialist in X’ but they then burned out or got repetitious. I recommend
having two foci you can switch between, regardless of what people tell you, just for your own sake.
My general advice? Read long and widely, take notes (with page numbers, so you can find that quote or
thought again some day) and file them forever in the Cloud. Find a topic or a philosopher whom you
really love, and when you write, don’t go in circles, be linear, and polish, polish. Nothing is ever
wasted—everything you learn is useful in some way. Trust me, you will use it some day.
45